There that knowledge sits, just out of sight, like an unwanted guest until an approaching storm wakes it up and brings it to the surface. So what can we do about it? That’s easy; buy some extra long-term storage food that will last for 30 years without needing any additional attention and kick that worry right out of your brain. Your authors did exactly that a number of years ago, and the sense of peace it bought has paid itself back many times over compared to the relatively minor expense of the actual food.
Even better, there’s no way to lose. If we’ve concerned ourselves over a risk that never materializes (hopefully!) and we never have to actually use that stored food, then we’ll donate it to a food bank or other worthy outlet in three decades. We get to feel good about the donation and maybe even take a tax deduction in the process. No matter how you slice it, in terms of reduced anxiety, effort or money, it wasn’t wasted effort.
So our advice here is simple: if you want to reduce your fears, anxiety or concern about the future, don’t just sit there, do something!
SELFLESS NOT SELFISH
Another objection we hear to the prospect of preparing and becoming more resilient is that those actions could be seen as being selfish. Instead we see them as being selfless. Those who are not prepared when an emergency strikes are a drain on critical resources, while those who are prepared can be of assistance.
To be among those who can be in a position to render assistance, or at least need none of their own, means that your prior acts of preparation have selflessly removed you from the minus column and placed you on the plus side.
The first steps towards preparedness usually involve addressing your own needs or those of your loved ones, but many people then go beyond that and prepare for others who may not be able to do so, or have not done so, or maybe even will not do so.
But let us put an important qualifier on that; preparing before a crisis hits is responsible and selfless, but trying to accumulate necessary items during a crisis is an act of hoarding. We do not and never will advocate hoarding. Responsible preparations begin long before any trouble appears. Anything else stands a good chance of making things worse, not better.
The news has been full of stories of how people behave when scarcity strikes and they are generally not pretty. People in Boston fought over bottled water just hours after a water main broke in 2010. Nasty fights, too.
In Venezuela, as of the writing of this book, desperate people are attempting to buy anything and everything that might remain in the stores as their national currency devalues by the day. This is bringing forth all sorts of government-mandated counter measures that make it impossible for many families to buy essential items.
We mentioned earlier that time may well be your most valuable asset in becoming resilient. Be aware that many things that are easily available now may be difficult to obtain later. Now, before any big crises have hit, it’s very easy to pick up the phone, or click a mouse button, and have the big brown truck of happiness roll up to your doorstep a few days later. Everything you could ever want to buy is currently available and stores are abundantly stocked in most countries. However, we can imagine a large number of possible futures where such easy access to consumer goods and desired items is either much more difficult or impossible.
WHAT RESILIENCE IS NOT
In closing, it’s worth clarifying a few things that resilience is not.
Sometimes people think that our encouragement of becoming resilient is the same thing as being a “prepper” or survivalist. While we might recommend a few of the same items that you’d find in a prepper’s house, that’s where the similarity ends.
Our version of resilience and preparedness has nothing to do with living in fear, merely hoping to survive. It’s about thriving today—and tomorrow—whatever the future brings.
Being prepared, or resilient, is something that any prudent adult can and should aspire to. Like a boat captain who assures that his ship is properly equipped with a working radio, life vests, and life rafts, each of us can and should do the same for our own households.
And just as we’d never accuse a captain with proper safety equipment of being a pessimist or a crackpot hoping his boat will someday sink, it’s equally inappropriate to cast efforts towards resilience as somehow being unbalanced. To us, the exact opposite is true. Those who refuse to take even minimal efforts towards securing their own futures are exposing themselves and those around them to unnecessary risks.
Think of it like carrying fire insurance on a home. That’s socially acceptable, is considered prudent, and nobody ever implies that the owner of home who carries fire insurance is secretly hoping that their home burns down.
Now that we know what resilience is, and what it is not, let’s move deeper.
RESILIENCE — WHY DOES IT MATTER?
As we look at the global predicaments laid out in Chapter 2—The Three Es—it’s natural to wonder: How did we get here?
The reasons are numerous—resource exploitation, population expansion, a profound societal disconnection from nature, short-term thinking, to name just a few—but the underlying cause is the same: our never-ending pursuit of growth.
A FAILED NARRATIVE
Research shows that it’s the stories we tell ourselves that guide and determine our destiny. And we, as a global society, have near-universally embraced a narrative that says “More is Better!” about practically every aspect of life.
Financially, we’re told that having more money is better than having less. At the national level, we’ve constructed an economy that must grow in order to function well—and so our politicians and captains of industry constantly agitate for more GDP and more job growth. To feed this growth, more and more debt is created each year. Energetically, this drives countries around the world in a race to extract more barrels of oil and other fossil fuels out of the ground. It’s the same with mineral ores, with bushels of food harvested, with fishery hauls, with new houses built, new cars manufactured, new smart phones sold, and on and on…
This narrative of “ever more” is coded deep within our ancestry. It served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well, as they lived under conditions of much greater resource scarcity than most humans today. Securing more calories, or more sexual mates, often determined the survival of both the person and their progeny. It continued to serve the human race well as we developed agriculture and began to industrialize. At least, for as long as civilizations had access to untapped resources.
But in today’s world where there are no more undiscovered continents and the concentration of remaining resources is becoming increasingly dilute, we are the first living generation to encounter limits to growth on a planetary scale. We no longer live in a world where our narrative of endless growth is possible, let alone desirable.
And as the global resources pie no longer expands as it once did, competition for the slices that remain intensifies—especially with overall world population still growing. If history is any guide (and we think it is), increased competition for resources will lead to friction between nations, social classes, and demographic groups alike—discord that is becoming ever more apparent, as those adhering to the old narrative find themselves increasingly unfulfilled and frustrated.
A good example of this is the wide-scale rejection of cultural norms the millennial generation is demonstrating (those born between the early 1980s and early 2000s). Facing a tough job market (the unemployment rate of millennials in the United States is double that of the overall population) that offers low wages and little