If you’re waiting for the revolution, you’re missing the one that already started. It doesn’t look like marches. It looks like a greenhouse, a harvest group, a spreadsheet nobody asked you to make.
Some will tell you that’s not revolutionary. That a raised bed doesn’t change the system. And they’re right — it’s not the whole thing. But it’s also not nothing. It needs a foundation that demonstrates better alternatives to what has been offered. A revolution needs everyone, not just the people on the front lines. It needs people doing what they’re actually good at, pointed at their actual street. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s most of the actual work.
The skills hiding inside your hobbies are the exit. Most of you are already doing enough of them to be a long way down the road. You just haven’t given yourself permission to point them somewhere that matters — or you’ve been taught not to.
One more thing before you get into this:
At the end, you can pick a place to start, one of our suggestions or your own.
There’s a link to let us know where to follow up, and we’ll check in, once or twice, not to nag, just a reminder and to see how it went.
Even “odd pastimes” carry this. Look at what you’ve actually been building without noticing:
Run the same D&D campaign for a decade?
Keeping six different personalities engaged, on-topic, and heard for three hours a week = block-meeting facilitation with better snacks
Holding a coherent story across years of sessions = planning a neighborhood solar buildout in phases
Always writing?
Start a neighborhood ‘zine the block actually reads
Put together the book that tells the story of who’s lived on this street, creating a sense of community and shared history
Love organization and spreadsheets?
Catalog the shared garden’s harvest log — who grew what, who’s picking this week, whose zucchini nobody claimed — and offer suggestions on what to grow next year
Manage and maintain communication channels
Always the one who gets everyone to actually show up?
That’s convening — the actual skill the harvest group and tool library run on
Turn it into a standing thing: weekly block happy hour, quarterly cookout, getting the street into the city’s 4th of July parade
You already have the skill. You’ve just been spending it somewhere small. I’ve been writing about that quiet exit for a while — the side door out of systems that want you dependent, the way your expertise is an asset your job is just renting.
So this is the permission slip. Here are six ways people are already doing that — on purpose or by accident.
1. The green thumb you already have.
If you’ve kept anything alive on a windowsill for more than a season, you already know this part: whatever you plant makes more than one household can use. A tomato plant doesn’t stop at four tomatoes because that’s what fits your kitchen.
Our yard is full of raised beds at this point — it wasn’t a plan, it just kept growing. This year we built a greenhouse to push the growing season further into fall. None of it is about self-sufficiency as a philosophy. It’s that a half-flat of strawberries runs $35 at the farmers market near us, and growing our own feels better than paying that.
The skill was never “put a seed in dirt.” It’s what you do with what comes up after. Extra seedlings on the porch rail. A bag of tomatoes on a neighbor’s doorknob before they turn. That’s the difference between a hobby and something the block runs on.
Small win: Give away one thing you grew this week — seedlings, extras, whatever’s about to go bad. Don’t wait to be asked.
Want a reminder to your commitment? Follow the link and we’ll checkin with you.
2. Preserving — grown or bought, it doesn’t matter.
You don’t have to grow anything for this one. Preserving — canning, dehydrating, fermenting, freezing right — works the same on a flat of strawberries from the farmers market as it does on something out of your own dirt.
This year my family made the trip to pick cherries, and I made my first batch ever of bourbon cocktail cherries. I started handing jars out around the neighborhood, and what came back was two things at once: a half-dozen kinds of jam we’d never have made ourselves — my son’s going through PB&Js with flavors I’d never heard of a month ago — and a knock on the door from people we don’t normally trade with at all. The jam is nice. The knock is the part that’s easy to miss and actually matters.
Preserving isn’t storage — it’s an occasion. A reason to make something, hand it to someone, and know them a little better than you did the week before.
One good first stop: the National Center for Home Food Preservation. Read it once, then go.
Small win: Put up one jar, one bag, one ferment — store-bought produce works fine. Give at least one away.
3. Cooking without the wall outlet.
You probably already own something that could cook dinner without the wall outlet — a grill, a camp stove, something gathering dust in the garage. The skill was never buying it. It’s using it enough that it’s not a stranger when you actually need it.
Last Father’s Day I was given a propane flat-top griddle for next to the barbecue. I figured I’d use it twice and it’d sit there. Instead I cook on it more than anything else in the kitchen — breakfast, dinner, whatever. Cleanup’s easier, we end up outside for the whole meal, and I can steam vegetables on it same as a stovetop. I was already cooking most meals in a frying pan, so it wasn’t much of a jump.
The side effect I didn’t expect: we have people over a lot more now. Cooking outside turns dinner into something you can casually invite a neighbor into, and they show up with food and drinks of their own. Small thing. Also most of the point.
You do not need to go off-grid. You need one piece of equipment that doesn’t care whether the wall outlet works — griddle, kettle grill, rocket stove, camp stove — used enough that it stops feeling like backup and starts feeling like the kitchen. Use it before you need it: if the only time you touch it is during an outage, your hands don’t know what they’re doing and neither does the dinner.
Small win: Cook one meal this month on a tool that doesn’t need the wall outlet.
4. The gift economy, not barter.
You’ve probably already done this without a name for it — watered a neighbor’s plants while they were away, dropped off a meal when someone was sick, lent a ladder and never got it back and didn’t care. That instinct is the actual skill.
The cash economy is one layer, and in a lot of neighborhoods it isn’t the strongest.
I’m organizing a small harvest group on our block. When the fruit trees are ripe, the group picks — none of it goes to waste. When people go on vacation, the group tends their gardens. Nobody’s paid, nobody’s keeping score.
That’s not barter, and it’s worth being precise about that. Barter — a direct, tracked trade — was never really how small communities ran. What actually happened was closer to gifting: you give someone what they need because they need it, trusting it comes back around eventually, from someone, somehow. Nobody’s keeping a ledger. That’s the muscle worth rebuilding — not “what am I owed,” but “what do I have that somebody needs right now.” Same reframe as wealth itself: what you’re building isn’t money, it’s access.
If you’ve been reading Resilient Tomorrow a while, you’ve heard me mention NeighborhoodShare — a tool-sharing app built for exactly this. I took it down to rebuild it right, and it’s coming back; paid subscribers get first crack at the beta. The app isn’t the skill, though. Giving before you’re asked is.
Small win: Make one money-free exchange in the next 30 days. Don’t keep score.
5. The power of the library.
You stop renting something you can own or borrow. Most of us already own more of the pieces than we think — a spare battery, an old laptop, a hard drive doing nothing in a drawer. This can became your digital library.
Streaming owns what you pay for and can take it back the same day; that’s already happened as I wrote about here. My digital library — Apollo, a $150 mini PC on free software — does what the subscriptions did, minus anyone quietly removing the titles off the shelf. The best part, I share it with my friends and family.
My wife is building a “little toy library” (called the “truck stop” starting with our sons toy trucks) in our front yard. We live near an elementary school, kids walking to school see it and normalize the exchange without being told.
Small win: Determine what you are paying subscriptions for that you can get another way. Do you have the items in your home already to test it out?
6. Making the skills visible.
This is the part that turns a hobby into something that builds you a life, not just a private one.
When the neighbor fixes every lawnmower on the block, the neighborhood knows who to call. That’s the goal — not hustle, just letting people find out what you can already do. Most people skip this step: the skill stays in the garage and the head, and when the job disappears, nobody outside the kitchen knows what you can do.
A few ways to fix that:
A one-page portfolio online — here’s what I built, here’s how to reach me
A Saturday class — teach the thing to three neighbors over coffee
One text to the person next door — “if you ever need X, I know how to do that”
I’m building a cyberdeck (a DIY tablet running open source software — this is so Solarpunk) for my old Toyota pickup. It’s too old to have GPS and my state banned touching phones while driving, so navigating has become difficult. This solution has a ton of bennefits besides adding GPS to a truck:
It works out of the truck too, so I’ll have an on the go tablet
I can download music and movies to it from my media server
Not only will it have AM/FM radio, but also NOAA weather services — convenient when camping
Bluetooth to connect to my phone if needed - where I can update or stream more media
But the best feature: It won’t collect my data. I’m tired of every device I own harvesting what I do and selling it back to me.
My favorite part of this cyberdeck project is that I’m building it with friends. This means I’ve got people to call when I run into a problem. And I get to hear other peoples ideas too. A handful of us learning it together, none of us walking away knowing only what we knew going in. Skills that don’t look “saleable” are rare precisely because most people don’t have them, and showing someone how is worth more than the thing itself.
If you want to hear more about the cyberdeck or are interested in learning to build one leave me a comment!
The point isn’t the portfolio. It’s the muscle: being comfortable being seen as the person who knows the thing — and it’s usually how you end up knowing your neighbors instead of just recognizing their cars.
Small win: Tell one person, in one sentence, one skill you have that you haven’t told them about. The bar is low. See where it goes.
The off-ramp, in plain language.
The hobbies aren’t the side life. The hobbies are the life. The job is the side life.
The paycheck isn’t the foundation. The skills, the network, the garden are. What you share with your neighbors is the part that scales: cherry jars that come back as preserves, a harvest group that picks your trees while you’re on vacation, a toy library on the curb. None of it works alone — it works because somebody else is in the kitchen next door. Ask before you need to. Give before you have to.
That’s the exit. It looks like a hobby because no one profits from you seeing it clearly. You’ve been told there’s no alternative — rent the power, rent the library, rent your own time back from an employer, and call it realism. It was never true. There are alternatives, and choosing one doesn’t require burning anything down.
The work of changing the system starts with the one thing you actually control: YOU. Make a choice instead of accepting the only one you were handed — that’s how it starts. It’s like the six things above, already on your actual block, usually started by someone who never called it a movement.
This was never the side project. This is the actual work. Keep it private if you want — but the version you let your neighbor see is the one that holds. There’s a side door out you’ve been told to ignore your whole life, and it turns out you don’t walk through it alone. Start with one thing. See if it builds you a life closer to the one you actually want.
How to start this week
Reading a list of suggestions is the easy part. If you want an actual nudge instead of good intentions, we built a place for that — The Off-Ramp List. Pick what you’re starting this week, and we’ll check in with you twice: once around day three, once around day six. Just enough to ask if you started. Not to hover.
Go to Resilient-Tomorrow.com
No account, no dashboard. Just what you’re starting and where to reach you. A way to create your own accountability.
Related Reading
7 Steps to Quietly Exit a System That Wants You Dependent — the original off-ramp guide
Your Expertise Is the Asset. — the companion piece
Apollo Build Guide — the home library piece
Convenience Is the Cage — the wealth reframe behind the gift economy
I’m intrigued by the cyberdeck!
oooo i’m also trying to build a cyberdeck at the moment! it’s my first time building something but i’m going for a portable workstation that isn’t harvesting my data.
I feel like this article comes at a good time for me - i’ve been shifting my life around being more solarpunk and community is something i’ve struggled with because of my anxiety. Seeing it broken down into small thoughtful acts makes it all seem a lot less intimidating 💚