My Grandfather passed away last week – 2 weeks shy of his 90th birthday. Since then, the stories that have been shared about him lead me to believe that he would have been an incredibly popular and resourceful person in the Next Economy – just as he was in the current one.
Grandad was, as they say in Northern England where he grew up, a 'dab hand' at pretty much anything he did. He built a caravan by the sea by hand from scratch, replumbed his son's crumbling house, and did everything in a D.I.Y. fashion from auto maintenance to shoe repair.
His skill, however, wasn't all with his hands, but also with people. He started the first Post Office Social club in his area, and led the way to raise enough money for them to build a location where the men and women of BT in Plymouth and their families could gather and socialize, and … you guessed it … build community.
Exactly the type of skills that will be in high demand in the Next Economy.
Currently, when something is broken, we generally throw it out, unless it is something vital, in which case we take it somewhere to get it repaired. There is, however, an undercurrent of D.I.Y. That flows just below this 'throw-away' society.
Consider the recent death of my iPod. I got the 'sad iPod face.', meaning it was almost certainly done for. My sister, however, insisted it was probably just the battery. My Mom went on eBay (she's the ebay queen) and bought an OEM battery, and gave it to my sister to fix. Well, something went wrong, and she accidentally unhooked a vital cable while putting it back together. It ended up coming back to me with a new battery – but a disconnected headphone jack.
I was looking seriously at shelling out $200 or so for a new iPod touch (which frankly, I really want), but then decided to have one last kick at the cat. So I found a youTube video that described really well how to get the iPod open, and with much fiddling, managed to get the cable plugged back in. Voila – fixed iPod. Total cost? About $18 for the battery.
Year ago, in the book Die Broke, Stephen Pollan described taking his old 'breadbox' Macintosh to an Apple store in Manhattan to get fixed (a wire was loose). The clerk looked at him in shock and said “This thing is really obsolete. It's going to cost $100 or so to fix it. You should really just get a new one.”
“Wow!” exclaimed the author, with feigned surprise. “I can get a new Apple for $100?”
“Well, no...” replied the clerk, only just starting to get it.
He fixed the old one.
As the flow of artificially cheap goods from overseas starts to slow in the next 10 to 15 years as the price of bunker fuel starts to climb, it is going to start to make so much more sense to fix what's broken, and buy second hand. To say nothing of the environmental and social degradation that comes from replacing your electronics constantly.
So next time you 'fall out of love' with your cell phone. Think carefully – is it really not doing the things you need it to do any more (enable you to call people, text message, play the odd game)? Or is it just boredom? Or better still, is it just a small, relatively easy fix you could probably do yourself with the help of a good online video?
Who knows, it might be an idea to join the legions of DIY enthusiasts, and get a jump on the Next Economy now.
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