By André Angelantoni, on The Oil Drum.
The future most people are living into is beginning to disappear. The financial crisis threw the first punch, but oil depletion will deliver the knockout blow. The moment people realize that the society they have known their whole life can no longer function the same way without the energy provided by oil, it will become glaringly apparent that the future will be very, very different. It’s not just that we will no longer have fresh food flown in from around the world. Some of the fundamental assumptions held by people living in the rich countries will no longer hold:
- many jobs that have never existed before will once again no longer exist
- retirement, a phenomenon only a century old, will disappear
- accumulating “wealth” will be out of reach for most people
- most children will no longer be able to attend institutions of higher education
- diseases and conditions that are easily treated now will once again claim lives
Once a person has realized that these and many more futures will no longer exist, they will ask themselves the following question: If the future I’ve lived with my whole life will not longer occur, what will my future be?
People will react in many different ways as they consider the question of what their future will be. Some people will become resigned and despondent, others will become resolute as they concentrate on the job of making sure they and their family are sheltered and adequately fed. Still others will become happier as they leave the rat race and simplify their life. If you are considering this question, hopefully you will realize that creating the future rather than waiting for it to happen to you will give you a better result. That’s what this article is about.
Being aware that this society and the advantages it provides to corporations and large organisations/projects, impairs the lives of most people within it, is devastating the natural world and enslaves us all, is surely sufficient motivation for radical change, even if oil were not running out. We have all been sold ‘the american dream’ which turns out to be more of a nightmare, not just for those who live in poverty, and are enslaved to make the trinkets and plastic toys, but also those who have been fed the lie of privilege, and, in economic terms, are ‘doing alright’. We are all connected, and we all suffer when we allow our landbases to be damaged. We all need clean water and air, decent food, and community relations. Modern industrial civilisation is poisoning all of these and more.
Quality of Life vs Standard of Living
We’re almost ready to discuss how to create a future worth living into. I’m going to make one more distinction that should help the transition. With the loss of inexpensive and plentiful oil you are not just confronting the loss of vacations in the Tropics. It will look like the sudden loss of much more than that. But what is it you are losing, exactly?At this point it’s valuable to get yourself clear on what you are actually going to lose. If you don’t stop your brain, it is likely to say, “Everything!”, send you down a dark tunnel and leave you there. But you aren’t going to lose everything; you aren’t even going to lose the most important things, as you’ll soon see. That’s because almost every person tends to make one fundamental mistake (myself included when I’m not paying attention).
We tend to confuse what economists call “standard of living” with “quality of life.” The two are not the same, no matter how many vacation advertisements try to convince you otherwise. The standard of living index measures the number of things a person can purchase or possess. This is again useful only to a point. Beyond the very basics of life, like food and shelter, we want things not for the things themselves but for what they give us at an emotional level.
We want money to go on vacation so that we can have fun. But is it necessary to leave town to have fun? We want to send our kids to college so that they can “create a future for themselves.” But what does that mean? Are people who don’t go to college incapable of experiencing happiness in their life? If your children were healthy and happy, wouldn’t you have done your job as a parent? We know that the poor can be happy and the rich can be (often desperately) unhappy.
Things and circumstances fool us into short-term happiness, and then the happiness wears off and the cycle starts again. Have you noticed as your income rose, your expectations rose with them? If you hadn’t noticed that, you’re in the standard of living trap and you don’t even know it.
