I can do it myself!
—my two-year-old daughter
I knew this man, Jeremy, who was just a useless lump. “Jeremy, you’re disgusting,” I told him. “You can’t hold a steady job. You still live with your parents. Also, you’re ugly, and you’re stupid, and there is just this sort of indefinable quality to you I hate and can’t stand.”
And he said to me, “Who are you?”
“Let’s not worry about that. Come with me; we’re going to work on changing all that.”
“I don’t know about this. . . .”
“I have a helicopter.”
So we got in my helicopter and took it out into the middle of the wilderness, landing in a clearing.
“So what now?” Jeremy asked.
“We’re going to survive on our own out here in the wilderness with nothing but a set of fundamental survival tools like the frontiersmen of old would have had with them,” I said. “So a basic rifle, a knife, some camping gear like a small tent, and some matches and such.”
“And where are those?”
I shrugged. “I forgot them. So let that be your first lesson: You relied on me to bring survival supplies for you when your survival isn’t as important to me as it is to you—and look what happened.”
“But you’re going to survive out here, too, right?”
“Yep.” I got back into the helicopter.
“What are you doing?” Jeremy asked.
“My survival strategy is to take a helicopter out of here.”
“How is that being self-reliant?!” he demanded.
“I paid for the helicopter myself. Hey, if you find your own helicopter out here, it’s not cheating for you to use it . . . or you can build your own helicopter out of rocks and twigs like something out of The Flintstones. Later. Just remember to punch the hippie inside you.”
“Punch the what? What are you talking about?!”
So I flew out of there in my helicopter and stayed at a hotel near the forest. Days later, Jeremy emerged from the woods, but now he was a changed man. Or it actually was a completely different man; I’m not really very good with faces, and he was speaking gibberish.
So what was it that changed Jeremy? It was finally learning to be independent.
Now, I ask you: Do people like freedom? No, most people don’t. Yeah, sure, if you ask people if they like freedom, they’ll always answer, “Oh yeah, I love freedom. Freedom is the best!” That’s because they’re liars. Little weaselly liars with stupid lying faces. And with dumb lying hats on their heads to keep the sun out of their lying eyes. And shoes on their feet. For walking. Which doesn’t have anything in particular to do with lying.
I’m getting distracted.
Anyway, the fact is that most people find freedom too bothersome. Yes, everyone loves the “I get to say what I want, do what I want, eat what I want, watch what I want, make lists of things when I want” aspect of freedom, but there is one part of freedom that most hate dealing with: responsibility.
Responsibility is the other side of the coin of freedom; for anyone who embraces freedom, it is inescapable. When you’re a kid, you yearn for the freedom of being an adult, getting to go where you want and do what you want without some parent dictating it all. But when you actually become an adult, you find that the cost of that freedom is getting a job, paying bills, and wearing pants every day. Freedom isn’t free, and the cost is responsibility. And many people just don’t consider freedom worth that awful price.
But you need freedom if you want to achieve awesomeness. Which means you must also embrace responsibility. And when you have mastered both freedom and responsibility, you are then independent. Our country fought a war for independence, but you just need to beat up your inner hippie to achieve yours—just like Jeremy was forced to when he was alone in the woods.
Independence is the treads on your tank of awesome. When you have independence, nothing can stop you, and you can adjust to any terrain. While others complain about how bad the economy is or that the government isn’t fixing things fast enough, you will just roll onward, because you rely on yourself and not other people or external circumstances out of your control. Because if you want to achieve great things, you need to put your fate in the hands of the person most concerned for your well-being: yourself. Now, I have nothing against other people, but let’s be frank: They’re horrible. They’re always worrying about their own problems and not about my much, much more important problems. That’s why you never want to rely on other people, and you need to take control of your own life.
Your inner hippie does not want this. Having full control over one’s own life is a huge responsibility, and hippies recoil from responsibility like a vampire from a cross.* What your inner hippie wants is for you to lounge around in your parents’ basement or collect a welfare check while spending all day watching people you don’t know buy storage units on TV. Can you meet your full potential in this condition? Of course not; you’ll be a loser dependent and a slave to your inner hippie.
But when you exert your independence, you grab your inner hippie and smash his head through a jukebox while yelling, “Shut up! I’m in charge!” And with independence you become a changed man, like Jeremy was after his stay in the woods. You are more powerful. Maybe even a little scary. Perhaps authorities will have to come and tranq you. But whatever. You can now rely on yourself no matter the circumstances, and your awesomeness is truly in your own hands.
So let’s put the treads on your unstoppable tank of awesome and learn how to be independent.
So what is your biggest obstacle to independence? Friends? Family? No, those are easily overcome. It’s the government.
Back in the day, there used to be plain old oppressive government that considered the citizenry its property. That government existed only to benefit the rulers and would crush all who opposed it. That was nice, because then you clearly understood that the government was your enemy. You’d avoid the government at all costs and join some secret underground movement to amass weapons and plot against the ruling regime, that is, you’d lead a nice, healthy life striving for independence.
But now we have something much more insidious than an openly evil and oppressive government. We have a government that acts like it’s there to benefit the people and that everything it does is to help us. And I mean everything. Just think of all the things the government does for us:
• Inspect food quality
• Build roads
• Lock up criminals
• Deliver mail
• Fund scientific research
• Give money and food to poor people
• Fight other countries
• Set health and safety standards
• Read your emails to make sure you’re not a terrorist
If a part of you looked at that list and said, “Wow! It’s nice that the government does all those things for me!” that would be your inner hippie. That’s the part of you you need to hit in the head with a beer bottle. Because the last thing you want to do is to become complacent about the government caring for you, as the government is absolutely horrible at everything it tries to do—except maybe fighting other countries, since that’s the one duty of the government where the goal is to destroy things. And destroying things is all the government is good at.
One advantage of oppressive government is that you might occasionally get someone competent in charge there. Taking over a country might actually appeal to someone who’s both ambitious and capable—like a supervillain. In our democratic system of government, that never happens, though. We set up our republic so we’d elect the best and brightest, but those people don’t run for office. Instead, the best and brightest build businesses and invent things and create charities to voluntarily help the community, such as one that supplies top hats to homeless people to make them look fancier. So the government is left with people who said to themselves, “I’m not really good at anything, but I’d really like to just get in the way of everyone who actually does know how to be useful and boss them around.” Basically, the government is full of incompetent sociopaths. If you didn’t know that, then I guess you haven’t been paying attention to the news. Get on the Twitters or something, and find out what’s going on.
I’m guessing there are a few of you out there saying, “But there are some good politicians.” And I have something to say to you. “Shut up; you’re an idiot. Please never vote again.” Never, ever be so naïve as to like a politician. Let me tell you where I’m coming from. I hate Republicans. Absolutely abhor them. In fact, the only things I hate worse than Republicans are Democrats. I don’t subscribe to the magical thinking that these people are going to help me; when I vote, I vote only for who I think will get in my way the least. And if you ever get it in your head that a politician is actually a smart, competent person and is going to fix things, ask yourself this question: “If this guy is such a smart and useful human being, why in the world did he ever decide to run for office?” To give up doing useful work for that shows a nearly psychotic character flaw.
The only politician I’m close to respecting was President Coolidge. Of course, he wasn’t even originally elected president and only became one when President Harding died under mysterious circumstances,* because our system is set up to keep sensible people like Coolidge from succeeding in the political world. And what sensible things did Coolidge do? Nothing. Everyone was yelling at him, “You have to do something about the economy and foreign affairs and childhood obesity! Help us, Calvin; you’re our only hope!”
And Coolidge was all like, “Meh.” In fact, if you went to Coolidge’s campaign website—or whatever the equivalent was in the 1920s—I guess like a board with stuff tacked to it or something—and looked under “Issues,” “Meh” was his proposed solution for everything. Coolidge used to say, “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and, as for the tenth, why don’t you put on your big-boy pants and handle it yourself?”
You see, the problem with any politician in any party is that they’re putting all that time and energy into getting into office because they want to do stuff, and stuff is the absolute worst thing any politician can do, as there is nothing our giant, bloated government staffed by idiots and malcontents won’t just make worse. It’s a bit like that movie War Games: The only winning move is to not play (though, incidentally, I do have a number of winning strategies for nuclear war if anyone is still interested).
So anyway, government is horrible, and you should never depend on it for anything. For instance, I’d check my own food. I’m not going to blindly trust that Food and Drug Administration; I mean, they’re part of the government, so what’s their incentive to do it right? Half the country could die from food poisoning, and probably no one there would even get fired. So if you buy some meat, just look it over yourself to make sure nothing is moving on it that shouldn’t be. And then put it under a magnifying glass and look for little tubular things. That’s E. coli—you don’t want that.
And know how to build your own roads and bridges, too. Building roads is pretty self-explanatory—you just throw some asphalt on the ground. And a bridge is just a road over water; let’s stop acting like that’s some spectacular engineering feat.
As for criminals, do you really want the government to handle them? Anyone can grab some guns, put on a costume, and patrol the streets as the Night Avenger, bane of the criminal underworld.
See, you can do a lot of what you depend on the government for yourself, and remember, each time you take on more responsibility, it’s like you squeeze harder and harder on the neck of your inner hippie, whom you have in a sleeper hold.
Right now you may be thinking, “I’m pretty independent.” Maybe you have a job and your own place and your own family you’re taking care of, but how independent are you, really? Many people these days are more dependent than they realize, so to really check how independent you are, you have to imagine how you would do if the government and most of society disappeared, and a big crisis hit. The traditional scenario for that is a zombie apocalypse.
Imagine you wake up one day and go to check the news on your Twitter feed, but the Internet is out. So you check your smartphone—but you have no bars for your 4G. So you act like it’s the olden days and walk to different parts of your house to try to get a signal, but no luck. And then you look out your window and see that the dead are shambling about in the streets. And you’re all like, “The dead shouldn’t be walking! The dead should be in graves or voting in Chicago. Something is obviously wrong.”
And something is wrong. Because of radiation from a crashed satellite or a virus or a curse or something, there are zombies everywhere. And anyone who gets bitten becomes one, because that’s how zombie-ism works. And the government has already collapsed, because government employees are the most susceptible to becoming zombies—that’s basically what a bureaucrat is.
So what do you do? Well, if you panic and freak out, then you are not an independent individual. Hippies are not going to survive in this scenario; everything is now about survival, with no room for useless people who just annoy everyone and get in the way. Thus those who are really dependent on the government are going to just totally lose it and be like, “We’re going to die! Aieee!” Yeah, you will with that attitude.
But the independent person is going to say, “Oh. Zombies. Better board up the windows and make sure I have my numerous guns ready. Time for some head shots!” Because the independent person is used to taking care of himself, he’s not worried—especially not about some slow-moving creatures lumbering around moaning. Know what’s scarier than that? Bears. And the frontiersmen of old used to deal with them all the time. Sure, if you get bitten by a bear, you don’t become one—though that would be pretty cool, as now you’d be Bearman with bear powers—but otherwise bears are much more fearsome, and people used to go out all the time into the frontier with no society and no government and deal just fine with the bears.
So, society collapsing because of zombies should be no problem for a true American, as he’ll know exactly what to do. First he’ll fend off the initial zombie horde and then maybe put on a leather jacket that’s missing one sleeve to establish himself as a post-apocalyptic badass. Then he’ll get right to work finding a nice place to hunker down, perhaps with room to grow crops and start to rebuild society—but a nicer one with fewer hippies. In fact, a truly independent person would probably prefer the nuisance of a zombie apocalypse to living under government. I mean, you can shoot zombies, and they’ll be gone, but government is persistent and everywhere and always coming after you. It’s like the Terminator—bulletproof and unstoppable, with a frozen smile on its face as it relentlessly pursues its destructive programmed mission to ineptly help everyone.
Anyway, that is the test of how independent you are: Imagine a zombie apocalypse. If your reaction would be anything other than to shrug indifferently and get to work, you need to work on your independence.
So what do you need in order to be independent? To help out on your quest, I’ve listed some essentials of independence. If you make sure you’re set on everything on this list, you’ll be ready for anything. You’ll have strong treads on your tank of awesome and be ready to roll over any sort of terrain that lies before you. So here’s what you’ll need:
Fire: Fire was the first basic tool of man. Well, I guess the first basic tool was probably like a rock, but those are everywhere and hardly worth mentioning. Fire takes a little bit of skill. I know we have lots of modern ways to make fire, with matches and lighters and computer processors we overclocked, but you should know how to make fire with nothing but what you can find in the forest. Then, no matter how bad things get, you’ll at least have a nice, warm fire. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s a weakness of zombies if that ever actually comes up.
Guns: Guns are an essential part of being independent, because they mean you are ready to take on criminals, zombies, aliens, communists, and whatever other awful thing life can throw at you. A truly independent person should have his own defense of home and family well under control and not rely on government bureaucrats with guns to come save him if trouble arises. When a knife-wielding maniac busts into your house, would you rather have a phone to call the police or a shotgun? “Oh, hi, police? Yeah, a guy is currently stabbing me. Can you come help? Oh, it will be fifteen minutes? Okay, I’ll try not to bleed out by then. Thanks.” I’m not saying never use the police; I mean, you can let them remove the dead maniac from your house, because you don’t want to touch that, but your day-to-day safety needs to be in your own hands.
Now, your inner hippie will probably protest this and be all, “Oh no! Guns are scary! Keep them away!” When that happens, just work the action on your gun; that sound will scare your inner hippie right away. And other hippie-influenced people might not like your having guns, either, or may question what types of guns you should have, saying things like, “No one needs an assault weapon; those are too dangerous.”
Just say to them, “I’m an awesome, independent, law-abiding American; the deadlier I am, the safer everyone else is.” And they’ll listen to you, because they know you have guns.
Martial Arts: Let’s say you’re in a tough situation, and the gun gets knocked from your hand. What should you do? Well, pull out your other gun, of course. Why would you have only one gun? That’s silly.
But let’s say there is a situation where somehow—I don’t know how—you don’t have any guns. Or maybe you have an enemy you want to deal with nonlethally—like a temporarily deranged puppy. Then you’ll need to know basic hand-to-hand combat.
Now, some people are wary of anything called martial arts because it has the word art in the title, but this isn’t some hippie-type art—this is art that is actually useful, since it’s about getting better at hitting people in the face. So not only will knowing some martial arts help you be better prepared for any situation, but it will also improve your hippie-punching skills, making your punches even more educational.
So what’s the minimum skill level you should have in martial arts? Well, you are looking for a basic proficiency. That means, if suddenly surrounded by a group of ninjas, you should be able to kung-fu fight them off. I think that’s a green belt.
Money: A useful thing to have is money. Money can be exchanged for goods and services, two things you may need from time to time. It can also be exchanged for nachos, ammo, and life-size replicas of Darth Vader—money is just an awesome thing to have. In fact, with enough money, you don’t even need all these other skills I’m listing, as you can just pay other people to do them. (“Hey, you. Here’s a hundred bucks. Make me a fire.”)
Of course, to get money, you’ll need some sort of job—the exact sort of thing your inner hippie hates—and to get a good job, you’ll have to have some sort of marketable skill. Or often instead of a marketable skill, some companies just want a college degree that pretends you have one. But when getting useful skills, make sure you have the zombie apocalypse scenario in mind. When society collapses, Java programmers aren’t going to be in huge demand.
Speaking of society collapsing, it’s also a good idea to have some gold. See, right now our money doesn’t actually represent anything. A “dollar” is basically just a made-up word we all pretend means something—we could just as easily value everything in unicorn farts. And that’s fine, as long as we’re all pretending together, but one day someone could go, “Hey, this money here is just imaginary,” and then the illusion would collapse, and so would our economy. So that’s why you should have some gold as a backup, as it’s yellow and shiny, and everyone loves it. Even if our economy withers away, you’ll be able to say, “Can you give me some food? Here is something yellow and shiny in exchange.”
Just make sure to hide your gold well. I recommend burying it somewhere very remote and then putting directions to it on some sort of well-worn map that you can then hide in a picture frame or something. Then if you die having never needed your gold, some kids in the future can find your map and have a Goonies-type adventure recovering it. So, in a way, gold is an investment in children’s future.
Trapping Skills: What’s something essential you need every day? Air? Well, yeah. That you kind of get for free. Well, I guess plants make it—which makes you kinda dependent on plants. Maybe one day we can make a device that makes air so we’ll no longer need plants, because, like most people, you probably hate plants and hate depending on them. They think they’re so special, because they absorb the rays of the yellow sun just like Superman, but you’re not special, plants. You’re stupid.
But anyway, the essential thing you need every day I was trying to get at is food. If you’re in a survival situation, do you know how to obtain food? I guess you could forage for berries and stuff . . . if you were a rabbit. But you’re a man—or a woman, one of those two—so you need meat. Therefore, you need to know how to wander out into the woods and come back with meat.
This involves making traps like snares and hidden pits with spikes in them (but if you make a hidden pit, make sure to put a sign up to warn people who can read but not tasty animals who can’t read). I guess you could also use store-bought traps, but if you’re already at the store, you might as well stock up on jerky. You want to make sure you can trap and kill animals with nothing but what you can find in nature. It may seem hard, but really, if you can’t outsmart a rabbit, then just give up now. Come on.
Knowledge: What if you don’t know something essential to a situation? Well, you just pull out your smartphone and google it. This is a huge advantage we have in the modern age; people of old didn’t have Google. Let’s say you wanted to know what a honey badger eats. Right now, we just plug “honey badger diet” into Google and get the answer. In days of yore, you’d have to go to a library and consult the card catalog and find a book on African animals and then go locate that book and hope it wasn’t checked out and then hope that book has an index telling you where you can find information on honey badgers and then maybe get your answer. It was so tedious, it was better just to remain ignorant.
But you don’t want to be dependent on Google. Let’s say you try to go to Google and you get a 607 error page, which means nuclear war knocked out the Internet. Uh-oh. Hopefully you already know a lot of essential stuff, since you can’t just ask the Internet anymore. So keep reading useful books and articles and fill that squishy thing in your skull with stuff you can know on the ready.
Hey, you’re reading a book right now! You’re nailing this one. Good job.
Car: A big part of being independent is having transportation. You can walk, but that’s tedious and boring. Now there are lots of ways to get around, but the car is the best, because it has a long range and you control it yourself. I mean, if you can own and fly a helicopter, that’s awesome, but anyone can get a car. Actually, it’s kind of weird in this safety-conscious age where we can’t smoke anywhere and they want to outlaw large sodas, that the government still lets absolutely any idiot speed around in a few tons of metal.
Of course, in a situation where society collapses, you’ll have to battle roving gangs for gasoline, but if you have the other skills I’ve listed so far, you should be fine.
Bucket: A bucket is good for carrying things, and when you are independent, you may at times need to carry things. You may also want a wheelbarrow.
So you’ve got all the essential skills and are now independent. Despite the protests of your inner hippie, you control your own life and your own fate. Your tank of awesome can take on any terrain by itself. There’s a problem: You will now be a target for dependent people. They’ll see you, someone who has it all together, and say, “There’s someone I can leech off of.”
Don’t let this happen. If you are to use your independence to continue in being awesome, you must avoid dependents who will sap your ability to be awesome. People will want to “borrow” money from you or crash at your place or have you fight off hordes of bandits for them, but you can’t devote your full energy to being awesome when your time and money are going to people who aren’t pulling their own weight. If you have someone who is trying to be dependent on you, here’s a very kind way to tell them that’s not okay:
“Get your sucker off me, you filthy leech.”
And then you sprinkle salt on the person’s face, because that is how you get leeches off you.
Yeah, so that doesn’t sound kind, but the kindest way to deal with people is in a forceful way that makes them confront the hippies inside them that are causing their failures. Also, I don’t really get the point of being kind or care to know the point.
I know what you’re probably asking now: Since I’m saying you shouldn’t have dependents, does that mean you shouldn’t have children? No, they are an exception. Yes, every child starts out as a useless dependent sapping your time and money, but in principle there should be a return on this investment. Unlike dependent adults, your children should grow out of it. And if you raise your children right, they will be awesome like you, and then you can declare, “Behold my glorious progeny as they march forth and further conquer this world in my name!” But if for some reason your kids don’t turn out awesome and remain dependent, at a certain age you can just kick them out. Yep, when they get old enough, they are no longer your legal obligations. You can just tell them, “I’m sorry, child, but you are a failure. Perhaps it was my fault . . . but more likely it was yours. Bye.”
So anyway, you can have children as dependents, but definitely avoid any dependents you don’t get a tax deduction for.
So who should be your friends? Well, that should be obvious: other independent people. You only want to be around people who are awesome on their own, but then you can combine all your powers to create even greater things—like with Voltron.
This is especially important in picking a spouse. You definitely only want to marry someone who is awesome like you and will pull his or her own weight. That should be in your marriage vows: “I will pull my own weight.”
So if you’re a man, you want to marry a strong, independent woman—but not like a screechy feminist who acts all independent but then wants the government to supply everything. They also tend not to find the humor in my ironic misogyny. Hey, lighten up, toots. And if you’re a woman, you don’t want one of those beta-male, primping and preening types who are all about feelings. Ask your man what his feelings are, and if he answers with anything other than a look of confusion, dump him. A proper man should be too busy for feelings.
As for your friends, it’s great for an independent person to have a lot of friends—just make sure they are all of some use to you. For instance, you could have a friend who knows how to do magic tricks. A friend who knows how to do magic might not seem useful now (and he, in fact, might seem a bit creepy), but let’s say you and your friends are on a plane and it crashes in the middle of nowhere and are taken prisoner by some primitive tribe, which you then need to convince you’re wizards so they’ll let you go. Then you’ll be all, “I’m glad I have a friend like Archibald.”
Oh, I should note that you should make sure you know your friends’ names. Friends don’t like it when you call them by the wrong name. If you have a particularly large group of friends, instead of remembering all their names, it may be easier to call each one an affectionate nickname based on a physical feature, as that’s easier to remember. For example, “Stretch,” “Beardo,” or “Fatty Fatty Fat Fat.”
So go through your list of friends right now and ask yourself about each one: What purpose does this friend serve? If you can’t come up with an answer, call that friend up and tell him he can no longer be your friend unless he becomes more useful. You can then helpfully suggest which skill the friend could work on, based on what you lack in your other friends. A good friend worth keeping will respect you for this. A bad friend will respond by cursing at you and accusing you of selfishly exploiting everyone. You don’t want a friend like that.
In this chapter, we learned:
• Independence is like the treads on our tank of awesome, because it rotates or something. I dunno.
• Most people lie about liking freedom.
• The government is awful.
• Be ready to fight zombies or something.
• You need a lot of skills to be independent, though money seems like the most important one. The others sound hard.
• Avoid dependents and friends.
In the next chapter, we’ll talk about the armor on our tank of awesome: gratitude.
What causes dependence? Is it society? If so, how do we destroy society?
Is there anything the government is good at? Could you do that better yourself? If not, why do you suck?
Why do zombies hate us?
Q. You make it sound like government programs are the opposite of freedom, but isn’t part of freedom being free from worries, like whether you’ll have enough to eat or have access to health care?
A. Yeah, you know who is free from those worries? A child. Because a child does not understand economics and how those things are supplied and just assumes he gets all the things he wants because he likes them so much. Hey, you can not worry about those things you want and trust some government idiots to get them for you, but eventually the worry will find you when those dimwits fail, and then reality will punch your hippie face harder than I ever could.
Q. Isn’t sacrificing some independence part of living in a complex, civilized society?
A. Now, that’s your inner hippie talking right there, trying to turn your inability to take care of yourself into some sort of grand virtue. “I’m going to put my fate in the hands of idiots who don’t really care whether I live or die because I’m civilized. Look at my monocle and bowler hat.”
Q. No need to mock me.
A. Well, I can’t punch you, so I’m going to mock you, as it’s the next best thing to jolt you out of your stupidity. I mean, have you seen politicians and bureaucrats? They’re basically like hippies. Would you put your fate in the hands of hippies? I certainly wouldn’t, because if they didn’t outright break your future or lose it, they’d probably just try to turn your fate into a bong or something. And when you trust the government to take care of you, that’s what’s going to happen to your future: It’s going to end up weird and sticky and gross.
Q. You seem very down on the government. Are you some sort of antigovernment militia type?
A. I just think the government is full of idiots—which is a fact that shouldn’t be disputed. Just because you don’t like the government doesn’t mean you have to be running around the woods with an assault rifle. I mean, I do run around the woods with an assault rifle, but it’s for completely unrelated reasons.
Q. You talked about a zombie apocalypse. Is that an actual thing we need to prepare for?
A. I know it seems far-fetched, but people go into mindless, violent states all the time. Just read the comments on YouTube if you don’t believe me.