Future uncertainty.

When people are uncertain, in general they become more hesitant to act. This effect is tempered by how risk-averse people in a culture are, as well as any inherent predispositions people may have, but it's still true enough to hold as a general rule.

Tighten your belt. Don't risk what you can't afford to lose. Keep your eyes open for opportunities weighted in your favour, no matter how small.

Cappy Cap recently wrote about how he used to feel safe as a kid in the 80's:

"I am not joking when I say this, but when Ronald Reagan was in charge I felt very safe and never worried about the country.  Of course I was only a child at the time and there really wasn't anything I could do about it, but I intuitively KNEW the government or "what adults were in charge of" was something I didn't have to concern my mind with."

It should be no surprise that people are getting antsy these days. We've all been on the slope of the coaster for a while, being wheeled up the hump, and now is the time when the track starts to even out before the plunge, the sense of trepidation before the storm.


Of course, anyone who is honest with themselves will admit they can't give a hard timeline as to when things are going to happen, only a general outline and a hazy guess as to when events are going to escalate to the point where even the lowest of the low will be forced to accept reality. No one can give dates or exact events, but everyone can get the general feel of how things are going to be shaping up. Some people are talking about it on the local level, others the national, and yet even more the singularity.

Things are changing once again. What did the kids who came of age in the Great Depression think as to what they were going to do with their lives? At least a bigger percentage of them had the option of staying on the family farm or business. At least back then there were still farms which needed farmhands and pickers, machine shops, non-atomised people who looked out for each other. None of that today.

They soldiered on nevertheless, and so shall we. Because the alternative is death.

I'm sitting out here, wondering and plotting as to how I am going to get anything approaching a reasonable job when everything seems set to explode. Worst comes to worst, I may have to make like my teenage days and practice my "would you like fries with that"?

No one's feeling safe. No one wants to take action. People always say "for a better tomorrow", but what they really want is for tomorrow to be like today, because as bad as today was, you managed to live through it.

Even with this going on:

"Ladies and gentlemen, look around and trust your lying eyes.  Every strip mall and shopping center in the country is dotted with empty store fronts.  Every neighborhood is blighted with distressed homes and vacant houses.  Just like in the 1920’s, our skylines are graced with grand structures that were built on dashed dreams and failed expectations that will never be utilized to full capacity.  Every year we drive less.

There has been a slam down of paper gold that resulted in a corresponding flight into precious metals and hard assets.  Hard money is moving out of vaults and into private hands.

The bubble of borrowing has now moved to student loans enslaving a whole generation to a debt that must be paid down with part-time jobs.

Half the population is either directly or indirectly subsidized by some kind of federal program.

Listen to what you are hearing.   Eighty-four billion a month is being conjured out of thin air just to keep the government’s doors open.

Home Land Security has grown to a standing army of almost four hundred thousand if you list the private contractors in the overall count.  HLS has ordered enough ammunition to fight a twenty year war and has taken delivery of 2700 armored vehicles designed to fight urban wars on our city streets.

The Constitution has been suspended on the federal level.

The majority of Americans distrust their government. Congress is more despised than cockroaches and lawyers.  A third of the population expects a revolution.

American citizens now buy enough guns and ammunition to outfit a World War II size army every nine days. 

We have exceeded critical mass.  The collapse is taking place all around us."

With my life that has been comfortable - with all our lives which have been comfortable in the Age of Leisure - looking forward is hard, even with the benefit of being able to look back as well to learn from the past, unlike those who make Forward their religion.

There are those amongst us who foresee that 3D printing and other technologies will propel us into the post-scarcity technological singularity before it's too late. It would be nice, but ultimately from what I'm seeing, I'm tending to agree with Vox and Jim that social decay is starting to outstrip technological advancement at an accelerating rate. So you have replicators and everything can be synthesised from a ten-cent blob of uni-gel. How long are the replicators going to last when people come unplugged from their holodecks and think they ought to live their gimp midget fantasy in the real world?

And even if the whole of humanity acquiesces to the technological singularity, will we be better off in the chest, the heart? Will we all end up like E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, or at least, those of us who aren't in the ranks of the natural aristocracy? What then?

I know I've always had a certain level of Thanatos in my blood - seems like a lot of young men do these days - but events in the last few months seem to have given me a booster dose of the stuff. I suppose it's different from the kind of Thanatos that's found in the filthy corn-syrup pop culture crap that inundates the world today: the desire for death in the hopes of rebirth as opposed to a slow, degenerative slide into filth and ferity with no rhyme or reason behind it.

I know what has to be done: prep and build as much as possible while still maintaining a facade of normality.

It's much easier said than done. At this point, some of us are already mumbling to ourselves: "just start the ride already so we can get off all that much faster." To quote my dear friend Nationalist Pony:

"DESTROY EVERYTHING! DESTROY EVERYTHING! DESTROY EVERYTHING! DESTROY EVERYTHING! DESTROY EVERYTHING! DESTROY EVERYTHING!"

Thanatos indeed.

Will there be jobs for me in a couple of months, or once the shockwaves from the Anglosphere hit home?

Will I even be worried about getting a job in lieu of more pressing matters or means of production?

Give up modern conveniences and live as my grandfather did? Shit, where do I sign?