These past few months have gotten me thinking in somewhat different patterns (life rarely follows the script).<br><br>I’m going to go out on a limb here, and so I want to make it clear right from the start that this is not criticism of this site, this forum, our approaches, our thoughts, or anything else. Think of it as philosophical musings, or incoherent mutterings, if you prefer. Note that this is in the “campfire”.<br><br>It seems to me that, once we’re past talking about attitude and “will to live”, the essential skills that we associate with survival are mostly what earlier generations called “making do”. After all, if we have all the resources we need, we’re not in a survival situation. The specific skills that we practice mostly boil down to using what’s available to substitute for what we need and don’t have- but the more specific the skill we learn, the more it seems like it’s imitating someone else’s innovation, rather than learning to innovate. Not bad, but not versatile. <br><br>"Making do” in general is probably something most of our grandparents could teach us a few things about, and I think that becomes more and more true the further back we go in generations. There are some disadvantages to growing up in a society where everything is available.<br><br>We, myself included, spend a lot of time going over our kits and refining items. This is something we’re very good at, having been trained nearly from birth; selecting the optimum items from millions of consumer goods to suit our purposes. We set the limitations in size, weight and cost, we develop scenarios, and we try to choose the tools that are most useful and versatile within those bounds, for those scenarios. It’s a necessary, essential process, it’s fun, and it never ends- and I enjoy it more than most. But… it’s essentially consumerism.<br><br>What it isn’t, in any sense that I can see, is practice for “making do”. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite skill. It’s choosing the optimum from a near-infinite set of resources, as opposed to learning to accomplish a goal with a very limited set of resources. As much as I personally enjoy the process, it does sometimes feel as though we’re practicing and reinforcing a set of skills we’re already very good at- and maybe not the ones we really need.<br><br>Again, I’m not saying that the selection process isn’t necessary, and I’m not suggesting we abandon it.. I’m just wondering if we’re missing something else that’s important.<br><br>I'm not sure what to do about it. Our society goes out of it’s way to avoid ever having us “make do”, because that’s how free markets work, and they work well. The survival training that I’ve seen is very good at supplying specific skills and techniques, but seems less successful in teaching innovation, and thus might not be as versatile as one would hope. I think what we might need is a balance with exercises more like “Here’s a drawer full of junk and a the contents of garden shed. Create a safe way, with ventilation, to have an indoor fire.”, or “Here’s three wrecked cars and two trucks and some woods - you need to get four people across that river.” Or even, “Here’s two pieces of plastic tarp, but no cord.. it’s going to rain”. If you follow me, it’s not so much knowing how to make a stove out of a coffee can, as learning to think like the first guy who made a stove out of a coffee can.<br><br>I think a key factor is that the goal and (limited) resources are unanticipated- anyone can figure out solutions from an armchair with plenty of time (many of which won’t actually work). The specifics aren’t important, I’m NOT looking for solutions to specific scenarios- it’s the baseline skill that I’m talking about- and I still think our ancestors would tend to do a lot better than we would, because they were practicing innovation their whole lives in much the same way that most of us have practiced consumerism. <br><br>Admittedly, it’s difficult to figure ways to practice for the unexpected, as compared to stocking items for the scenarios we can anticipate… but maybe we should be trying.<br><br>I’m not going to push this line of thought, and I’ve only half thought it out myself… but does anyone else feel that sometimes we should be practicing the innovative skills we lack a little more, and the consumer skills we already have a little less?<br>