Do you expect to survivel PO?

[The Black Knight]

forager, this is for you (if you haven't already thought about it), isolation can come in many forms, such as your excellent example above. When did people stop being people and became "consumers"?  Tell you what my friend, how many can/will survive PO or collapse? This in part, is the difference...Survival means being able to live in a sustainable environment...

"The instructors view of isolation was a very unique one. They viewed modern man as a weaker specie from earlier ones, and the more that we strayed from a sustainable environment, the weaker man would become. Furthermore, man already in a physical state of decline could find the distance to a suitable habitat, too great to penetrate. The distance to suitable habitats would become greater, as those habitats grew smaller. When contemplating distance often time is involved. They thought that man already in a weakened state would not have enough resource to make the transition to another suitable habitat in time. If it took X amount of time and unlimited resource to get where we are today and for the population to build as it has, is it reasonable to expect the population to unfold in the same amount of time as resource depletes?"

[Broil]

Depression is actually one of the things that might improve if one transitions to a more primitive lifestyle, especially hunter/gatherer -- especially if the depression is not genetic, running in the family.  One of the causes of some depression is being out of sync with natural circadian rhythms - we're mostly designed to get up with the sun and go to sleep soon after.  We're made to get lots of sunlight during warm weather. 

And those whose ancestors came from cold climates will naturally tend to become sluggish in the months after the autumn feeding frenzy, so that it won't be as hard to sit around and conserve energy, as must be done when there aren't many foods worth going out for.  So simple uncomplicated depression or sluggishness should be fairly normal during the winter months, but not afterward.

[Hope@ZeroKelvin]

Depression is actually one of the things that might improve if one transitions to a more primitive lifestyle, especially hunter/gatherer -- especially if the depression is not genetic, running in the family.  One of the causes of some depression is being out of sync with natural circadian rhythms - we're mostly designed to get up with the sun and go to sleep soon after.  We're made to get lots of sunlight during warm weather. 

And those whose ancestors came from cold climates will naturally tend to become sluggish in the months after the autumn feeding frenzy, so that it won't be as hard to sit around and conserve energy, as must be done when there aren't many foods worth going out for.  So simple uncomplicated depression or sluggishness should be fairly normal during the winter months, but not afterward.

That is why it is VITAL to live in a place that gets at minimun 8 hours of sunlight daily.

When I lived in DC for 2 years, I thought I was gonna die when it got dark at 4 pm.

[forager]

forager, this is for you (if you haven't already thought about it), isolation can come in many forms, such as your excellent example above. When did people stop being people and became "consumers"?  Tell you what my friend, how many can/will survive PO or collapse? This in part, is the difference...Survival means being able to live in a sustainable environment...

"The instructors view of isolation was a very unique one. They viewed modern man as a weaker specie from earlier ones, and the more that we strayed from a sustainable environment, the weaker man would become. Furthermore, man already in a physical state of decline could find the distance to a suitable habitat, too great to penetrate. The distance to suitable habitats would become greater, as those habitats grew smaller. When contemplating distance often time is involved. They thought that man already in a weakened state would not have enough resource to make the transition to another suitable habitat in time. If it took X amount of time and unlimited resource to get where we are today and for the population to build as it has, is it reasonable to expect the population to unfold in the same amount of time as resource depletes?"

I see a parallel between city squirrels and civilised man. The city squirrels tend to eat less of their traditional foods like acorns. Oak trees were not considered good landscape trees in many places. Squirrels in places like where I live, a city in SE MI, often live on silver maple seeds and stuff that people give them like corn and bread (our relative shit food).

I gathered a bunch of Red Oak acorns earlier this Fall. During the processing, I discarded a large amount of them into the yard. The neighborhood squirrels feasted on them. At the time many of them seemed sickly and mangy. Now they are all fat (to be expected) and have great looking fur coats as well. I wonder if the nutrients in the acorns, their native food, brought them back to health, especially with regard to the mange?

What is our native food? We've been living largely on "fortified" grains. We were concerned with making them tasty, not healthy. Man cannot live on bread alone. What did we give up when we gave up on the wild edibles? Obviously, IMO, our health was compromised, in many ways, when we became civilised.

And yes, those healthy habitats are thinning and disappearing. We have been plowing under our "acorns" for thousands of years. All we need is drugs.

[the Black Hunter]

Depression is actually one of the things that might improve if one transitions to a more primitive lifestyle, especially hunter/gatherer -- especially if the depression is not genetic, running in the family.  One of the causes of some depression is being out of sync with natural circadian rhythms - we're mostly designed to get up with the sun and go to sleep soon after.  We're made to get lots of sunlight during warm weather. 

And those whose ancestors came from cold climates will naturally tend to become sluggish in the months after the autumn feeding frenzy, so that it won't be as hard to sit around and conserve energy, as must be done when there aren't many foods worth going out for.  So simple uncomplicated depression or sluggishness should be fairly normal during the winter months, but not afterward.

This is pretty much my pattern. It is complicated by the stresses of life in the larger community. 

When I stay at the off-grid cabin in winter, it takes me a day or two to get used to it, but pretty soon i'm ready to crawl into the loft and sleep not too long after darkness falls.  That's pretty darned early in winter!  Read a bit by candle light, wake up in the morning at sunrise, spend the day outdoors.  I feel great doing this.

I wonder also how much our depression is aggravated by the amount of machine fumes we breathe.  We are so used to low levels of this stuff going in and out of our lungs with our breathing we hardly notice it, or not at all.  But so much of our lives are spent around running vehicles breathing this entirely unnatural shit. 

Anyway, lots of outdoor time, aesthetic surroundings, plenty of exercise, meaningful rewarding work in reasonable doses, lots of sleep, simple good food and good companionship (community) - that's the cure for depression.  Take one of these things away, and you may have trouble.

[April]

In answer to the original question, YES! I expect to survive, thrive, and finish raising my family. If I didn't feel that way, I woudn't bother prepping.

[fossilfuelfiesta]

I know I'm bumping an old thread, but still.

When I learned about peak oil, I was 23 years old.  It shattered my worldview completely.  I would spend the next 4-5 years in a state of desperation.  But eventually... it gave way to a sense of Zen.

No, I don't expect to survive peak oil.  Not in the slightest.  I'm disabled, and totally dependent on the cheap available medicine that oil-based civilization has made possible.  I would liken my situation to being a life-support patient wired up to the electrical system of the Titanic.

And yes, that's been distressing; but over the years, a sense of calm acceptance has finally arrived.  I'm no spring chicken; I'll be turning 30 next September.  I've really had a spectacularly good run of things; I grew up in a fairly wealthy family, in a nice old heritage-listed house in the suburbs.  My childhood (for the first 10 years at least) had just about everything a kid could ask for.  Things may have turned a little more pear-shaped in the years following that, but hey, it was character building.

And in my adult life I've really done everything one would want to do.  I've driven V8 luxury cars; I've made love to beautiful women; I've fired guns; I've travelled the world and I've worked on Hollywood movies.  I've been to remote parts of the Earth where there's barely another human being and where the waves crash onto undisturbed coral reefs.  I've flown in biplanes and I've met Oscar-winning film directors. 

I've had a damn good run of things, all considered.  And even at a fairly young age I'm willing to say that, if it all ends tomorrow, I had a pretty damn good run of things.


Edit: Oh and I've also smoked Cuban cigars.  Really, those are very nice.  If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

[MEA]

In answer to the original question, YES! I expect to survive, thrive, and finish raising my family. If I didn't feel that way, I wouldn't bother prepping.

I'm just about 180 from you -- I expect only to bring part of my family though a slow crash, and only part way, at that, if we are lucky.

It sounds, and I may have misunderstood, that, IYO, it's only worth prepping if you are SURE you're going to to get through.

[Xenopus]

I think we've already survived PO, which seems to have come about in summer '08. The question is how many of us will survive the ensuing global economic collapse and the answer is, surely, few if any.

[the Black Hunter]

In answer to the original question, YES! I expect to survive, thrive, and finish raising my family. If I didn't feel that way, I wouldn't bother prepping.

I'm just about 180 from you -- I expect only to bring part of my family though a slow crash, and only part way, at that, if we are lucky.

It sounds, and I may have misunderstood, that, IYO, it's only worth prepping if you are SURE you're going to to get through.

This mindset is actually at the core of much of what ails us.  We are a society that mostly only acts on odds anymore, not principle.  It's the thinking behind, "Why try?  After all, what can one person do?"  Well, for starters, one person can do what the right thing is to do, regardless of outcome, (which you can't know anyway in most cases.)

Why has this become such an alien concept to us?  Okay, I know the answer to this:  Business School.

[Tinfoilhatmann]

I know I'm bumping an old thread, but still.

When I learned about peak oil, I was 23 years old.  It shattered my worldview completely.  I would spend the next 4-5 years in a state of desperation.  But eventually... it gave way to a sense of Zen.

No, I don't expect to survive peak oil.  Not in the slightest.  I'm disabled, and totally dependent on the cheap available medicine that oil-based civilization has made possible.  I would liken my situation to being a life-support patient wired up to the electrical system of the Titanic.

And yes, that's been distressing; but over the years, a sense of calm acceptance has finally arrived.  I'm no spring chicken; I'll be turning 30 next September.  I've really had a spectacularly good run of things; I grew up in a fairly wealthy family, in a nice old heritage-listed house in the suburbs.  My childhood (for the first 10 years at least) had just about everything a kid could ask for.  Things may have turned a little more pear-shaped in the years following that, but hey, it was character building.

And in my adult life I've really done everything one would want to do.  I've driven V8 luxury cars; I've made love to beautiful women; I've fired guns; I've travelled the world and I've worked on Hollywood movies.  I've been to remote parts of the Earth where there's barely another human being and where the waves crash onto undisturbed coral reefs.  I've flown in biplanes and I've met Oscar-winning film directors. 

I've had a damn good run of things, all considered.  And even at a fairly young age I'm willing to say that, if it all ends tomorrow, I had a pretty damn good run of things.


Edit: Oh and I've also smoked Cuban cigars.  Really, those are very nice.  If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

I'm very glad you have the new, Zen mindset. I think the crash will take some more time yet, so take every day you can and enjoy the most of it. Don't waste it panicking over something you can't change. Hell, this could plod on for decades so get some more Cubans and smoke em!

[MEA]

Okay, Black Hunter, spell it out for me -- what does Business school have to do with the fact I accept I may not survive PO? I mean, I accept the fact that tomorrowI might be hit by a bus -- which would put a crimp on those PO plans.

I'm also not one of those willing do to anything to survive people. Eat a worm -- no problem. Eat the cats -- no problem. Eat my children -- problem. I never went to business school so I don't know if such topic are covered, but considering some of what's happened lately, I think eating one's children may well be covered.

[Capella]

I don't know. I mean, for one thing I don't know if I survive the next day. Nobody knows that. Shit happens, roof tiles fall off buildings, people get killed in car accidents or by sudden cardiac arrest. Death can hit you out of the blue, PO or no PO.

But a PO world does not scare me more than the everyday craze we are living at the moment. It will be less comfortable in many respects, but it should be managable where I live. I acqured many important skills in the past years which give me confidence there.

The one thing that does scare me is the strong possibility of large scale resource wars. That's what makes survival pretty much a guessing game. If you happen to be in a war zone, you run a high risk of dying. That's how wars work. They are loud, they stink and people die.

[Grower]

I think a lot of us on a board like this suspect they will make it through, even though the odds (business school! ) are not great. But as BH says, that's not why we do it. The main reason I think I may survive is kinda woo-woo, so feel free to dismiss it if it doesn't work for you. I think people get called to be in a certain place. As I've said before, I think a lot of us have heard that call, and we've either answered it or it's driving us nuts not to.

So, I think I'm in this place for a reason. I'm prepping for a reason. And more than beans in buckets, it's about skills and attitude as much as anything else. To a certain extent, people who live are going to have to come together after TSTHF bigtime, so we may not have to prepare for every single thing. But being who we are, with what we know, might be the linchpin to a coordinated effort to make it through to the other side (whatever that is).

[Six Gun Jim]

I think a lot of us on a board like this suspect they will make it through, even though the odds (business school! ) are not great. But as BH says, that's not why we do it. The main reason I think I may survive is kinda woo-woo, so feel free to dismiss it if it doesn't work for you. I think people get called to be in a certain place. As I've said before, I think a lot of us have heard that call, and we've either answered it or it's driving us nuts not to.

So, I think I'm in this place for a reason. I'm prepping for a reason. And more than beans in buckets, it's about skills and attitude as much as anything else. To a certain extent, people who live are going to have to come together after TSTHF bigtime, so we may not have to prepare for every single thing. But being who we are, with what we know, might be the linchpin to a coordinated effort to make it through to the other side (whatever that is).

Well said. Everything I do is aimed at making a window for me that is just big enough to get through to a reformation of the world. I could probably do it with much less but why go the hard road? It's not like our money is going to be worth a damn anyway.