Digital Permaculture?

Applying (emergent) permaculture ethics and principles to our life in the digital landscape.

At Het Kloosterbos we are concerned about the lack of critical/sceptical use of digital tools in the permaculture community. As far as permaculture practitioners and organisations choose to be online, they seem to be unaware or uncaring about the impact of commercial ‘platform’ operators and the services they offer. Convenience and popularity seem to be the decisive criteral, followed closely by inertia – sticking with whatever service presented itself first.

Where permaculture designers, teachers and private practitioners are conscientious and deliberate in their care for the earth, people and fair share, they exchange them for digital convenience in blissful ignorance of the consequences.

They wouldn’t want to be caught dead with GMO seeds or glyphosate pesticides in their pocket, but they think nothing of using toxic ‘social media’ platforms or the surveillance capitalist business models of ‘free’ email and cloud data storage providers.

Most disturbingly is that permaculture people are not alone in this. Most government and NGO agencies have embraced the surveillance economy without a second thought, even consider it a marvelous opportunity to finally get a handle on their fickle – and now effectively captive – constituencies.

Where did this come from and how does this work? How can we turn this back into harmony with (our) nature?

Origin

Triggered by our sense of curiosity and novelty, people were seduced by the potential and promise of a publicly funded Internet for free, unfiltered and unmediated communications and information sharing. Soon however corporations realized the potential for surveillance capitalist development of the medium and started offering ‘free’ services, like search engines, email and home pages to private consumers and businesses alike.

Then there was a wave of more blatant monetizing of web content and influencing of consumers. And finally the public got wind of the data mining and processing going on in the background feeding the profits of a new breed of surveillance entrepreneurs and shady agencies.

Escaping Surveillance Capitalist Industry

Liberating yourself from the mutual and delusional deathgrip of the commerical communication platforms is a major challenge in itself. But eminently possible with a range of current and emerging Open Source solutions available right now.

Toolkit

  • Encryption and certification with OpenPGP and Let’s Encrypt;
  • Self-hosted home network monitoring and filtering with Pi-hole and PiVPN or RaspAP;
  • Self-hosted cooperative and distributed ‘social media’ like SSB-based Manyverse or Planetary, and Matrix or Mastodon;
  • Self-hosted and cooperative cloud data storage with NextCloud or OwnCloud;
  • Easily accessible (mostly) Open Source hardware and Operating Systems like Raspberry Pi and Beagle Board (Beagle-V).

Of course we won’t mention the underlying industrial complex for the moment 😉

Integration

Still missing in the equation is the integration of these tools into convenient packaging that is on equal footing or superior to the commercial platforms. Think: zero-configuration plug-and-play appliances, that at most should require customization to individual taste. Just plug it into your own internet router and communicate with your glocal community in confidence and comfort.

Rethinking the Digital Landscape

On the other hand, a huge remaining issue with the ‘social media’ communication platforms is the the fact that they are much better characterised as sociopathic anti-social media. The way they are designed for maximum engagement means they are intended to create a biophysical dependency and psychological isolation that belies and contradicts its naive and misleading name.

What we really want is tools for free thinking, independent and creative thought and action. Tools to create and develop ad-hoc communities on emerging issues as well as to satisfy the endless curiosity and generosity of people anywhere in the world. Tools to encourage critical and skeptical investigation and exploration as well as developing meaning, cooperation, compassion and living in harmony with nature.

This requires a complete rethink and overhaul of the suite of ubiquitous communication applications we now consider as ‘normal’. We must return to basic questions and needs. How do healthy people in healthy communities communicate with each other? How do they cooperate and coordinate their individual lives so the experience of the whole is much more then the simple sum of the parts? How do we make sense of the world around us? How do we respond with open minds and open hearts to its universal and unconditional hospitality. How do we discover, nurture and leverage our innate diversity to the benefit of the inclusively pan-species commons?

And: how can we be sensitive and vigilant against abuse of such tools, in a non-coercive way?

Tools for Ambulant Lifestyles

What a ubiquitous communications network seem to be eminently suited for is reaching out to distributed communities and staying in touch with your community while traveling anywere in the world.

How much fun would it be to deploy a mobile/ambulant network on your bike or in your backpack, spreading information throughout the world while adventuring into the wild, discovering new places, new people and new communities. Learning first hand what new landscapes lie beyond the horizon, what wisdoms and abundance other people are eager to share? The concept of ‘sneaker net’ comes to mind. As do the internet cafe and media bus.

Not as an occasional luxury tourist holiday but as a fulfilling ambulant lifestyle.

And once that is achieved, so many more urgent and existential issues with our dominance of the planet find an organic and inevitable solution. Well, that is my current working theory anyway 😉

A Path to Explore

Permaculture ethics and design principles could be a fruitful approach to design tools for a new, viable and regenerative digital landscape. We should start somewhere, so why not here?

It all starts with considering the ethics or permaculture design:

  • Earth Care – or: pamper the soil and the planet as a whole;
  • People Care – or: cherish your chosen community (of humans and non-humans);
  • Fair Share – or: share the abundance of the unconditional and universal hospitality of nature, be a respectful and attentive guest and host.

We can all go to bed now and rest in the confidence that all is well on the climate front

You have to admit the genius of the final Glasgow Decision document.

It is one (1) sentence that boils down to this:

“The conference of parties (…) requests that the actions of the secretariat called for in this decision be undertaken subject to the availability of financial resources.”

Which decisions are named?

28: Decides to establish a work programme to urgently scale-up mitigation ambition and implementation during the critical decade of the 2020s;

32: Decides to convene an annual high-level ministerial round table on pre-2030 ambition, beginning at CMA 4 (November 2022);

What does that mean?

  1. this is a REQUEST, not a mandate;
  2. the request is exclusively addressed to the secretariat;
  3. any “actions of the secretariat called for in this decision” is contingent on available funds (of the secretariat);
  4. ambitions and implementations remain largely unspecified and optional;
  5. there is no assessment process;
  6. there is no sanction process;
  7. actioning the request is delegated to the UN secretariat;
  8. it admits defeat: climate change is happening without any attempt to stop it;
  9. it does not specify what is being mitigated, or what its parameters are;
  10. it requests annual talks without any other specified goal then to talk about ambitions.

In other words: BAU, more conferences, more talk, more travel, feeding the delusion, rather then eliminating it.

Remarkably and totally unsurprising there is no mention of the suicidal mental delusion that brought all of this upon us; no mention of humanity and no mention of Nature, our host system we all depend on for our own lives.

A total loss for humanity’s future after 50 years of talking at the highest level of global government.

Patience Young Grasshoppers 🙂

Het Kloosterbos withdraws from EuPC21 programme

Sanity before celebration? or: Why we decided not to participate after all, and why this may impact you too…

Dear C, friends in permaculture :-)

With this message I'm replying on behalf of the team of Het Kloosterbos (HKB) and Faire Cabane (FC) to all your outstanding messages concerning the EuPC and EuPN/EPT events this October.

For clarity: I'm copying this reply to our local/remote support partners as well as all the presenters and facilitators here at HKB & FC.

Please consider this a constructive and critical response for the evolution of and my contribution to the EuPC/EuPC & EPT online events.

The short version

Het Kloosterbos & Faire Cabane teams have collectively decided not to participate in the European Permaculture Convergence (online) 2021 and will not host a European Permaculture Teachers partnership anniversary at this point.

The main reason for this is that we find the platforms chosen to broadcast the presentations and facilitate the online interactive events are in direct conflict with what we wish to achieve with our respective projects, based on the published privacy policies and terms of use of the corporations providing the online services. We are concerned that the EuPC in particular has chosen to use these platforms, not in the least because these terms and policies also violate the ethics of permaculture design philosophy directly. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that alternatives have been developed over the past years, with the support of European permaculture organisations and EU financial support at CoLab. We would have expected that EuPC21 could have been the perfect opportunity to showcase these alternatives and get the European permaculture movement on board.

Feel free to read on at your convenience :-)

The longer version

In April this year I got the first invitation from S to get involved in the organisation or contribute to the programme of this years first fully online edition of the EuPC.

Since my first EuPC (2010 in Nethen, Belgium) I've been closely involved with co-creating a better online presence of European permaculture and online EuPC/EuPN development in particular. Even so, pioneers like the late Stefania Strega-Scoz (Stella of Finca Luna, La Palma) and others have been active and successful in various degrees in creating online convergence platforms for even longer. Just to indicate that nothing about the issues and solutions of online meetings and communications is particularly new in permaculture circles.

CoLab's digital circle is a good point in case. I was much encouraged by CoLab A's involvement in this EuPC and her enthusiastic offer of support when I contacted her earlier this year. My local partner and friends at MAD emergent art center were also looking forward to make streaming from the wilderness of HKB a successful event.

After the initial meeting in April, I contributed some thoughts and proposals in May and July. Some more preliminary correspondence followed in August and September. On 30 September I received the invitation to register at Comcast as presenter/facilitator. The details of planning arrived with the message below on 2 October, with 6 days to go till the start of the EuPC event. Since then I have consulted the members of our team at HKB & FC.

Checking out the registration page at Crowdcast set of all my alarm bells. That is when I first realised what we were getting into, from a point of view of the protection of our privacy and the agency over our contributions to the EuPC programme. I dove deeper into the terms of use and privacy policies of the other commercial partners that EuPC has chosen. I'm both unpleasantly surprised and shocked to find how participants of the EuPC event are exposed to the surveillance marketing practices of commercial corporations that we, as practitioners of permaculture ethics and principles, would never want to be associated with by choice. Not unlike we choose not to use pesticides, eat farmed meat or drive hummers to the office. You now what I mean ;-)

So, why is this different? It's not like there aren't any viable alternatives available.

In essence the event partners like Google (documents, forms, email. etc), Crowdcast (curated programme), Zoom (Open Space) and KumoSpace (Socializing) all have one goal: gathering as much data from the participants as possible, with the incidental "service" provided totally at the sole discretion of the provider, while taking effective and exclusive ownership of all that data. The privacy policies are only statements of the legal framework and justification for violating your privacy. Even more so since none of the participants are in a position to independently verify whatever happens to their data streaming over the public internet into the private corporate data centres around the world. Which is exactly why it would have been of immense value had CoLab been contracted to provide those platform services.

The activities at both Het Kloosterbos and Faire Cabane are based on trust, on equality, freedom and hospitality.  All of these would be violated by the commercial nature of the platforms chosen for this EuPC. We would be complicit in sabotaging our own work as well as compromising the key ethics and principles of permaculture: planet care, people care and fair share. Not to mention loosing all agency over the content we unintentionally provide to unaccountable and unverifiable commercial parties. We would also be exposing the participants in our events to the data gathering and processing activities of those commercial parties, well beyond the scope of the EuPC event itself.
The other consideration is that with just three more days to go now, the room for negotiating time slots is less then ideal. Three days to do detailed local promotion of our live events is now practically impossible.
But given the fundamental issues of the chosen platforms, this is a very minor issue now.

So: as a unanimous and collective decision, we choose not to participate in EuPC and/or act as presenters or facilitators in this 2021 edition.

What now?

For the future: we are always open to share our work with like minded people, whether online or IRL :-) We will actively work with anyone interested in further developing online channels of communication that respect the principles of trust, equality, freedom and hospitality. There are some great things happening in this field already. We have no ambition to dominate the market in online surveillance, but would love to grow our own secure and trusted network of people and communication tools. Just like you are :-) Let's make it happen. Now is as good a time as any.

Please let's work together on "living in harmony with nature". Fixing our addiction to coercive control mechanisms like the "social media" platforms, monitored "free" information services like cloud data storage, search engines and unencrypted email is the first step in fixing our civilised mind sets that prevent us from transitioning from a world in distress to "living in harmony with nature". Permaculture is a strategic step in the right direction. Let's work from its ethics and principles and follow the path that emerges and evolves from there. AT HKB & FC we have been taking some baby steps already.

Over the coming months we, here in Eindhoven, will be busy with doing our own little bit in this quest. Stay tuned - and get your own protonmail.com account or your nextcloud account at CoLab or set up your own in-house internet communications hub system.

Wishing you an enlightening and satisfying EuPC21 experience!

warm regards and hugs!
l:-)

kwartiermaker for Het Kloosterbos

On behalf of
AL, AM, F, G & M.

419/278

Despite the near total collapse of non-essential economic and social activity of human communities around the world over the whole of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, a new record of 419 ppm of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide was set in May 2021.

The requirement for the biosphere to maintain its diversity and the survival of most of its species is a carbon dioxide concentration of 278 ppm. Unless a radical change emerges now, as in: right now, you & me are the last generation of human folks to make this kind of mistake, ever.

What this metric demonstrates, but is hidden in plain view, is that the fundamental challenge for life on planet Earth is to balance the incoming and outgoing flows of energy, to create a global temperature homeostasis, other then by storing the surplus. The current stored surplus is the ticking time bomb of global extinction that has gone off several times already in the past and is going off again right now. The fuse is lit – and the human civilised mindset hasn’t helped to fix this.

The problem is simple. The sun provides most of the energy for life on our planet. It does so in abundance. Over-abundance in fact. Life created and maintains a thick atmosphere that shields us from many harmful gifts from space. It also prevents most energy from returning to space. Carbon dioxide is one of the gasses that trap this energy. Still there are a few narrow frequency bands that allow energy to pass from the surface of the planet back into space.

The solution is perhaps even simpler. Recent research and development into systems to use those heat windows show that it takes just that: when objects have a specific temperature and direct that energy outward to space, it will pass unhindered though the atmosphere, while cooling down its environment. One such solution is a super white paint, that absorbs very little energy from the sun, but can radiate the ambient energy at just the right temperature. Painted on roofs, the radiated energy disappears directly into space.

Why does it have to be this super white colour? Because otherwise the painted surface would heat up too much and the radiated energy would be stuck in the atmosphere again.

Would it be possible for organic beings to come up with a similar solution? Absorb as little energy as possible from the sun, yet radiate at just the right temperature (between 28 and 38 degrees C), directed at the sky? So far there don’t appear to be any organisms that have come up with this by themselves – or did they? Other strategies may work too.

Yes, they have many solutions to store the excess energy, but this only means that they have pushed the problem of dealing with it into the future.

And the future is now, as it turns out 😉 What are the odds of that?

Het Kloosterbos: Meeting Ground for Hospitality

Seed 

Permaculture’s seed: questioning the sense and sanity of the civilised Australian agricultural food system (David Holmgren1(Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture forHuman Settlements. David Holmgren & Bill Mollison. 1978. In 2011, David provides more insight … Continue reading). The answer of permaculture (= permanent agriculture = the enduring domestication of nature) is still agriculture, albeit pre-industrial.2Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. Bill Mollison & David Holmgren. 1978. “1.0 Introductory Comment. … Continue reading

The outcome is inevitably the same: the ultimate collapse of human mental health. This is because it doesn’t address the root mental pathology that resulted in the concept of agriculture: civilisation. This led me to look for the deeper questions of the mental health of humanity, as individuals and collectively.

One answer lies in the liberation of people and their companion creatures. Het Kloosterbos is a place and process of liberation: feral design, rewilding by design, graceful collapse. 

Het Kloosterbos is a feral meeting ground, practising freedom, equality and hospitality. Being free, equal and hospitable takes practice after 10 millennia of civilisation. Making mistakes is inevitable, but that is how we learn together to find a new common meeting ground in diversity. 

Heart of the Matter:
Universal Transcendence 

At the heart of it all is the realisation that models, principles and design are arbitrary abstractions, tools of domestication. They also provide us with the tools to notice freedom by contrast. Letting go of the preconceptions and accepting the wonder and abundance of reality are what liberates us. Feral design can lead us there. You can also skip the design, innovations and arduous pathways of political and environmental activism and just let go of civilised life. Go with the flow. Be one. Be all. 

Life is Transformation 

Life is the ongoing process of transformation of ambient matter driven by ambient energy. In other words: life is all about food and feeding. You transform other beings into you and vice versa. Death is transformation. Feeding is transformation. Food is beings in transformation. 
Real Life is not a competition. The concept of competition with its implied concepts of winners and losers, and gains, losses and profits is an arbitrary and fictional invention of civilisation. The rest of nature just doesn’t work that way. In transformation nothing is lost, just changed.

Humanity 

The base state of being for humans if to be free, equal and hospitable.
The base state of being for civilisation is control through competitive segregation and coercive control. In this in-sane scenario, nature is considered inferior and subservient to the whims of human superiors. Once on the path of separating superior from inferior, we separate humans from nature and inferior humans from superior humans in a fractal hierarchy. There is an inevitable causal connection with the advent of agriculture: a phenomenon where a community of people settled in one place, where they could grow carbohydrate rich domesticated crops and feed domesticated animals for food. “Growing” food enables a few people to feed many more then by foraging, while you can accumulate and store food for later. Here lie the seeds for the separation of humans from nature, the segregation of producers from consumers and the concept of profit: producing more than the producer needs to feed themselves. “Everything that follows, is a result of what you see here3I, Robot. Asimov. 1950. There is only one outcome: civilisation. It makes everybody unhappy. Reclaiming our humanity and its mental health, requires reclaiming our innate freedom, equality and hospitality. 

Meeting Ground Het Kloosterbos: 
Pleisterplaats (way station) for Mobile Lifestyles

Let go of having a house (domus, domicile), a permanent address. Go where the food is and move on with the seasons, as any sensible being does. Choosing the feral path is choosing a mobile lifestyle. To facilitate mobile lifestyles and to restore nature’s capacity for hospitality, I propose a network of way stations, pleisterplaatsen, meeting grounds for travellers. 

Het Kloosterbos is conceived as one of those places. A marginal space, between the city and the relative wilderness of rural Brabant. A place abandoned by its “owners”, designated with unprofitable zoning (social use, not residential, commercial or agricultural, not a nature reserve). Now it is a place of learning (to rewild), biodiverse restoration and climate adaptation. Now it is a place where you can imagine leaving civilisation and having a brief moment of sanity, of being a free human in free nature. A meeting ground of free, equal and hospitable life. 

This article was first published in Meeting Grounds – Reader Four: The Community Garden. Amy Gowen (ed). June 2021. Onomatopee. Eindhoven.

note | noot[+]

An Afternoon with Het Kloosterbos and Friends

Where: Het Kloosterbos
When: Thursday 27 May, 14.00 onwards

An Afternoon with Het Kloosterbos and friends is an informal gathering that will act as a finissage to the Onomatopee Meeting Grounds Edition 4 programme, a launch for accompanying publication, and as an introduction and invitation into the delights of Het Kloosterbos, a peri-urban oasis of rewilding situated in Eindhoven.

Het Kloosterbos is a social media-free project.
Please help us keep it so.

Het Kloosterbos is a pleisterplaats // a meeting ground. A healing place, a place to recharge. For plants, animals, microbes – and yes, for you too. Everyone is an equal and worthy guest.

Meeting Grounds takes the form of a series of publicly programmed events that looks to the physical sites that play host to the diverse communities of Eindhoven – be they human or non-human.

Together Het Kloosterbos and Meeting Grounds invite you to an afternoon of nature-based activities, insights, explorations, nutrition and delight.

What to expect during An afternoon with Het Kloosterbos and friends:
Guests will be welcomed across a number of designated “sensory” stations situated around the forest garden that will act as a carousel to guide you through the many processes of this place and for you to learn directly about the site and its multitude of offerings through sight, smell, taste, touch and listening.

Whilst at each station you will be welcomed to document your experience through the act of writing or drawing and while embarking on this journey, we will gather ingredients for a collective meal, process the ingredients and cook them into a tasty and nutritious menu.

Once we have successfully prepared our food and drinks, we will embark on a reflection of our experiences in the garden, coupled with readings from the upcoming Meeting Grounds publication as a way to consider the philosophy of Het Kloosterbos, its vision of rewilding and core ethics and guiding principles.

Through your time in the garden, we hope for you to experience the diversity of species, the community of species, the landscape that invites and facilitates (or at times hinders) these meetings between species and individuals; and how we as guests influence those conditions and processes within the garden.

Please note attendance at prior Meeting Grounds or Het Kloosterbos events is not required, all are welcomed and encouraged to join.

Due to current COVID-19 restrictions reservations are necessary for this event and places are limited. Please contact amy@onomatopee.net for further information and to register your place. 

Faire Cabane — a treehouse project at Eikenburg

A DAE student project supported by Het Kloosterbos.

Marie Verdeil and Anna Mareschal de Charentenay are both French students currently in the third year of their education at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

The idea of making a treehouse in an urban environment comes from our desire to explore building structures together – whether they are physical, social, architectural, technological or virtual.

This treehouse is the materialisation of a local network of people, places and materials, which they connect together in order to gather the necessary resources for the project. The main principles for the construction are:

  • collaboration – making in conversation with the network;
  • togetherness – creating a platform which is a space to meet and discuss;
  • scarcity & circularity – materials are used consciously, come (largely) from second hand and will be repurposed when the project comes to an end.

The treehouse will stand (at least) until mid-July; what happens afterwards is undecided yet.
The short temporality of the treehouse (few months) pushes us to consider the process of building up and taking down with the same importance in our design choices: these decisions do not depend merely on the designers, but are rather part of a discussion with the network, as well as the local environment surrounding the treehouse: the users and inhabitants of Eikenburg.

Practical information: as of Wednesday 28 April, they have done three days of building. When the building phase is more advanced – they hope to have any curious visitors come up and have a chat.

Anna and Marie mainly work on Wednesdays and Saturdays – though it depends on the weather conditions. If you see them around, or have any questions, do get in touch! Preferably in English or in French, as they are not so comfortable with Dutch.
Contact the students by email to AnnaMareschaldeCharentenay@student.designacademy.nl.

3% Remaining

For most pension funds it is panic stations when capital reserves drop below 95%. For civilisation 3% of ecological reserves remaining stays firmly below its horizon of perception.

While it is equally unwise to romanticise pristine nature as it is to deny the presence of humans in our global ecosystem, 3% of healthy ecosystems left on the planet should be cause to pause and consider if we want to live beyond today.

Looking at the map of the assessment of ecological health of most of the planet’s land surface, it seems that where humans have taken an interest in extracting natural resources are the least healthy and those that have been left alone are the most healthy. Perhaps this is a clue to restoring the health of both ourselves and everything else in the planetary biosphere?

Perhaps it is a matter of perception, on the part of us, civilised humans? Maybe we could work on that? Some day? No rush, as neither nature1that which is born, rather then manufactured by humans. From Latin verb nasci. nor the planet care one way or the other 😉

note | noot[+]

1.5 Degrees

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.

United Nations Climate Change – Paris Agreement 2015

Pre-industrial Level

Associated with pre-industrial society, commonly recognised as (western) society before 1850. The Industrial Revolution, the period of transition, taking place world-wide between 1750 and 1850.

1.5 degrees

1.5 degrees Celsius, being the global annual average temperature of the atmosphere, over land and sea.

Below

Below 1.5 degrees C means any value lower then 1.5, like 1.49 or 1 or 0 degrees increase in global annual temperature compared to pre-industrial levels.

The global annual temperature of the atmosphere in 1850 (since the availability of thermometers) was… Sources are vague about a specific value. My best guess, based on eyeballing squiggly lines of graphs, I’d say: 13.8 degrees C.

So the target for the Paris Agreement on the limitation on global average temperature is: 15.3 degrees Celsius.

How are we doing in the Netherlands?

Annual average temperatures aren’t evenly distributed over the globe: dependent on latitude, elevation, other factors.

In the Netherlands the annual average temperature in 1850 was… again, sources are evasive about a clear value, but again eyeballing some graphs, I’d say about 8.2 degrees Celsius.

Compare that value with the current value of 11.7 degrees Celsius (that was much easier to find), it seems obvious that we have royally crossed the 1.5 degree line, for the first time in 1974, taking 124 years. From 1974 the rise in temperature has accelerated considerably, to 3.5 degrees in the last 46 years.

What’s Next?

At least we don’t have to worry about missing our Paris Agreement target. We did that already in 1974, way before there was a Paris Agreement.

Shall we aim for 7 degrees? Up the ante in a bid to out-game all the other nations? Or do we want to live? Perhaps even as free people? The radical transformation of our lifestyle and society seems inevitable. The most efficient way is quite possibly to do absolutely nothing. No mitigation policies and funds. Just let the nature of civilisation take its course and get it over with as soon as possible, while there are still resources left for a graceful recovery?

Let go and enjoy the moment? That is where we would be heading in a cooler, slower, less energy-intensive rewilded world anyway. Take an advance now, on the future we should be aiming for. Isn’t that what we are trained to do anyway? Buy now, pay later?