What Is ‘Our Life in Flannel’ About?
What is Important to Us?
It’s been difficult to figure out what exactly our blog ‘Our Life in Flannel’ is. Sometimes, it’s easier to define something by what it’s not, rather than what it is. It isn’t cut and dry.
It isn’t a blog about minimalism, financial independence (FI), or gardening. We aren’t just writing about living in Vermont, farming, or even homesteading. We find it hard to focus on any one topic, or choose a ‘niche’, because we want to talk about all those things and more.
All of those topics, from minimalism to homesteading, are key elements of our life, and we want to talk about them. But we also want to provide a more meaningful purpose than just sharing a personal blog serving as an online journal, or regurgitating the same information that you can find on the web with a quick google search.
We’ve concluded that Our Life in Flannel needs to be about something much bigger than all of those things. We put careful thought into every single decision we make, and have spent the last 10 years of our lives crafting a life and lifestyle that we love. We want to share the ideas, benefits and beliefs that have helped us make those decisions and lead such an amazing life
Intentional Living
If you had to sum up everything we desire to share in one category, the best name for it would probably be intentional living.
We are millennials, and being a part of this generation has shaped our outlook on life. We know nothing is guaranteed, and aren’t willing to wait for our happiness. We’re choosing to take life by the horns and make it into what we want it to be.
We’ve adopted many aspects of the various social influences and movements around us, like minimalism. But unlike the stark apartment photos you see on instagram, our house doesn’t look very minimalistic.
Part of this is because we chose to become landowners, who do much of the work involved with owning the land themselves. This requires many tools and supplies, often cluttering up the space with ongoing home improvement projects. We’ve taken the aspects of minimalism that work for us, and learned when we need to be maximalists.
We try to be intentional with every choice we make, whether it’s as small as the snack we’re buying or as big as our investments. Each decision made can have a profound impact on our lives and our future, sometimes in ways you would never be able to anticipate.
Self Improvement
We’re constantly trying to improve ourselves in everything we do. Every day is a chance to do better than the day before, even if it’s something as small as drinking more water. It’s mind-boggling to us how people won’t take responsibility for their life and just expect their dreams to come true.
We’ve been incredibly privileged, and this has allowed us to do what we’ve done. But there are many other very privileged people out there who fail to see just how good they have it. That the only thing standing between them and their dreams is some hard work and discomfort.
If we want something, we figure out a way to do it. And if our goals change, we’re not afraid to let things go. With each failed idea, class completed, and book read, we learn new things and become (hopefully) more successful, well-rounded people who are better prepared for the next thing.
Our Values
Above all else, we try to stick to our values. We love personal finance and business but hate get-rich-quick schemes or anything that makes money at the expense of people or the planet. You won’t see us participating in a pyramid scheme any time soon.
That’s one of our problems with many of the other blogs and websites out there- they’re all or nothing. People turn into fanatics with one-track minds. And we get it, extreme ideas and clear-cut, black and white concepts make for great blog posts. But that’s not how life works.
If you’re into the rapid race to Financial Independence, it’s often at the expense of your health, work-life balance, or the planet. You’re not really a minimalist unless you purge your entire house, embrace an all-white aesthetic, and wear the same black t-shirt 365 days a year. And homesteaders? You must completely remove yourself from the grid, dress like a pioneer and grind your own flour.
Now, if you want to go all-out on something like this, great! More power to you. But usually, that means compromising on something else that is also important to you. And we don’t want to compromise if we can help it.
Life Is About Balance
No matter how hard we search we haven't found another blogger who talks about how no one system/blogger/idea will save you. Maybe because it’s not profitable to send people away from your platform. Maybe because people aren’t interested.
But it seems important to us to share this sort of ‘next level’ of thinking. For when, like us, you’ve researched all you can about minimalism, financial independence, homesteading, simplifying, and want more.
When you’ve realized that on their own, many of these concepts can start to get sort of convoluted and silly if taken too far.
Many of the homestead blogs quickly swing into radical self-sufficiency, which does not work for the general culture and takes far more resources (in time, effort, and money) than we desire. Working together gets us a lot farther than everyone trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.
Minimalism blogs tend to keep the listicles coming, recycling the same “Top 9 Best Ways to Declutter”. These blogs share ideas that can be very useful, but encourage constant consumption of resources and are often tailored towards middle or upper-class people living in urban areas that can manage this sort of lifestyle, where goods are easily replaceable.
A stock image, like many blogs use. There’s nothing wrong with them, but just like listicles, they can be kind of boring and overdone. Your blog ends up looking just like everyone else’s. Is that good or bad?
Even many of the FI blogs have become nothing more than recycled content. With a focus on world travel, or dumbed down to entry-level topics of personal finance, touting the no brainer financial mistakes leaders like Dave Ramsey teaches you to avoid. This advice is great, and helps lots of people. But if you never move beyond these basic money skills, it can hinder you in the long run. We need more depth than “credit cards are bad”. They aren’t always bad. There is a ton of generic advice out there drowning out the good new content.
So What Does This All Mean?
There are many things that are important to us; we could write a book, but we tried to highlight some of the themes that we live our lives by. When we think about the things we do on a daily basis, like gardening, and burning wood, and think about why we do them, they boil down into a few key concepts.
We do these things because we enjoy them and because we feel they’re the right thing to do. They’re intentional choices we make. We care about the environment and we care about the impact we are having on others in our community and around the world. We try to be ethical and morally upstanding citizens and lifelong learners.
We want to be who we are. We can’t be something we’re not just to build a brand or grow a business. We think )we hope) the world is beginning to see through the fake veneer of social media and is once again trying to find its way back to what is real, what is right and what is authentic.
