Preparing for the Apocalypse
Are you ready for world collapse?
Are you ready for the apocalypse? It’s coming. In fact, it’s always been coming. My grandfather understood the threat of the end of the world. He remembered the Great Depression. There were a few winters when his family struggled to put food on the table. Fortunately, they had harvested a bountiful supply of turnips from the garden that year. Thankfully, those turnips in the root cellar saved the day.
My grandfather never felt more secure than when he had a larder full of food.
He and my grandmother led a lifestyle centered around plenty of food. They gardened, canned, froze food, and hung cured hams from the ceiling of their summer kitchen. They clipped coupons and stocked up on items that were on sale at the grocery store. They had chickens, a pig or two, a cow, and fruit trees. My grandmother knew how to gather food in the wild. Hickory nuts, walnuts, and mushrooms were collected and gladly used. Nothing went to waste. If they didn’t eat it all, then the animals on the farm got the scraps.
Sigh.
Their lifestyle is a lost art. Modern humans have lost the skills to provide for themselves. We have become dependent upon the almighty dollar to get us everything that we need. We’ll slave our lives away in an office cubicle collecting that green stuff, which we believe is our key to never going hungry. We’ll rape and pillage the earth in order to prop up a life of waste and wanton neglect and call it the American Dream.
But you can’t eat money.
You see, whenever panic sweeps through America, we do the same damn thing. We run out and stockpile in a fever. The shelves are soon bare, supply and demand are thrown awry, and shortages are created. Prices go up, and many items become difficult to find. It’s something we can count on. Whether it’s an incoming storm, a possible collapse of the banking system, rumors of war, or political upheaval, modern humans tend to panic, stockpile, and then relax and immediately go back to their old helpless ways. The incentive to suddenly live like my grandparents did isn’t about treasuring smart and realistic goals, but about saving our asses in a pinch.
Very few people want to go back to the good old days.
Not really. For all the talk about the good old days, most of us would hate living like my grandparents. I mean, the people we admire are the rich with lavish lifestyles of excessive waste, those who live high on the hog and squander natural resources. The good old days are nothing more than a bedtime story that we tell ourselves. Most modern humans are quite content to manage life in a technological bubble. We surround ourselves with junk and stuff while our cupboards only hold enough food for a week or two at best. We’ve blown our money on plastic, toys, and junk while completely forgetting that you can’t eat any of that stuff. Our priorities are detrimentally skewed.
We’re so impractical that we barely have enough money laid back to get through six months if we lost our jobs.
No, we’ve got to keep up with the Joneses, and that means crippling debt with no way out of our predicament any time soon. So when we hit panic mode, when we’re triggered by fear and the possibility of collapse, we run out like crazy people, hair standing on end, pupils dilated, hands thrown above our heads, and start grabbing anything and everything in sight.
Are we headed toward a collapse of the economy?
Are we staring at the possibility of World War III? Are things stacking up in such a way as to create the perfect storm? Will we see the world we know change dramatically? No one can predict the future with complete certainty, but we can know this — the world is always teetering on the brink of devastation. Whether it’s Mother Nature attacking with overwhelming strength and tenacity or mankind destroying everything we’ve worked so hard to create, we’re always one step away from a major shift in reality.
Rather than panic and run out to stockpile everything and anything we can get our hands on, why not adopt a lifestyle more like my grandparents modeled? Are we so crazy we can’t learn from history? Are we so shallow that we simply are unable to think below the superficial levels of our silly friends and neighbors?
I wonder.
Teresa is an author and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
