This site is a collaborative effort to present everyday skills in an accessible way that means anyone can master them. These are skills that most of us used to know, practical abilities that kept us safe, warm, and fed from one year to the next. Yet, today, many of us would have no idea where to start if left to our own devices. In fact, it takes just two generations for skills, languages, traditions, and knowledge to be lost. The more we rely on others for our daily needs, the more is lost in this short timeframe.
But there is hope! We can bring these skills and knowledge back into the everyday. Reclaim them. Share them. Expand them. Building our skills back one at a time.
Different people contribute to our articles, which are then written by our editor, Scarlet Bierman. She brings decades of experience in digital and print publishing to this role, combined with her direct practical experience across many of the topics we cover.
A note from the editor
Autonomy through practical skills means resilience. We can all develop the capacity to meet our basic needs without complete dependence on global supply chains, specialists, or functioning systems. Skills give you options in times of upheaval (whether through economic disruption, infrastructure failure, or personal crisis). Knowledge costs nothing to maintain but becomes more and more valuable as our external stability decreases.
Beyond pragmatic resilience, there is joy in competence. Understanding the processes that sustain you rather than existing as a passive consumer entirely reliant on others gives you a deep sense of satisfaction and harmony. Autonomy is not about paranoid self-sufficiency or rejecting modern systems; it’s about maintaining enough capability that you’re not helpless. It’s about agency over fundamental needs.
Basic skills like repairing a garment, growing food, fitting a door, or applying first aid make you a more rooted human, capable of weathering change. It doesn’t detach you from the social and cultural systems we live in but allows you to participate more fully and more deeply. Interdependence, rather than outsourcing, is how humans first flourished, but it has been replaced by opaque one-way reliance. Where we are sold connection, it’s really extraction by another name. True connection isn’t purchased.
Learning basic autonomous skills is empowering and connecting. We all have the right to learn these skills, to use them to help, to share them with others! – Scarlet
