And Life Goes On...

An old REM song keeps popping into my head with greater frequency these days, and I find myself crooning, "The world is collapsing ... around our ears..." to my cow, for instance, as I go about milking.

No doubt this financial crisis is worming its way into more American (and beyond!) psyches than just mine. We're poised on the brink of a reckoning, without a doubt, and regardless of how it all shakes out, the unknown is difficult to handle. There's simply nothing out there yet to wrap our brains around, no solid challenge to tackle head on. Just lurking shadows of history and chimeras of fear that keep us all on edge each time we round a corner.

Add to that the perfect storm of peak oil, population, and global instability and we live in very interesting times, indeed.

I vacillate between panic and paralysis in my own head, and who really needs to read about my private neuroses? So, I've been pretty quiet here lately, preferring to go insular and spend much of my time, mouth agape, watching the train wreck in front of my eyes, searching for small hints and signs of direction and best action.

I admit I'm filled with doom and gloom these days. I think there's a very good chance that we're headed into a global depression as the culture of credit and consumption catches up with all of us whether we're complicit personally or not. (Though I'd argue that it's impossible to live in the developed world without being complicit.) The direct infusion of cash into banks worldwide is enough to momentarily shore up the financial systems, but simply printing more money is not a long term answer. Far from it—it is instead a short-term band-aid that arises out of the same profligate mentality that got us into this global crisis in the first place.

We humans are unsustainable. That is the most basic inconvenient truth of our lives and one we're now forced to face. What we're seeing is a mad dash to deny that truth, or at the very least to keep the man behind the curtain for just a little while longer and continue the deception for the masses.

Our culture is unsustainable. Our sense of comfort and convenience and the entitlement to both are unsustainable. Our hubris and push toward immortality are unsustainable.

Our governments and financial leaders keep telling us that the central problem to the crisis is that credit is locked up. No. The central problem to this crisis is that the cash to lend no longer exists. Not that it ever did, of course, but now the house of cards has collapsed, and the Ponzi scheme of endless credit is revealed. Banks are holding onto their cash to try to cover their own asses. But that doesn't change the fact that there's nothing real, nothing hard behind the paper, and if we continue to try simply to print our way out of this mess, we're in for a world of hurt down the line. Pain now or pain later. Or both.

The point is that our economy is contracting, and this contraction back toward some semblance of sustainability will be painful. Jobs. Homes. Food. These are the basic things that we'll see falter. As the economy contracts, more and more jobs will be lost, affecting folks' ability to pay mortgage or rent, which means more people will lose their homes. Not just people who were overextended, but perfectly solvent and responsible people who depended upon their job to pay for food and shelter. Pretty basic stuff since most of us fall into that category.

How secure is your income? How adaptable are you? How self-sufficient? These are the questions I'm asking myself and I think everyone should be asking.

Can we pay off a 30 year mortgage in the next year? No way. Is our income secure enough to rest assured that we'll keep our home? I hope. Do we have ways of creating income should our current one fail? I don't know because history tells me that even if I can produce goods for sale, there's no guarantee anyone will be able to buy them in a depressed society.

Aren't you glad I'm back? I promise I'll go light on the gloom and doom and heavy on the self-sufficient stuff in the coming days.