I feel both relieved and joyous as well as sad and mournful when reflecting on big-ass CRASH. Im thinking actual crash is already happening and im both smiling and crying alternatly. I guess BIG-ASS-CRASH will amplify all those feelings. The intensity of my fears my doubts my happiness and tears will probably be amplified by the enormity of what is happening around me.
I find pleasure in viewing afterpocalypse though.
cheers
Part of what makes this hard is the thinking that goes along with modern society. When I was 14 in 1979 2 kids took the Principle of my Jr. High school hostage with shotguns. It made the local news it made the papers it probably made 15 seconds on some out of state news channels, there was no CNN there was no one there to turn it into a carnival. The same thing happens when I hear about 100,000 people dieing in Africa because of tribal violence. I feel sad in an academic way because I can’t remember a time in my life when Africans weren’t dying. I personally felt nothing, had there not been an international news media there to tell me I would have never known. Without international media there death becomes very personal. Your sphere of influence shrinks, so it becomes; please Lord not my wife not my child not my Mother. Then it stretches out to not the guy I traded with last spring when we ran low on food and he didn’t. The reason 9/11 hit Americans so hard is because it felt personal to us. We all knew that tragedy of far greater magnitude happen all the time, but they were far away and we felt they couldn’t happen here. However without media to tell us people 2000 miles away on the west coast we wouldn’t have known either. You’re probably not going to know what’s going on it the next county let along the rest of the world.
the crash is happening.
this massive dieoff i don’t even anticipate happening. unless, unless! we get into some kind of war scrambling over the scraps of civilization. remember those bombs & warheads don’t dismantle themselves.
as for thinking about who would die, i know i would. i’m a domesticated human, and as bad as it gets. i didn’t see a living cow upclose (and not just a dot while passing by on the freeway) until i was 12 years old. i woud die, and perhaps some members of my family would not. i know in my bones that my family has not done very well in this society because we have a pre-copernican worldview. most things still happen asif by magic to us, and the public school system did not help much in understanding the increasing level of complication. we have long lived multi-generational under one roof, but dysfunctional at that. so some of them are already prepared in that respect to deal with a tribal mindset. they’d lose their ‘bread & circus’, though.
whatever i imagine might happen probably will not play out exactly as i’ve imagined it, so i try to just be open & mentally prepared for any possibility. it is quite possible that this collapse will play out so slowly that we won’t feel the gradual creepingness of it. then again…
everyone on earth, who manages to think about things deeply, suffers because of it. less people=less suffering. this is illustrated by my recent lack of finding a good response to a friend who announced their pregnancy. my thoughts on children are largely ‘why bring something into this world only to have it suffer & die’. and we all do suffer in some way, & eventually die. people generally only see the positives in birthing when they get into it, just like they only see the positives with buying the new blackberry, etc. the negatives have been externalized; after all, they never anticipate having to actually SEE their own kids die, so to their reality it won’t happen. that takes place abstractly for them sometime off in the distant future, just like garbage dumps happen ‘out there’ beyond the city somewhere.
hrm, perhaps my family isn’t the only one engaged in magical thinking!
It seems that mental preparations precede physical prep. I’m finding the hardest part of preparing for collapse is enumerating the possible scenarios of the collapse. Most of the discussions about preparedness I have read/heard come from survivalists that are expecting a more or less immediate SHTF event. It strikes me that the collapse might not be so immediate or obvious. I am trying to formulate short-term and long-term plans for collapse.
Besides timing there are other certain and possible variables to account for: peak oil, global warming, mass extinction, martial law, power outages and as has been pointed out in this discussion mass human starvation.
Not only do those who want to ride out the collapse have to consider all of these possibilities and/or eventualities. We also have to keep a clear head and not get anxious. Many of the folks whose prepping plans/advice I’ve been paying attention to are disappointed about the coming collapse of civilization, so I have to constantly remind myself to not haul around their emotional baggage.
i daydream regularly about the future. one that has recurred to me lately is this:
a few years into the future, i and some friends are living in the mountains, rather simply, growing a small vegetable and herb garden, tending to an orchard we planted, growing mushrooms, doing crafts. we live as self-sufficiently as we can.
but a steady stream of old friends who went down different paths – to become accountants, scientists, politicians, etc. – begin showing up. they each come telling of the hardship that has befallen them and everyone back in the cities. they’re looking for a place where they can live safe from all that, where they can survive the difficult times.
i ask every one of them, “why did you wait until it was a matter of survival to come?”
…
as redwolfreturns said in another thread, the real frightening situation for me is that this civilization goes on and that i’ll forever be stuck in it. i want to get out. i want to live a different way. i don’t want to do this because civilization is collapsing, i want to do this because it is what my heart most calls me to do. i don’t want to survive. i want to be free.
[quote=“wildeyes, post:25, topic:821”]…
as redwolfreturns said in another thread, the real frightening situation for me is that this civilization goes on and that i’ll forever be stuck in it. i want to get out. i want to live a different way. i don’t want to do this because civilization is collapsing, i want to do this because it is what my heart most calls me to do. i don’t want to survive. i want to be free.[/quote]
Hell Yes !
perhaps that should be my ultimately goal–to live the dream, regardless of what civilization does to itself.
it really seems like what the earth needs is a massive die off,i anticipate it only out of wanting to be prepared for it.ive seriously been contemplating browsing some hardcore pictures of starving people,death camps,dead bodies etc just so i dont go into shock when i have to witness brutal atrocities.
Wildeyes, my dream is much the same. However, I am worried that civilization will crash while I am still attached to it.
This reminds me of my own story.
So does this.
I have a hard time feeling happy about pregnancies, too. But it’s not so much because I think that human life is inherently something to be suffered. Certainly, everyone suffers sometimes, but not all the time, and I think there are reasons why people suffer – in other words, I don’t think that life is all suffering, all the time, by its very nature.
I do think that civilization is a radical departure from balanced, sustainable cultures, and so it puts people in positions of extreme or prolonged suffering that is quite damaging. And I think that any significant reduction in world population that may or may not happen is probably going to happen very quickly, as opposed to gradually/voluntarily, so people would suffer very much during a hypothetical population crash. In other words… the majority of the suffering I’ve witnessed/felt (and that which I might witness/feel in a collapse) can be linked to the society which brings out large-scale destruction, dominance, and arrogance in people… linked to its existence as well as the end (collapse) of its existence.
Until people no longer suffer in this way, under this hierarchical regime of blind insensitivity, I feel uncomfortable with pregnancy… not just mine, but nearly anyone else’s. No matter how great a parent I might want or try to be, I feel that it would be just plain irresponsible to add another person into a social environment of oppression that would cause them to suffer. And I’m not sure I can give a child any alternative environment… while I can try to change myself, there are things exterior to myself which I can’t change or control.
this may not be directly pertinent to the discussion at hand, but i found this slightly inspiring:
Unemployed use time for health, hobbies and family
http://my.earthlink.net/article/nat?guid=20090208/498e74e0_3ca6_15526200902081865486779