As I travel around the country talking to folks and working a bit here and there what I’m finding is that the powder we’re supposedly keeping dry, well, it ought to have been expended long, long ago. Things are tough and it isn’t just my life; everywhere I turn I see folks with worse troubles than what I have.
I got into a nice conversation regarding these issues much earlier this week and I've only now found the time to translate and write it up in a sensible fashion.
The economy, it is stressed people out. We’ve got things like the mortage disaster that are making the papers and taking things down in a chain reaction fashion, but that is certainly not the only thing going on out here.
I think a large part of that problem has to due with hedge funds. As we’ll recall this is a pretty much a shadow banking system; a billion in real money goes in by some method, it gets sliced, diced, fluffed up, and it becomes twenty billion in funds driving merger and acquisition craziness. This started out as a small and sensible way to insure against risk but it has grown to the point where it’s so large it will strangle our economy.
We see this as statistics but there is a very real human cost. Some folks are keeping up a good face ...
But if you get beyond a superficial inspection you find they’ve been hollowed out financially, physically, and emotionally.
We should expect dramatic change, here at the end of the oil age. Portions of some business sector long regarded as steady may simply and irreversibly collapse.
While in other cases industries are going to merge and shrink, doing much less than they formerly did, but remaining healthy.
All of this is going to be very, very hard on the humans who make their living working within the structures of corporate America. Former easily understood career paths are going to be blocked as industry segments come down
I meet people who are just clinging to their current position in the world, but it won’t take much more before they take a tumble, just as I have. The 9/11 attack, my divorce five months later, and the health stuff that started dogging me not long after that have been in one sense suffering, but in another sense a blessing. I’m no longer attached to material things and I’ve learned to turn deprivation into adventure and art.
I talk to people who haven’t been stung yet and they generally don’t want to believe what is coming at us. I think everyone can find a fatal systemic flaw in the economic sector in which they work with just a little inspection, even if overall things appears to be taking
I don’t know what I’m going to do next with myself, but I am feeling pretty secure, in a post peak oil kind of way. My industry came crashing down and my life circumstances forced me into a change a year or so ahead of the masses; I’m blessed to be living in a time and place where my pathfinder tendencies are viewed as positive and needed, rather than a disruption.
We’ve become isolated in this society, zipping around all insulated in our automobiles, sitting alone in our back yards instead of meeting neighbors by being out on the front porch, and this is costing us every day. If I can stop, pick up random folks by the side of the road, and feed them, then you can certainly reach out to someone right next to you who has stumbled amongst the flood of changes we face.
Get yourself prepared. Start now. The waters are rising and where once you found rich soil you may discover mostly stone once the flood recedes. Those who are mindful and accepting of these changes will find themselves standing strong when it’s all done.