Self-Sufficiency 2.0
Growing your income and your life with your own hands
Half past five in the morning.
Outside it’s still dim. Only the birds, awake a little before me, break the silence. My family is still sleeping. From our home at the foot of the Southern Alps, in the quiet, I’m writing this.
I run a small company, alone. I live where I chose to live, doing work I chose. It’s a calm life.
But the road here wasn’t a straight one.
Through my school years I could barely attend, and I left university without finishing. I moved from one part-time job to the next, more often than not unable to settle in anywhere. There was nothing on my résumé worth showing.
One thing I always carried, though: the question of how I wanted to live. That, I suspect, is exactly why I never fit. I kept spilling past the edges of the mold, with no idea how to answer it.
At the end of a long detour, the outline of an answer finally came into view.
Make your income, and your life, yourself. I gave this way of living a name: Self-Sufficiency 2.0.
People once grew their own food to live. What we grow now is the system beneath income and daily life. The tools change; the essence — building your life with your own hands — does not.
I gathered this thinking into a book and published it in Japan. What I’m doing here is sending it out again, in English, a letter at a time — not as a finished method, but as a record of an experiment still in progress. What worked, and what didn’t, written honestly.
If something in the way you live feels slightly off, this letter might become a seed.
From the foot of the Southern Alps. Yuki Hattori