Jon Jandai: Unraveling dominant ideas of success to realign with true abundance (ep306)
What can the pandemic teach us about the true meaning of ‘security’? Why must we challenge the dominant culture's ideas of wealth and success—in order to realize true abundance?
In this episode, we welcome Jon Jandai (IG: @jonjandai; YouTube: Jon Jandai Life is Easy) foremost a farmer and secondly a widely-known earthen builder in Thailand.
Jo is from Yasothorn Province and has been farming all his life. He began building earthen homes on his family farm in 1997, and started doing workshops on earthen building in 2002, initially traveling the country to voluntarily educate farmers’/villager groups, NGOs, and more. By doing so, he helped to create what is now a widespread earthen building movement in Thailand. Jo co-founded Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance in July 2003 and is most interested in preserving our heritage through seeds.
Listen to the full episode through the podcast player above or in any podcast app, and read on for the conversation's transcript below.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Laura Palicka
“I thought ‘why did I work 10 hours per day in the city, yet not make enough to feed one person, but when I came back to the land, I worked only half an hour per day and I had enough food to feed six people?”
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Transcript
Note: Green Dreamer is a community-powered multimedia journal exploring our paths to collective healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. The values, views, and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Please do your own additional research on the information, resources, and statistics shared. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: I would love to start off by having you share a bit about your background, how you grew up, and what it was that led you to question your city life in Bangkok, chasing the dreams that society tells us to chase.
Jon Jandai: I grew up in a village that was quite far away from the city, and at that time people didn't use money much. People just relied on themselves mostly.
Even if you had money, you’d have nothing to buy – that was the case when I was a kid. But when I grew up, when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, that was the first time TV came to my village. Before that, we didn't think about being poor. We didn't know the meaning of the word. We used the word “suffering”. When you don’t have things to eat, when you don't have a good family, they say that you’re “suffering”. We never used to use the word “poor”, but the arrival of TV was the first thing that taught us to use the word poor.
If we wanted anything, we just went to get it from the forest, from the river, from anywhere. But when the TV came, they told us that we were poor because we didn't have money. So to solve this problem, we had to work to make money.
And then after that, people started to work harder and harder. I felt bad after that. Before that, I didn't feel bad. I felt so proud of myself because at nine years old, I was able to find food to feed my family. I was very happy at that time because I knew everybody in the village and everything around me. I knew where to get things for the family.
But when they told us that we were poor, I thought it was true because we didn't have money. Most of the people at that time felt bad too because they felt poor – they needed to work harder and harder to make money.
At that time, the center of the country was Bangkok. If you wanted an education, you needed to go to Bangkok. If you wanted money, you needed to go to Bangkok. If you wanted a job, you needed to go to Bangkok. So I was one of the people at that time who went to Bangkok. They said if you are diligent enough, if you work hard enough, you will not be poor. So I believed that I would not be poor because I can work harder than most people. I went to Bangkok for seven years and I worked very hard, many hours per day.
Despite working hard, I get very little pay at that time. Just enough for food and rent. For seven years, I asked myself what's the meaning of “work hard and then you will not be poor.” I worked more than 10 hours per day, but I didn't have enough to eat. I didn't see a future in which I would have enough money to stop working like this. The system is corrupt. Working hard in the city didn’t help me have a better life.
I thought about going home after that. I felt like city life is not for humans.
So the first thing I did when I went back home was to think about how I was going to feed myself. I needed to have food. So I started to grow food. I asked my mom to use a small plot of land, maybe one-fourth of an acre. And then I started to grow more than 50 varieties of vegetables in a small area. That gave me enough food to feed six people in my family.
So I thought “why did I work 10 hours per day in the city, yet not make enough to feed one person, but when I came back to the land, I worked only half an hour per day and I had enough food to feed six people?” It changed my life a lot, changed my thinking a lot.
Life has to be easy. But we make life hard because we are not ourselves. We become like robots. We work for somebody else, we do not work for ourselves. If we work for ourselves, we will not be angry, we will not have a problem in our life.
So that was the beginning, and then after that, I thought about building a house, so I started to build an earthen house, the first in my town in Thailand at that time. I spent two hours per day working on the house, and three months later, I got a house.
Why do we need to spend 30 years working to afford a house, when you can work only two hours per day for three months and build a good, stable house? So that's the story of how my life has changed so much so far.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing that. It definitely pushes us to question a lot of the dominant narratives that society tells us.
You’ve said that places with a wisdom for and a practice of self-reliance really haven't been impacted that much by the global pandemic, even if these are communities that might be considered economically “poor”. This led you to also redefine what it is that brings us a true sense of security. So if monetary resources don't always translate to a sense of security for survival, what is the role that money has to play? And why do you say that the money system is not stable?
Jon Jandai: The role of money is just as a tool that we use to exchange for things. That's the only real role of money. But now we use money as a tool to take advantage of other people. That's a problem because we use money in the wrong way.
Pun Pun still needs money. We use money. We do not refuse money. But we use money as a tool.
Money is not security. Money is not everything. Money cannot buy everything – it's just a tool like a knife that we use to cut something. But when we don't want to cut something, we just leave the knife be. Money is the same thing.
We do not think money is everything, so we do not save money. We don't have a lot of savings. We make just enough money to use in our daily life.
What we save instead is natural resources. When we have money, we buy land. Then when we’ve got land, we develop the soil. No burning, no chemicals, and no moving leaves or branches away from our land. Over time, everything gets better and better.
And we save many varieties of plants, animals, and things like that. That's our security. Under the soil, we have a lot of roots and taro. Above the ground, we have grass, we have vegetables, we have trees, we have fruits, we have everything. We save water underground. We have everything. So whatever happens, we know that we will be okay. Even in economic collapses, we don't need to ask for help from anybody. Instead, we have enough for sharing. We have food and natural resources to share with other people. So we think that natural resources are more secure than money. They’re more real because we use them in our daily life.
But if we have money, we need to use that money to buy natural resources. So it's like beating around the bush instead of going straight. You work harder to make money to get what you want, but if you try to get what you want directly, it's easier. This is the way we think about money.
Kamea Chayne: There's definitely a difference between economically poor people that have food sovereignty – access to land and food and fresh water and shelter – and people who are economically poor but reliant on the globalized economic system. That is fundamentally what causes a lot of suffering, is when people are economically poor but don't have community-based self-reliance for themselves.
Jon Jandai: I think the way we educate people is a problem because we try to teach people to be specialists. You can do only one thing. You study for almost 20 years just to be one thing, to be able to do one thing. To be a teacher, to be a doctor, to be something, you need to learn for so many years.
But we don't learn to do anything for ourselves, we don’t learn about self-reliance. So that makes people feel poor because they cannot use their skills. They cannot help themselves at all. So that's the weakest point of this system in the world. That makes people poor. Actually, everybody has the ability to create their own food. They have the ability to build their own house, they have the ability to find everything they need if they got trained, if they were educated in the right way. But the way that we’re educated now just trains us to be robots.
So this is the main problem. We should not be poor if we know that we can grow food. We should not be poor if we know how to build a house. Everybody has a chance to learn, has the ability to do it.
There are so many women that come to our workshop. It changes their life a lot because beforehand they think, oh, I'm a woman and weak. I cannot build a house. Building a house is a man's job. But when they come to our workshops, they learn that they can build a house in five days. Then they feel like, wow, we’ve lived such long lives and yet, we cannot do something like this.
And then many people change their lives because they feel like they can do anything because the biggest thing in their life is building a house. Once I’ve built a house by myself, I can do anything. So this is the thing that we train.
And this is our problem with the word “poor”. If we are able to help ourselves, if we have enough skill, if we were trained in the right way, then we have enough. We will not feel the impact of the word “poor”. There is no “poor” or “rich”. What do we need? How can we enjoy our lives more?
This is what I see as the problem with education.
Kamea Chayne: I do very much agree that because our system leads to specialization, a lot of people end up working jobs that are maybe nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, doing the exact same thing every single day. And I think that is very dehumanizing because as humans, we're meant to do a variety of things. We need to, maybe play music and then do some art and then maybe help plant some things in the garden and build some things with our hands. We're humans and we gain enrichment through doing a diversity of activities and not through slaving away, doing the exact same thing, nine-to-five, five days a week. So it does feel like our system right now is very dehumanizing and is turning us into robots, like you said. And a lot of people who are struggling today don't necessarily have connections to family farms or have countryside homes to return to in order to have access to land.
So for people who don't have these foundational roots set up right now but are struggling, how can we help address this short-term suffering that they are facing and work towards making sure that a lot of our currently economically poor people that are reliant on the global economy can build a sense of security for themselves?
Jon Jandai: The main thing isn’t actually just about coming to the land. Everybody can have a simple life, can have a sustainable life. The main thing is that people have to do what they like doing. It's not possible to make everybody become a farmer because not everybody likes to farm. If you love to be in the city, if you love to work in business, then do business. If you’d like to be a teacher, be a teacher. You can be anything that you’d like, and do anything that you’d like. But the most important thing to make our life easy is to follow our consciousness more than our feelings. Mainly, the problems in the world right now come from the fact that we follow our feelings too much, but we do not follow our consciousness, our goodness.
When I look back at my life in the city and wonder why my life was so hard, why I never had enough money, what I saw at that time was that most of my spending, more than 60 percent, paid for my feelings. I like this, I buy it. I like this, I buy it. But I never bought what was important for me. I bought a lot of cassette tapes at that time, I bought a lot of clothes, but I never bought organic food to eat.
The most important thing in our life is our health, but we do not pay much for our health. We eat a lot of garbage in our life. We drink soda. We eat snacks. We eat so many things that are very bad for us, but we rarely buy organic food. We think it's too expensive.
We spend so much money on our feelings. But feelings are not something that’s stable. They change all the time.
We work hard and we spend money to feed our feelings. Today I feel like I love this car. I have to be in debt to buy this car. And then not many years later, a new car comes out and you start feeling like you need to buy another car. So we just follow our feelings like this. It never ends. But the most important thing is when we train ourselves to follow our mindfulness.
Whenever I buy anything, I ask myself do I want to buy this because I need it or because I like it. If I like it, I will not buy it. If I need it, I will buy it.
So practice this. People can have a simple life anywhere. They can have a good life anywhere when they spend less. We would have better health, a better lifestyle. Whenever we don’t follow our feelings too much, we have less problems in life.
And at the same time, city people can do what they love and still connect with farmers who do organic farming. In many cases now, people are starting to love farming. They want to grow organic food. They want to produce a lot of good food for people.
But many people don't want to buy from them because they think it's too expensive. But if you help people reconnect with those farmers and buy from them, the farmers can sell to us directly. Like now, in Thailand, there are many farmers’ groups who do organic farming. They sell their produce to consumers in the city directly, so it makes the price of organic food drop. The price is very low now because they don't need middlemen.
So this is the way we reconnect. You don't need to farm if you don’t like to farm. You should do what you love and connect with farmers who like farming. This is the way we reconnect ourselves. Because in our lives now, we’re disconnected completely from everything around us. So some people in the middle can take advantage of us. We need to reconnect again. We need to create new communities again. I think it will help. I can see it working very well in Thailand right now.
Kamea Chayne: Well, a lot of what we just discussed today really challenges the messages and norms and aspirations that the dominant culture tries to instill within us, and it would be amazing if our friends and families and neighbors all understood these concepts so that we can collectively work towards building healthier communities that we want for ourselves. But we live in social systems where we are influenced by societal expectations, by expectations from our families, and by the desires of other people around us.
This is personal to me because my parents are very traditional in terms of really valuing things that the dominant culture tells them to value. But these are things that I personally question – things like seeing wealth, fame, and status as success.
I'm currently liberating myself from these societal values. I’m doing a lot of unlearning and learning with the help of people like you. But I'm still bound by the same judgments of family members who I love, whose opinions influence me as a sort of emotional trap. And I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. Maybe some of our listeners can relate too.
How do we go about building this future that we want for ourselves and building community when most people around us are still chasing the same materialistic aspirations and think that what people like us want to do is going backwards?
Jon Jandai: I think it's quite common for people to want to have more material possessions, to want to have more fame. Something like that is quite common. And it's not a problem as long as we train ourselves to be able to help ourselves. We can do both things at the same time.
If you like farming, it will be easy to do. If you like farming, you can come back to the land and you can work. For example, the model that we use here at Pun Pun is to work less than an hour per day. You will have enough food to feed the family and you'll have enough income from selling the surplus from the garden to pay for the normal expenditures of the family. One hour per day is enough to have a good life and then you have another 11 hours per day to do what you like to do. If you want to be a singer, you can practice singing. If you like to dance, you can practice dancing. You can do anything. There's no limit.
We have a chance to do anything if we just have food, a place to stay, our daily needs, and some knowledge about healing and self-healing. These four things are the basics of life, the rules of life.
Anybody can learn. Anybody can train themselves to be able to understand these things. You don't need to train yourself for a very long time – in a few months, you can learn so much. And then when you have enough skill, you can have less fear in your life. And then you can do anything. You can go anywhere. You can make money, you can do business, you can do the same things as normal people. As long as the important things are still stable.
Our families, our parents maybe won't agree in the beginning, but when we start living this way, they start to change. When they see it they start to understand it.
The problem is that many people want to change other people. Many people want to change their families to think like them. But they haven't started anything yet. They cannot understand us.
In Thailand, we have many people who have the same problem because they want to come back to the land, they want to farm, they want to grow their own food. But their families say, why are you wasting your time doing something like that? If you do business, you’ll make more money than that. The family cannot understand it.
People think that the solution is to get their parents to think like them. But this is a big mistake because their parents already have their own ways of thinking. So the solution that happens in Thailand now is that people don't talk much with their family; they just come back and do it. When you do it, you grow a lot of food in a small amount of time. And then families say, wow, where did you get these vegetables? Where did you get these fish? Oh, I just got it from my garden. I work in the garden only one hour per day.
This is a chain. When families have food from their own gardens, they decrease their expenses immediately. It means that you have more income without working more.
So when families see this they start to understand. But we still can do what we like to do. It’s the same problem everywhere in the world. In Thailand, it’s a big problem for new generations who will get tired of city life and want to find a new way of living. They want to come back to grow their own food, to learn how to build a house and their parents cannot understand. This is the biggest problem in Thailand. But when they start to just do it, it shows their parents that they can do it, and their parents accept them later.
Kamea Chayne: Sounds very relatable for a lot of us, so we will keep this in mind.
While a lot of people use technological innovation as a way to judge how “civilized” or “advanced” our society is and what our future should look like, you've questioned the idea that we are more civilized today, especially through looking at food and mechanization in agriculture. So why should we question what “civilized” means? And what should we use to determine our societal progress, if not technological advancement?
Jon Jandai: When I changed my thinking, my life completely changed. I started to see the world in such a different way.
People think about GDP as an indicator of growth for countries. But I see GDP as an indicator of how much we’re using natural resources. Increasing GDP is an indicator of collapse for me because a high GDP means that we’re using natural resources faster than those natural resources can replenish themselves.
A high GDP means that people have to work harder. They will have less happiness, less freedom, more sickness, and more social problems. When GDP is high, people have to work so much that they start to have no time for themselves, for family, for anything.So that’s how I think differently from “normal” people.
But when I came back to thinking this way, life felt so different. When I wake up in the morning, I don't need to hurry to go anywhere because when I want to cook, when I want food, I just walk to my garden, and I have vegetables there. I have a lot of rice in my storage house. I have many fish in the pond. I just draw the net in the pond and I've got fish. So I have no problems getting food. I can have food anywhere, anytime. And then when I have a family, my family can stay together. We can enjoy living together more.
I don't send my kids to school and instead, we do homeschooling because school is so expensive. It takes so much time and the kids do not learn much. They will learn to be handicapped. Even if they have a good body, by the time they finish their education, they wouldn’t be able to do many things in life – it’s like a handicap. When they stay at home, they learn more. We don't need to spend money on them. So I think it's easy for us in this way. And our kids can do anything. My son can build a house and he's only nine years old. It's easy. He has confidence in his life and we learn so many things: how to make soap, shampoo, how to make sauces, make yogurt, make many things for ourselves.
But we do not do everything ourselves because we need to network with other groups. There’s another group that grows soybeans, that makes soy sauce so that we don’t have to make soy sauce. We need to rely on them, help them.
Self-reliance doesn't mean that we have to do everything ourselves. We need to rely on other people, too. But self-reliance means we don't rely on the big system, we rely on ourselves and our neighbors.
My daily life is just being in the garden, working with the network – with the group that we know – visiting them and helping them.
We also have a lot of parties. If you want to dig a well, dig a pond, build a house, then we have a joyful party. In a few days, you can make a house together and then you don't need to spend a lot of money.
We can make anything with less money. This is the way we live now. We created a community that we call Pun Pun community. We have 20 people living here together. We work on the farm together, we do our own building, we make our own soap, shampoo and food and everything. We do self-healing quite a lot. We do acupuncture, we do massage, we do herbal plants. We do many things. We don't have a lot of money, but we don't feel insecure like normal people. We feel more secure here. We have more freedom than when we were in the city. If we want to go somewhere, we just go, we don't need to ask permission from anybody. If you want to take a day off because you’re sick, just do it, you don't need to ask permission like normal people in the city. You can stop working. You can do anything anytime. I think this is the beauty of life: when you can do anything that you want to do, when you can enjoy anything you want to enjoy, when you don't need to get permission from anybody. This is the way we live now.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. We're wrapping up here, but what calls to action do you have for our listeners? And how can we support the community and educational projects that you're working on now?
Jon Jandai: We need to come back to thinking about ourselves more. How health is the number one thing on this earth – ourselves are the number one things on this earth. When people think about themselves more, think about living a healthy life, think about happiness, think about love, it will change everything in the world. But now most people never think about themselves. They think about money, they think about jobs. They eat whatever just to fill up their stomachs so that they can then go work. They don't care about whether they will get sick or not. They don't care about how much time they’ll have with their kids. They are just focused on work. That causes a lot of big problems everywhere in the world right now. So to support the idea, to support a sustainable way of living, to support the ecosystems of the world, we just have to come back to ourselves.
Love yourself. Take care of yourself in a sustainable way, and the world will be good. Society will be good and our lives will be good too.
Kamea Chayne: What is an uplifting social media account or a publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Jon Jandai: I stopped reading 30 years ago and never read any books after that. In the past, I loved Marx. I read a lot of Marx. I loved a lot of Zen books. But after that I stopped reading because I feel like reading takes so much time from my life.
When we read too much, we have less time to do things. We cannot fully understand anything from reading and listening. We can get the idea, but we cannot understand it.
We understand things when we start to do them – when we face them and when we experience them. That's the way we understand things. So I stopped reading. I don't have any books to share.
I do not listen to music much. Not at all. No movies, no music, no books. Everything is around me, the birds, the sound of everything is music. The morning dew on top of the kale leaves is so beautiful. That is a book. The grand garden is a book. The people who come to play with me – it’s a book for me. So I just enjoy reading everything around me instead of books. I pretty much cut myself off from most of the media. I love that even though I have a YouTube channel, I never watch YouTube.
Kamea Chayne: Well, we get to watch it from around the world and it's really helped me personally. So I want to thank you for putting that out into the world so we can learn from your life experience and everything that you've learned.
What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Jon Jandai: I don’t have to do anything because life is so much fun. When we get out of the normal world, when we come back to nature, everything makes me feel excited all the time. Just growing the vegetables in their beds is exciting. I plant them and then they sprout a few days later – it’s so exciting. And then when I put compost on them, they grow back faster. And then we get to eat them, it’s so good. The taste is so different from food that’s grown with chemicals. It's the same variety, but it tastes different.
So these things keep me excited all the time. I do not have to try anything in my life now. Everything is just fun and exciting to do. Life is so much fun. So I don't need to try to do anything to motivate myself in daily life.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our world right now?
Jon Jandai: With all the crises in the world now: the pandemic, the ecosystem collapse, etc., many people think that these things are going to make people come back to thinking about themselves more, thinking about the world more. Right now, more and more people are coming back to the land. So many people come to our trainings now because they want to change their lives. They want to look at the world in a different way. They want to make their lives more enjoyable. They want to have good food for themselves.
That is the hope for me: when people love themselves, when people want to eat good food, when people want to be happy, that gives me hope. But when I see people want to be rich, that is hopeless.
Kamea Chayne: Well, green dreamer, if you want to learn more and stay updated on Jo’s projects, you can go to his website www.PunPunThailand.org. Or find him on YouTube. His title is Jon Jandai Life is Easy. He is definitely my favorite YouTube elder, and I really recommend that you follow him. And you can also find him on Instagram @JonJandai.
What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Jon Jandai: Life is easy. Don't make it too complicated. Invest your time. Make it simple, make it easy, and enjoy it.
