What Should I Do?

Given its simple elegance in addressing a question frequently asked on this site, this post has been elevated from the forums section. It has been updated by site members rhare and travlin since its first appearance (the original post can be read here).

I've been working on a way to get across to friends and family how bad the economic situation has become. I find one of the biggest problems is that when numbers are in the billions and trillions they are very hard to imagine, and people get this glazed/deer in the headlights look. So I decided to try to scale the numbers in a way that can be more easily visualized. 

Below is an updated version, with many thanks to members of PeakProsperity.com community who suggested changes/corrections, and particularly to Travlin for rewording much of the message to make it a better story. Hopefully this version will help convince others of the serious nature of the US fiscal outlook. 

My Troubled Relative 

I need your advice. I have a relativewho is in financial trouble. He makes $50,000 a year, but he spent $74,591 last year, and his prospects of making $50,000 this year look kind of bad. There's a good chance he will get a pay cut.

Abraham Maslow detailed a hierarchy of human needs as drivers of human motivation, postulating that we first attend to our physiological needs for air, food, and water, followed by our need for safety. Only when those needs are met do we then attend to higher level needs, such as creativity and achievement. Recognizing that energy descent will require significant changes in standard of living for most of us, we immediately want to secure the basics and find ways to make supplies of those basics resilient. 

Like many people, when I first learned about Peak Oil about six years ago, I began with physical preparation for a lower energy future. It makes total sense that many of us do this when recognizing danger ahead. The What Should I Do? guide here really supports us in learning about physical preparation. Chris says, “We are more resilient when we have multiple sources and systems to supply a needed item, rather than being dependent on a single source.” However, as Chris and many others have pointed out, all of our physical preparations are “necessary but insufficient,” because we simply don’t know what exactly will happen and we are totally dependent on natural resources for everything we consume every day.

So what else can we do? I believe we need to focus a significant part of our crisis preparation on developing inner resilience in addition to cultivating external, physical resilience. 

“Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” is an unofficial slogan among Marines made popular by Clint Eastwood’s movie, Heartbreak Ridge. Whether you plan to bug in or bug out should tough times occur, the ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome problems will be necessary regardless of how well-stocked, tooled, provisioned, or conditioned you are.

Honing this ability will serve you well. These skills can be cultivated easily in any setting and without a lot of money. Moreover, to build your skills quickly, I recommend that you strive to develop them WITHOUT money. Get creative. No one can take a skill away from you. It boils down to changing your perspective, engaging your creative mind, learning to learn, and improving your physical, mental, and spiritual capacity. 

Authors Note: For this edition of Practical Survival Skills, I want to make things more interactive, as I believe that this format is really beneficial for learning. During the “Mesoscale” discussion, I’ll ask the reader a series of questions that they should answer based on their location. If you don’t want to participate in the conversation, that’s perfectly fine! It’s simply an exercise to get you thinking about how to improvise under pressure.

The Survival Saw gives us three hours of exposure before we begin to succumb to the elements. 

This essay is going to largely fill the “mainstream” ideas of what constitutes a wilderness shelter, but I believe in simple, effective techniques, practiced towards perfection, and mental flexibility. Once you understand the concepts, it becomes easier to ‘improvise.’ This is critically important here, because it’s extremely difficult for me to write giving adequate consideration to all environments; it’s incumbent on you to learn your area, know its tendencies, and have the mental flexibility to survive.

Improvise, Adapt, Overcome is an unofficial slogan among Marines made popular by Clint Eastwood’s movie, Heartbreak Ridge. No matter what your plans for the uncertain future, the ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome problems will be necessary regardless of how well stocked, tooled, provisioned, or conditioned you currently are.