Interview Questions for Blog-Hosted Conversations

But then I thought: What if the people who have some of the best ideas, those who will be best equipped to cope with these crises, are uninterested in predicting how they will unfold? I have argued for the importance of resilience and ability to Let-Self-Change, so perhaps what we are doing to prepare for future eventualities, to educate and enable those we love, or just to make the world a little better right now, is more important than the predicted context in which these abilities will be applied. Perhaps it might be better to avoid the prognostications and lead off the interview with questions like this:

1. What do you think are the most important skills and capabilities that we, and future generations in this century will need in order to cope with whatever the future may hold?
2. How do you see yourself acquiring these skills and capabilities, imparting them to loved ones and being a role model for our children and grandchildren? Do you envision needing to change where you live, how you live, or how you make a living to do so? How so?
3. Given that our current political, economic and educational systems seem to be part of the problem, do you envision working to reform them, or rather disengaging from them to create a society that is more community-based and self-sufficient? Or do we have to do both? How do you think we should do either or both?
4. What’s the most important life lesson you’ve learned so far?
5. What’s the first, next step you think you need to take to pave the way for this, to make the world a little better? What’s holding you back, if anything?

These are tough questions. I wouldn’t want anyone to spring these questions on me in an interview, without having the time to consider my answers. So it’s only fair that I ‘interview myself’ first. Here are my answers:

1. I think the critical life skills people will need in the future will be much the same as the ones they needed in the past. They’ll need a broad understanding of how the world works. They’ll need self-reliance skills: How to grow your own food, make your own clothes, look after your own health, fix things when they break. They’ll need good imaginations and critical thinking skills. They’ll need the capacity to pay attention, to focus their senses and trust their instincts. They’ll need to learn to collaborate with others, and to form communities that work. They’ll need to learn how to make a living themselves, locally, in community, since there will be no one to offer them a job. They’ll need to learn to be patient, to educate themselves, and to be adaptable and resilient to rapid change. My generation, the boomers, were late in acquiring many of these skills, and some we haven’t picked up at all. I sense the generations that have followed us are even worse at these things. They’re better than we are at self-directed learning, fortunately, but some of these things can’t be learned on-line; they need hands-on practice. We’ll have to learn these skills and capacities ourselves, and then show them to the generations that follow. We also need to study and learn from the lessons of crises of the past: depressions, pandemics, natural disasters, droughts, famines, political brinkmanship. We have a lot to learn.
2. I’ve been very fortunate all my life, so I’ll soon have the time and savings to learn these skills. It will be fun learning these things when I don’t have to, at my leisure, when the cost of failure is minimal. But many of my generation and those that follow are living beyond their means, and they won’t have pensions to fall back on. We’ll need to be the role models and teachers for those who can’t afford to be. The intentional communities and natural enterprises we create in our later years, starting very soon now, will be important laboratories, where our failures will be important lessons for all and our successes will be critical models for a future where failure won’t be an option. 
3. I’m now at the point where I think it’s a waste of time trying to reform our political, economic and educational systems. They’re broken beyond repair, and hopelessly unwieldy. We need to start again at the community level, with the right, passionate people doing bold, disciplined experiments and creating radically simple model intentional communities, self-managed community ‘unschools’ and model natural enterprises that work.
4. My most important lesson so far has been the importance of Let-Self-Change, instead of trying to change the system. Second most important: Reconnecting with my senses, my instincts, and all-life-on-Earth.
5. I have a bunch of self-sufficiency skills to learn over the next couple of years to make me more well-rounded. And I want to get the Natural Enterprise book published and the Centre that will support that book and help people help each other to create joyful, responsible, sustainable businesses up and running. Then I’ll be ready for my first big step, co-creating a model intentional community. At that point my pension will kick in, which will give me more time to volunteer on various projects.

If you have experience as an interviewer, I’d welcome your thoughts on additional (or different) questions to ask, how far off track to let the conversation go, what types of answers and tangents to anticipate in advance, or anything else you can counsel before I start this process.

Another thought: I’ve been intrigued by some recent interviews I’ve heard on CBC where the interviewer’s questions are edited out. I wonder how this would work in blog-hosted conversations? Is it still a ‘conversation’ if all you hear is one voice?

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