How are you coping?
Here’s an interesting article, even if it gets a bit weird at the end: The Waking-Up Syndrome
[…] While the sky may not be falling, this day-after-day onslaught of alarming news is making it more difficult simply to overlook the triple threat of environmental, climatic and economic concerns. It’s leaving many of us feeling like Alice in Wonderland, being sucked down a Rabbit Hole into some frighteningly grotesque and unfamiliar world that’s anything but wonderful.
Few of us are eager to contemplate, let alone truly face, these looming changes. Just the threat of losing chunks of the comfortable way of life we’re accustomed to (or aspiring to) is a frightening-enough prospect. But there’s no avoiding the current facts and trends of the human and planetary situation. And as the edges of our familiar reality begin to ravel, more and more people are reacting psychologically. A noticeable pattern of behavior is emerging.
We call this pattern the Waking Up Syndrome […]
I suppose I go into #4 or #5 from time to time, even some days down through the rest into #1.
It’s easy to think that all this is just nonsense, that we aren’t headed for the next Depression, that we’ll always have gas for the cars, one day we’ll win the ‘war on terror’, that all the attacks on our Constitution and liberties would never be actually used against us (we’re much too ‘nice’!), that ’somehow’ everyone will be okay and be housed and fed, ’somehow’ we’ll have enough water, resources, etc, the environment will be magically cleansed, and that my children will have a more comfortable life than I have. The god of technology (or God Himself) will swoop down and rescue us from our wasteful greedy selfishness.
Endless growth without consequences, yanno. The American Way!
But #6 is where I live most of the time. Getting there wasn’t very fun.
Looking at the responses to my food security article last year, it’s clear to see where others who have stopped by are at.
What about you?
February 5th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I’m coping fine, heading towards the one-tonne carbon lifestyle, which also happens to be a very low fossil fuel use lifestyle. We’re about 70% of the way there from the Western average of 12 tonnes.
We’re changing to wind-derived electricity in our new unit, which will take us another 9% the way, we’ll be buying less new stuff this year which will take us another 4%, I’m going to have some fruit trees which should contribute another couple percent, that takes us 85% of the way - now if only I could persuade my woman to get rid of the car and/or not travel overseas, that’d save another 5-10% and we’d be there.
Living a low-consumption, low-emissions lifestyle, depending more on skills and people than machines, I think this is a good preparation for… well, doing the same later on.
I don’t think I really went through all those various stages, because of my upbringing. When I was a kid my old taught me fieldcraft, living in the bush. When I was about 12 my mother was too busy studying to cook, so I learned. I moved out of home at 18, spent time in the Army and so on. Throughout most of that I never had a lot of money. I’ve been homeless a couple of times. So I’ve had a long experience of having to take care of myself with not a lot of resources.
Thus, not being able to drive 2 miles to the shops, not eating a lot of meat, taking the train to work, sometimes being a bit too cold or a bit too hot, these things don’t seem like desperate misery and hardship to me.
As to worrying how the rest of society will handle things, I don’t worry too much. The lifestyle I live now builds some spare capacity so that if I have to take some others in and help them out, I can. And whether that day comes or not, I try to spread the word a bit about living a lower-consumption, lower-waste lifestyle. This both makes a desperate collapse less likely, and means that if it comes, we can cope better with it.