#10 - Shannon Hayes | Redefining Rich, Living Sustainably and Unschooling for a Fulfilling Life

Jesper Conrad: 0:11

Yeah, okay, I will start. You always do that. Perfect, Yes, today we're talking with Shannon Hayes, and I wanted to connect to you, Shannon, primarily just because I love the title of your blog The Radical Homemaker. Anything radical, it tickles my brain, So let's start with that. Why did you choose that name?

Shannon Hayes: 0:35

You know, i wish I could say I chose it. I feel like I didn't. It started back when my kids were really little and I was homeschooling them and I was noticing how well I had gotten out of grad school. I had a PhD and I was going on in academia, and when I was looking at the opportunities that were presented to us it seemed that nothing actually financially worked. I started to think that the wool was being pulled over my eyes because once I backed out for the cost of having a job and the taxes and the time away, it just didn't seem like it was financially a realistic proposition. And I had grown up on a family farm and this is in Northern Appalachia and my neighbors had grown up. Really the government would have defined it as poverty, but it was never impoverished feeling at all. And so that was my primary social life as a teenager and that was my economic perspective where I started to think, wait a minute, this having a job thing just doesn't add up if I can be close to my food and close to the way I'm living. And so I chose to step away from academia. I finished my PhD and then I started asking questions Like why does it seem like everyone believes that we should go on this one path, but economically to me, as I'm encountering the adult world, it doesn't seem very sensible or pragmatic. So that led me to start to realize, gaining from the wisdom of my Appalachian elderly neighbors who had grown up in quote unquote poverty, that it was the homemaking skills that would empower me to go forward with this. But I was raised a hardcore feminist. My mother was the second wave feminism and I was raised to pursue a career, and so this looked really strange And I started researching it, thinking I'm gonna write the most hated book ever, but I was really deeply curious. So I wanted to travel and ask these questions and started researching this, and all I can say is that for about two years my brain just spun on this subject nonstop, and it was originally I was thinking the enlightened homemaker, but that sounded so pompous. And then all of a sudden I was out walking one day and the words radical homemaker just came into my brain And I went home. It's like well, that came from somewhere. I don't know where it came from, i don't think it was me, i think it was channeled from something, but I, because I went home and looked up the term radical and realized it's about getting back to roots And that it's not radical in terms of I don't know what we think of as the fringe behaviors that are on social media or whatever, but it was about getting back to the core and questioning what we're being told and returning to not core values per se, but looking at those skills, the core skills that it takes to have a meaningful life, and so that's where it came from.

Jesper Conrad: 4:00

Yeah And wonderful. It reminded me of a blog post Cecilia have written called I used to be a feminist.

Cecilie Conrad: 4:08

Yeah, yeah. Well, i come from another part of the world, the planet, but I was raised in Copenhagen by a feminist mother and she was part of this whole Scandinavian big wave of liberation of women and this whole equal rights thing. And when I became a mother, things just changed And actually my first blog was about this. We had a movement in Copenhagen where the feminists I was used to be part of the feminists Copenhagen academic feminist wave, but then things changed And these feminists they made a quite harsh attack on women who chose to stay home with their children. We have a very good childcare in Copenhagen. It's cheap and it's for everyone and it's not hard to get And you can get rid of your children when they're about I don't know nine months old. Then you don't have to look after them anymore because you are a feminist and you wanna go to work. And those women who chose not to were attacked by the feminists and because they said that women who would stay home, they would make the other women feel bad And that would undermine the equal rights movement for women. And I sat with my child on my lap thinking where's my freedom? What if I want to stay home? The freedom to choose to stay home is gone, then Then as a feminist, i cannot be a homemaker, i cannot be a mother. I have to be a feminist in a particular way and my freedom is lost. So this hate word, which is Danish word, so it wouldn't make sense to you, but there was this word they used for these mothers. I called my blog that word and started writing because it didn't make sense Yeah, I'm optimistic that you know, radical homemakers is now.

Shannon Hayes: 6:19

Well, this is. It'll be its 13th birthday this year. I feel like the discourse has moved beyond that, but I think it was pushing. It was the pushing back from the other side like, wait a minute. You know even Betty Friedan who wrote the Feminine Mystique. Are you familiar with that book? I mean, it was very popular here in the United States and she really was responsible for kicking off what we call second wave feminism in this country. And in her last, her last version of the book, she wrote in the foreword that, people, this is not a battle of the sexes any longer. This is about corporations and the people and we need to move beyond this discussion And I do think, i want to believe I don't I'm no longer really in academia and following that discourse at this point, but I want to believe that we've moved beyond chewing up each other for our different decisions on this. I know I have very good friends who I can't believe how career oriented they are and yet they have fabulous, happy you know happy and healthy kids and they love what I do with my kids And so maybe it's just in my world where I've been able to build that acceptance. I don't know, but I do know that when the book came out I could not get any interest in Europe. 13 years ago I couldn't get them to. I tried so hard I was able to get a little bit of play for the research and the ideas in Ireland, but maybe it's just different, you know, maybe it was just not the right time, because it sounds like maybe the debate is in a different place.

Cecilie Conrad: 8:10

I think that's right I wouldn't be able to say I chose to not follow academia and not I stopped reading newspapers. I thought it was, can I say, ridiculous. No, yeah, absolutely I think so the whole debate on women's lives and children's lives and I think it there was such a loud voice of this whole getting things under control and controlling the children and make sure they behave and make sure they get the good grades and make sure that you as a mother get your own time for, i don't know, the yoga shala, whatever, doing things alone and all these things they just. to me it was all about splitting families And shutting off real emotion and getting things in some systematic, controlled order, which to me doesn't look like life flow. So I just decided I would write my blog, as, at that point at least, we didn't have a lot of it in Europe. I could find something in the States, but it looks the same, but it's not the same Europe. So I thought we need voices over here. So I just wrote my blog and shut off from everything else.

Shannon Hayes: 9:43

to be honest, And did you get a lot of pushback from that blog?

Cecilie Conrad: 9:48

Well, i don't know, because I didn't read it. I did get some, but I just decided to never look at it.

Shannon Hayes: 9:57

Well, I will tell you, when I came out with radical homemakers, it was probably the worst year of my life, i would say. I've written a number of books. I've been writing, my whole life writing and publishing And theoretically that was the most successful one. It was the worst year of my life because it just felt like, if you know every direction, there was someone who was angry, and it didn't matter. It was accused of being overly feminist, of being anti feminist, of pro education, anti education, pro religion, anti religion. So I think I was like I'm not going to leave it to the pro overly government, anti government. Pretty much everything was actually reading the book, or I think I don't know if anyone read the book. To be honest, it sold a lot of copies and then and then I was I started to get the impression that people maybe read the introduction and then they got their ideas, and so I decided well, if that many people hated it and bought it, it had to be a balanced work, right. But but then the other issue that I had with it and I think this ties into your reaction to the programming side of things was I had just as hard of a time with the people who worshiped it, and so I felt like, personally, as a writer, what I wrote was at a point in time and it was researched, based on a point in time and where I was at in my life, and some people would read it and they would get these ideas about me that I could never live up to And just, and the pressure of that of trying to be what people thought you were to be, this vision or this leader or this whatever, and and it really came back to the same thing that I think women in particular have suffered for eons is living up to other people's ideas of what they were supposed to be, and I found that, no matter what, no matter what platform I stood on, no matter what opinion I had, i was always disappointing somebody, and even if they liked my work well then I couldn't live up to whatever they thought of me anyhow, and it was. It was a really difficult, painful year until I learned to delete emails And I eventually learned to just not do social media and I do my blog, and I have my people who subscribed to my newsletter and I communicate with readers directly. But it is interesting, though, how we come up with these ideas, and you are very smart not to follow it To make the book succeed. I stayed with it for a while, but it was pretty painful.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:08

Yeah, well, i had I written a book, i would probably have followed through. I was just writing a blog. It's different. I mean, i was just sharing a perspective that was not shared a lot in my country. It's a very small country, is a very small language. We're only what five, six million people speaking the language and in my language there was hardly anything from this so called other perspective, and some, most lots of Danes prefer to read Danish. We all speak English, but it just feels more like home so I think my voice was needed in our language at that time, but I didn't write a book.

Jesper Conrad: 13:50

No no but, you have met this emotion from other people, i presume, where they took our choice of the way we lived as an attack on their value.

Shannon Hayes: 14:01

That is. That is precisely right. If you are walking your own path And and and, jasper, i think you hit the nail on the head if you're walking your own path, then people interpret that as judgment on theirs, and what's interesting about that is, i think I honestly I've seen people do great things on all different kinds of paths and at 48 years old, i just have no energy to judge. I have lots of energy to be opinionated. I don't really have the energy to judge, but that's usually an indication, though what I started to learn a couple things. I started to learn that that need those people who felt attacked were suffering because they actually weren't at peace with their own decisions, and and there's nothing that I could do about that. I've been in the office for a few years to make a change, but I do think that there's a price. If you walk your path, then you are assaulting others just by your choice to not embrace what is considered a universal truth.

Jesper Conrad: 15:28

Like, for example, the need for money or how money should be needed. We see it as your homemaker, we see it when we travel. A big difference in in how people have a small produce in their backyard. There are some countries in Denmark all is grass and flowers and very neat, and then we were worried in, except when it's rain and mud. But then we have seen in Portugal and in here here we're in south, yeah, where the where the front yard is just like produce, produce, produce, and it comes from poverty, but then not.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:13

It comes from reality.

Jesper Conrad: 16:14

It comes from reality where you produce your own food and just have continued to do it and I can be afraid that it's will it be lost some sometimes. I know there's a movement moving it forward but I can't be afraid with everybody think they need to go to college, university and stuff that they don't know how to grow a carrot. They may be never seen a carrot, you know.

Shannon Hayes: 16:42

I think from from my where I sit in the United States, i think, oh, you guys, you have it together. We don't. Because? because I feel like, well, in Europe people have known hunger And in this country there's been such abundance that people haven't wrapped their heads around that yet, and so it's just so easy to take the agricultural land and to take the, the vocation of farmer and disparage it and not pursue it, because people haven't recognized the necessity. And so I've taken periods of time where we've lived in Europe with our kids as part of our own homeschooling adventure, and I was dazzled by the amount of little. We lived in this little rural French village where all the houses were close together So they didn't really have yards per se, maybe just a little patio space outside for for some chairs, and that was it They all had along the river in an area that would have flooded. They all had their own plots for gardens that they were entitled to. That came with the deed of their property And I was just enamored with that, like what a smart thing to do. You know, we we probably would have slapped houses right up to that river so when it flooded, and we wouldn't have seen the food value of. You know, when it's a garden, you can go under the ground and you can restore that. And so I always felt my perspective, looking at Europe, was that you were ahead of us. But then when I saw how the idea of radical homemakers was not embraced, i remember being brought over to Ireland, actually, and talking with this Irish guy who he was just a guard in a museum, talking to him about what I did, and he goes ah, why would anyone do that? we're only just moving away from that hardship. Why would anyone want to do that? And and then I wondered well, i just wonder, maybe the chronology is just so out of sync between the two, so you still have your food traditions, but you haven't embraced this idea that I've been able to do, i think, a little bit easier here, which is turn around and say, yeah, i'm not doing a job, i'm going to, i'm going to raise my kids and work with the land.

Cecilie Conrad: 19:12

But I think in a way. I don't know obviously everything about the United States I've never been and obviously there will be a lot of things I get wrong but here's what I think, at least in the Europe I know, which is mostly Western Europe I know that more than Eastern Europe not that we've never been, but we haven't been as much in Eastern Europe There is still a tradition of growing food and there is a tradition not as radical as yours, but people have these little plots. It's not true. It's all nice gardens with tulips, because it's nice gardens with tulips and a greenhouse. That's right, it is. And we have these what would be the English word for a finger Like little plots where you go for the weekend. So you have this very, very small house, which is nowadays called the tiny house, but before it was just like a small place where you could stay for the weekend if you need it, because you work the land. Because of the poverty and famine everybody had lived through in the beginning of last century, it was just so normal that if you live in the city, you live in an apartment, you have a little plot somewhere outside of the city, you go for the weekend and work the land And this is very modern now, lots of modern city people. They have this little thing. They can go out. It's less than an hour's journey, very often much less. You can go for the weekend and then maybe you use it recreational. You don't really grow anything except one tomato plant, but some people actually do now. They do, and they don't grow everything, but at least they get their hands dirty. And I think this tradition we see it in France, we see it in Portugal, there's a lot of it in Spain. We're now in Sicily. There are lots of plants here, lots of little garden productions and people swapping. I think they don't produce everything for themselves, but someone has a lot of oranges and another one's growing tomatoes and then you share with your neighbors.

Shannon Hayes: 21:37

That's actually one of the keys to survival that I learned When I was doing the research. I started noticing there were homemakers and homesteaders, and a lot of times the homesteading idea was about self-sufficiency. And I'm going to grow it all myself, i'm going to make it all myself, i'm going to do it all myself, and the thing that I started observing. So, with every family that I interviewed, i spent a lot of hours with them, getting to know them, and part of the journey of the book there was was uncovering what I could write about. But then there was the stuff that I didn't write about because what I saw was so painful. I didn't want to violate the trust in those people. So these parts of the stories did not make it into the book in the same way, but they helped me, like a negative space in a picture helps you to see the picture. They helped me to see the picture, and what I started to observe is that when they were fixated on self-sufficiency, that they were going to be completely an island unto themselves and providing for all their needs, and then they were also prone to what I would call housewife syndrome. This is what Betty Friedan wrote about in the Feminine Mystique that really kicked off the second wave of feminism, where they said, you know, women who stayed home became, you know, they developed this sort of mania where they would get depressed, they'd have anxiety, they couldn't think about things beyond you know little mundane details, or fixating on their houses or obsessing over their kids, and she dubbed it housewife syndrome. And I started to feel like I was observing that same phenomenon in these people who were all about self-sufficiency, and something that you touched on earlier was actually what I saw as a sign of success was a little bit of mess. There was a lot of chaos. That, when I started to observe the people who didn't have it all organized, who had a little bit of a mess going on in the backyard because they had a lot of happy chaos around them, but also that was a sign too that you typically see that they were engaging more in the community as a whole and they weren't trying to do everything. They weren't trying to be self-sufficient and attain perfection. They were increasing their self-reliance and then relying on the broader community for meeting the rest of the needs. And that was really critical for me and my own learning journey, because, you know, my family has all this acreage and we grow all this food. And it was really hard for me grappling with the perfectionism whether I was going to be perfect, no matter what. Whether it was a career woman, i was going to achieve perfection, or as a homemaker, i was going to achieve perfection. Whatever. There was always the pressure right to be perfect. And I seeing these families where I started to see, oh wait, a minute, when you have it all together it kind of comes unraveled in little secret places. It just oozes out in different places And I started recognizing okay, it's going to be okay for me to come into my family, my family's livelihood, and not do everything. You know I will do what I can. I will. you know I will excel in the areas where I'm particularly good. We realized, my husband and I, that we are just terrible gardeners, absolutely terrible gardeners. But since we wrote the book, i was a great cook I, and then I learned, i got very streamlined with my canning and you know you can put me in any house. my daughter, she's working in New York City right now and she called me because she's she's staying with some friends and she opened up their fridge and she's like, oh, i can find cinnamon and I can find coffee and and leftover chicken. what can I make for dinner? you know, and I'm very good at that, being resourceful and my but my space is in the kitchen. that is where I really care And that's where I can solve problems and and deal with things. So I started to learn, okay, i don't have to be everything, and that has contributed to my happiness. but you know, a couple miles down the road is another farm that I work with, who? they just grow fabulous produce. they really do a great job, and on our farm we do an excellent job growing really delicious meat, and there's just a lot of economic circulation that is happening between all of us. that then creates a life.

Jesper Conrad: 26:17

And it's still not illegal to share.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:20

No, depending, depending Where we come from, some things you can't actually just share.

Jesper Conrad: 26:27

Yeah, what are you thinking?

Cecilie Conrad: 26:29

Well, some skills.

Jesper Conrad: 26:31

Oh yeah, yeah, it would be if I come and work.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:33

You can't be like that trained electrician and fix the electricity in your mother's house without giving her a bill and pay tax from the income.

Jesper Conrad: 26:43

And then you do that.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:47

It's not important. It's actually not interesting. What is interesting I'm sorry, no, i don't want to go there with the whole state thing. What is interesting is so you are the radical homemaker and we are the world's traveling. You know, unschooling family and I think it's it's a very important thing to underline. When you have these radical ideas and you do these more or less, i find you extreme and I don't find myself extreme, but I think a lot of people look at people like us and think we are very extreme. So when we do these quote unquote extreme things, it's important that we acknowledge that. You know, i do me and you do you And maybe we we can share our experiences and knowledge and we don't all have to do the same thing. We need a lot of different voices in the choir and We've been talking about doing something like what you do get a place and make a home and not be self-sufficient, but like produce our own food or some of it, or. But we realized we're just not. You would have to tie us to a tree. I mean, we can't sit still, so growing things. You would have to come back and water the plants, like every day, and we just have to go. So, yeah, i'm happy you do it, because I think somebody has to do it, but we have to do it in another way.

Jesper Conrad: 28:29

I have a question, shannon how many books are you up on now? Is it seven?

Cecilie Conrad: 28:36

I don't know.

Jesper Conrad: 28:37

No, okay, they're like naughty children, you know. It's not about the amount, but it's where the nerdiness comes from. to produce a book, it sounds like, when you talk about it, that there is this subject that you want to get to know, and then it ends up in the book. Look, has it always been like that, or how did it happen?

Shannon Hayes: 29:02

Yeah, so writing for me is a cycle of curiosity. This is how I learn. When I have to understand it enough that I can explain it to someone else using the written language, then that's how I actually learn, And so writing is how I make sense. I'm sitting here. it's a beautiful winter day. I don't know if you can see how white and glare it is outside my windows, It's also and my life looks very peaceful. But in order for me to make this life work, it's three generations, three generations who work together, and then we're in a small community that we've all known each other for decades, and so none of that comes without dysfunction and conflict, and we're in a livelihood that is difficult. The expenses always outweigh the income on a farm, and so the writing for me has been a way to understand it, to make sense of it. It's a way for me to spiritually organize my thoughts and communicate with powers that are beyond myself, but also so, yeah. So that's how books happen. I get obsessed with an idea And then I carry that with me and it gets organized into a book because I just I have to, and I've been quite fortunate in my career. I'm supported Most of my books are self-published, actually and I'm supported through patrons on my Patreon account who value the work, because the ideas that I talk about they're not going to make a bestseller list, and I've already told you I don't do social media, so I'm not going to become an influencer and sell a million books by having a great TikTok.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:14

No, but you are an influencer, just not in the social media style. They can't eat the word. You don't get to do that.

Shannon Hayes: 31:27

But yeah, but writing has been a way for me to just keep my mind going and it brings me back to a place of peace, because otherwise I'd probably be pretty neurotic.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:43

So what's next? What are you working on? What's puzzling you at the moment?

Shannon Hayes: 31:48

I'm working on two projects right now. Actually, one project is I've been working on a novel for 10 years, probably more than that now, but I stopped counting at 10. I enjoy that process of just accepting perpetual imperfection and going back in and working on it. So I run a family. My family has a cafe that we run. I don't know if you know the story of that, but in the wintertime we shut it down and I take the winter off And for the month of January it's all bookkeeping for the farm business. That's just the nuts and bolts of it. And then for February and March I'll work on that book. But there's another project that I am working on that I have not even talked about publicly, which is spending while the cafe is closed. So it's all. The cafe, by the way, only runs one day a week. We only open on Saturdays. We decided that I don't want to work more than that and it lets everybody, because we really use it as a community space. Then everybody knows they're going to see someone. They know if it's only one day that we're open. But right now Saturdays were closed And so I use that time to sit down with my mother and father, who have been on this land since 1979. And my father's been raising sheep since he was three. And because, as I told you before, we don't all do everything, i have different strengths. On the farm, i'm the person who's sort of at the front of the business. I do the bookkeeping, i do the marketing, i run the cafe, my dad runs the livestock And we have all managed to get along as three generations by letting everybody have their own expertise area, and so when we get mad we all retreat to our own corners of expertise and stay out of the other person's way. But that does create a problem, because I don't think like him And I never will. But I need to understand how we rotate the pastures. I need to understand when we're bringing sheep down and running them through the chute and we do a health check, what are the different ways. So I've just decided. Like you, we went through a cancer event in our family this year with my husband And I did came to two conclusions. One I was going back to playing a baritone saxophone in a jazz band because I cared about that. And then the other one is I want to make my father tell me everything, and so that project is every weekend I go there and I sit down and we talk, and I can only take it for about an hour because it's so intense. He has so much to tell me And so yeah, so I do the interview And then I bring it back and Bob transcribes it so that the information is traveling through everybody, and then I will take that and put that into a book. I don't think I'll put it out for public consumption, you know, but it's sort of a book for the kids on how we run the farm and how we make our decisions and organizing. So I have had the great joy as a writer to be able to choose the projects that matter to me and not the projects that are going to sell. But this one, this one really matters. It's a very important one.

Jesper Conrad: 35:20

It's a beautiful one.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:21

Yeah, I wish I'd done it. I thought about it with both my mother and grandmother birthday.

Shannon Hayes: 35:28

They both went too early.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do that.

Shannon Hayes: 35:33

Yeah, darn parents. Yeah, well, I am thoroughly enjoying myself, but my brain, my brain is ready to explode afterwards because I'm asking my brain to work in a way that I Haven't. My father and I are very, very different, because he has spent his whole life raising livestock and I spent my whole life recognizing the importance of that. But I work on a clock. I Say, okay, if I'm gonna get a book done, then I get up at three in the morning. I have this time for writing books. I had this time for cooking. I have this time for running the cafe. I have this time for doing the farm bookkeeping. I have this time for schooling my children. I have all this and I work everything that way. And my father, he drives me crazy. He goes out every day and he'll stand there and look at the sheet, yeah, and he will stand there and he will decide if one's limping or if one has a strange gate Or if if the room in on one is sunken in a little bit, and he'll say, okay, well, we have to change the feeding rations. Are we got to go catch that one? I don't have time to go catch that one. I'm sitting there and look at the sheep. I'm, you know, i've got my own little little hyperactive life that I'm living and and It's fascinating and and I want to pretend that he's calmly looking at the sheep. But the worst part of it is he's not quietly looking at his sheep. He's not a shepherd contemplating his flock. He's a shepherd who's spinning. His wheels are spinning the whole time while he's figuring out you know how much percent protein is in their feed ration if they're getting the grass at this time, and and You know what percent of total digestible nutrition are they getting and and what parasites might be coming in. And how is that Interacting with what the pastors are doing? and he's it's like, it's like you know, trying to get inside the mind of a genius while he's just sitting there quietly looking at his sheep. So it's, it's a challenge, it's a real challenge.

Cecilie Conrad: 37:29

Yeah, well, there's thing one though.

Jesper Conrad: 37:36

Your last book redefining rich. What? what made you write that one then?

Shannon Hayes: 37:44

What made me write that one was in in 2000. Between 2015 and 2016, we were recognizing that we had to go through a farm transition, that my parents either had to sell and retire or I really had to officially step in, and we were trying to figure out how to expand the farm to get some extra labor. And The price of farmland was going up so high and our income as farmers couldn't sustain it. We couldn't keep buying. So in our community was this little broken down Building. It was a white elephant. Do you know what it means when I say white elephant? It was an an awkward building that no one wanted to buy. It had used, used to how I was our firehouse. It still had the post office. It had a couple of apartment buildings in it and They had tried to close our post office. The government had tried to shut down our post office And we had fought and led the charge to keep it. But now the building was for sale. We didn't want to lose it and when we couldn't afford farmland, bob and I realized that we could buy this white elephant building for much less And we built a farm transition plan by moving the farm center of Commerce into the hamlet of the community, to create more community engagement, and so we started this enterprise. And then my mom underwent major heart surgery and my parents really needed me to then step in and take over. So we had this building, we started this cafe. I had to step in and take over and I had to figure out how to make a business work and what I was doing. As the. You know, i have a dog that looks just like that, i have to tell you, and I want to go get her and put her in front of it, but I had to.

Cecilie Conrad: 39:31

We can't really tell her to go away because she's so young She doesn't really get it.

Shannon Hayes: 39:35

You know these homeschooled kids, they just they have their way with you. But anyhow, we had to figure out how to make it work, and I had to do it without, at that time, what you're taught about when you go into farming, or when you become a farmer and you go into farming, or when you become an entrepreneur and at that point I had become both a farmer and I was running a cafe, a small business in the community. We're told that The honorable way is one of hard work, like so hard that you will drop dead working in both ways. And as I came into my own and I was the one writing the checks and deciding the business decisions, i realized that, just like the pressure on me coming out of grad school was to have a career, now the pressure on me was to work myself to death. And I didn't want to do that. And but, but. Not only did I not want to do that, but first I had to come to terms and acknowledge that, because I realized there was shame tied to my unwillingness to work myself to death. And so, and so one I had to get over the shame to. I had to then figure out how to make the economics work. How do you run a cafe that's open only one day a week? How do you do that? And so redefining rich became how I worked through my journey again on how do you make the finances work if you, if you, really don't want to have a full time job and I really just wanted to devote my life, one to enjoying it and two to bringing the fullest expression of myself to make a better world. And and that doesn't always happen You don't always get a paycheck for that. So redefining rich was well. I had worked out some strategies along the way on how to do this and how to make it so that I could still take my winters off and go sit in the woods to drink my coffee and have time for cocktails in the end of the day And travel if I want to travel. And so that book helped me to really gel those ideas and explain them by again by having to explain. I had to make certain of them myself.

Jesper Conrad: 41:58

Absolutely. It's fun what you say about the shame. I last year around this 10 days ago last year, i said goodbye to a fancy job in the CEO for an NGO and I thought it was the dream job for me. But I was so stressed out and I wasn't happy and I remember standing in the shower crying and I was like I don't want to do this anymore. And the fun thing is I've been the one, while Cecilia stayed at home, that I've taken in. I've been the breadwinner of the family when she stayed home with the kids And for me this last year at least you've been the money winner, money winner. Money winner Yeah yeah, yeah. The money. It's not what I agree, but let me. there's two different points. My points Yeah, yeah.

Shannon Hayes: 42:49

Absolutely.

Jesper Conrad: 42:53

My point is this last year have been a wild personal right for me, because I've been in an office for 22 years. The last five years we traveled, i've been working and it's first this last year I've kind of released the idea of you need to sit in front of the computer eight hours a day to be someone. And that's the crazy feeling for me is that I had like a loss of personality. Maybe I didn't lose my personality, but the identity I have built up about my self identity took a blow and I needed to work through that And it just shows me that we are driven to believe this path is the right path for so many of us And I'm very happy to be where we are today and I'm just thinking so many people out there first get to ask themselves who they are when they are going on pension, maybe you know and then becoming a pensionist.

Shannon Hayes: 44:02

And you know, yeah, that's a, it's a. That's a gripping issue. If you are taking this path, you don't get to walk into the room and be the CEO. You don't get to walk in the room and be the famous. You don't get to walk in the room and have any labels other than your name. If you choose to accept that And that's a, i understand that struggle. I think I've. I have been up against it, so I walked away so young I was 22 when I when I walked and so I've gotten very comfortable not having anything tied to who I am. But, unlike you, i am known by my mother. I am known by my father, by my husband, by my children, by my neighbors. So I think in some ways that gives me more security than you might have, because even though I don't have a title, i am a collection of my relationships. I am an amalgam. There is always someone who knows me by this way. So, as I move through my life and my community, i'm Shannon of Zappwush Hollow, of Jim and Adele's daughter, you know Bob's wife, sarah, and Ola's mother, because I'm in this place where people have lived for generations, and sometimes I think that makes my journey easier, because I still somehow have an identity And maybe it's its own challenge, because you could also sit here and argue with me if we had enough to drink, where you could say yes, but do you even know who you are? or are you who your family has decided for you? But yeah, in many ways I recognize all the time how the comfort I have. When I walked away from any kind of career thing, people still knew who I was. People still knew my name.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:14

And, to be honest, probably we are who we are in relation to those who matter Could be if we believe in a God. We are who we are in relation to our God and we are who we are in relation to our loved ones, those who are close to us and those who really see us. For you, it's at least part of it is your community, people just around you, who's always been, i think, for us, one thing that we experience, if we're not I'm not going to talk about the spiritual element right now So people on this planet, human beings we unfold, i think, our identity and feel that we can feel who we are when we meet people Could be people we already know, as we're nomads. So we move around, which means our local group of friends change all the time, but we also come back to places and then we are re-seen by the same people, like a year later or three months later or whatever, and I think, a personality. Very often maybe it is something in and of itself, but it unfolds in these relations. And people who work a career I walked away from one as well many years ago, but you did only a year ago They have this picture of themselves seen by the colleagues.

Jesper Conrad: 47:51

Absolutely.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:52

And now you have to unplug that whole idea because you're not working a career anymore. But then you have to be who you are with me.

Jesper Conrad: 48:00

Absolutely, and I just learned to knit.

Shannon Hayes: 48:05

Well, good for you.

Jesper Conrad: 48:07

Yeah, good for you Redefining.

Cecilie Conrad: 48:09

You're making fun of it.

Jesper Conrad: 48:12

No, I'm not making that. It's okay. Bob has tried to knit several times, actually, early on.

Shannon Hayes: 48:19

I bought him knitting needles for Christmas one year and a book on how to knit, because I never thought that I myself could do something like that. And he just was all a tangle of string. It was just this wicked time. We were living in this rural village in France and he was just totally nodded up all over the place And I sat down and I said let me see if I can help you. And I picked up the book and I put in front. I got this string all off of him and wound it up into a ball And I didn't go to bed that night. I was the one who became a knitter. It's a great thing to do especially now that you are knitting.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:03

We're five knitters, six, six counting the one in Copenhagen. We're all knit and crochet. Yeah, it's very nerdy. We're having fun with it. Now I have a husband to knit.

Shannon Hayes: 49:16

My daughters living where we are as rural as we are, they do fashion design. Yeah, why not? And it's unbelievable what they do. My 15 year old she had a boyfriend this fall who he went he goes to public school and he asked her if she wanted to go to the homecoming dance with him And she said okay, and but he asked her two weeks before the dance And she says, well, i have to decide what to wear, which meant she had to decide how to design a gown and she couldn't just wear something off the rack. And so this girl and it's very funny that they have their dress forms upstairs and they can't, they don't buy fabric. They go to the thrift stores and she found some old curtains and she, you know, she just pieced it together and she looks at the fabric and decides how the fabric wants to behave and she works with it and makes a design and executes a dress. And they're both do this all the time. Me, i get, i wear the same thing every single day until it smells so bad that I could care less about my clothes. But they're really into this. And then we have this family cafe where they work the front And they always have these crazy outfits every Saturday. They come in some days. My daughter, she's 19, she'll come in with a steampunk Renaissance gown on, and my younger daughter, she, you know, makes these dresses sometimes the night before. She knows these different dresses and she roller skates to wait on the tables. But they all have their own expression. we're talking about identity, and who are we And they? they just live their lives. You know it does not, but they have no rules about how they're supposed to live. They've decided that if we have this cafe in the middle of nowhere, this is their opportunity to enjoy their fashion and they dress and they plan all week how they're going to do it And you never know what you're going to meet. You could meet a punk rocker one day. You couldn't meet a princess one day, or a fairy another day, and they We have another good reason to go to the.

Cecilie Conrad: 51:28

States now.

Jesper Conrad: 51:30

Find a way.

Shannon Hayes: 51:32

I have enjoyed sewing. For me, i discovered in my home making journey that I tried a lot of things. I tried spinning, knitting, dying, wool, sewing All different skills. The only reason I actually tried sewing was because I was looking at my daughters my oldest was to and I just used to see the way she would look at pictures and just really study what they were wearing, and I am so not a fashion person. I had a gut feeling and I had $200 from my grandfather and I found a sewing machine that was a really good sewing machine on sale and I bought it for myself, for her at the age of two and learn just enough as she grew to teach her, and then gave her that machine. Happily, i learned through everything that for me, i'm just a knitter. I don't like doing the other things, i get tired of it, and for them they learned everything and they just love their sewing machines. They love their dress forms and to do the design work And I love that. The life that we've chosen has empowered them to have these joys. I feel like so very often we spend, we invest our education in training people to work, but we don't train our, our young to celebrate and enjoy their lives and to tap into passions that are meaningful to them, not because they're going to make them money or because they're going to make them famous or because it's going to, you know, give them a job. They need to tap into the things that make them whole and happy And I feel like this path has enabled that for my kids. I feel like as much as you know, when I see these other kids and I see a lot of the the children their age they're not children anymore the young adults. They have suffered so much from this pandemic, from the pain that has come from whatever they were living through, but I also see that they've suffered. Part of the reason they've suffered is because they don't know what to do to make themselves happy.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:49

Exactly exactly That's what we talk about when, when we discuss our whole homeschooling, which is on schooling journey, that I would almost say we don't care what they learn. They, you know, i don't care as long as they well, i'm sure, because they live this way, they do an hours in this radical moving around. We've lived, i don't know, maybe 20 places last year. The context is ever changing and they have to get up every morning and make themselves a meaningful and happy day for themselves and whoever is around, wherever we are, and they will learn to take that responsibility on themselves to make sure that life makes sense and that we give what we have to give and we take what we need to thrive or at least to go smiling through the day. And that I can't speak English right now.

Jesper Conrad: 54:55

That's okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 54:57

It's not my language. I'm sorry. And I appreciate that you're doing it, because I am definitely not speaking yours- Ability, that ability, the ability to make these decisions for yourself and evaluate them, to handle it. If you go to bed and you're actually not happy, you can't do that, you can't learn that if someone else is deciding all the time, and I think that's the great disadvantage And I think that's where they got. So hurt the young adults. We have children more or less. They may choose as yours, some of ours, in that range Yeah. Yeah, i can't speak English. As I said, they are hurt so bad, but basically from living the lives that our children live all the time. So what's the problem? The problem is that they don't know how to handle making their own decisions, or maybe they were not. I don't know how it was handled in the States, but at least here lots of kids were on their own, or young adults were on their own, but someone else was still deciding what they were supposed to do, what they should have done, but they had to sit and do it by themselves in front of a computer, no one to talk to, no one to tell them you know, you're okay, and they were hurt.

Shannon Hayes: 56:27

And a big other issue, but I think the pain, too, also comes from this. Going back to Jasper's comment about identity, i think they have been told what is success, it has been defined for them, and a lot of that has been stripped away. Now, yeah, i'm actually optimistic, though. My daughters. I can't believe how I've actually asked them to stop bringing their boyfriends home, because it breaks my heart every time they break up with one of them, because these kids are so wonderful. They are so wounded in so many ways, but you can see such deep, beautiful people within them that I think what they have suffered in these last couple of years, just as the Great Depression in the United States shaped my grandparents' generation, this is going to shape them, and I think they might really be the generation that recognizes how am I going to be whole and happy? because they are struggling with it in their 20s and in their teens, and I am hopeful. My daughters say, however, that they are just very, very good at jurying who comes through and who they decide to be friends with And that's just a matter of their good taste. But they make me hopeful for the future because I think a lot of these kids, because of this struggle, I think they're going to ask important things of this world.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:08

So I believe in them.

Jesper Conrad: 58:11

The serpent has been scratched So they can see there is a place for them to look further. As you live on a farm, there is a job to do for you for the rest of the day there. So I think we should kind of round up now. What could be wonderful is if people would want to know more about you, if you can tell where should they go, where should they look, and if they're around, where should they go on Saturday?

Shannon Hayes: 58:39

Okay, so the first thing is, since you probably have an international audience, they can find me online at theradicalhomemakernet theradicalhomemakernet, and if you go there, we talked about redefining rich and those financial principles that I figured out that would align with our values. They can actually download a free workbook if they want to explore some of these ideas, and that's at theradicalhomemakernet. If you are stateside and you happen to be near upstate New York, it's just a couple of hours train from New York City. So we are in the Northern Cascale Mountains and it's called Sap Bush Cafe and we are open every Saturday from April until just about the end of November, from 9am until 2pm. But in addition to that, we also actually our store that we have, our farm store is open and unlocked. We have what's called an honor store that we put in the community And so even if we're not open, you can still visit. People go in all the time and they just write up their receipts, they buy what they want from the farm and they go on. But it was a way that we figured out that the community you build, you create trust by being trusting and it lets people get what they need at any time, even if we're not open all the time.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:00:03

Perfect, perfect. We should find it on a like Google map thing and put in the show notes.

Jesper Conrad: 1:00:08

Well, xiamen, it was really really wonderful talking with you It was.

Shannon Hayes: 1:00:12

Thank you so much, Jasper and Celia. I had a really good time. Good luck on your journeys, thank you.

Jesper Conrad: 1:00:19

Thank you.

Shannon Hayes: 1:00:20

And likewise, yeah, you let me know if you ever come across.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:00:24

You will know And you tell me where in rural France did you live? Just as a final note, i'm serious.

Shannon Hayes: 1:00:30

I was in a very tiny village between Tour and Poitiers called Saint-Pierre-de-Mille, okay, and so it's just outside the Loire Valley, like maybe an hour from the Loire Valley.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:00:43

I get the area, i know where Tour is at least Okay. Okay, if we ever get to the States we'll come visit. Yes, we have to wait for the vaccine thing to lift.

Jesper Conrad: 1:00:54

It will come.

Shannon Hayes: 1:00:55

But Oh, we still have that requirement.

Jesper Conrad: 1:00:58

We can't get it. We can't get in Time will pass.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:01:02

But at some point we can.

Jesper Conrad: 1:01:03

Yeah, but Shannon, wonderful talking to you. Thank you for your time.

Shannon Hayes: 1:01:10

Bye.

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