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 employer loyalty, sky-high education costs resulting in record student debt balances, and over-inflated housing prices making first-time home buying unaffordable, many are simply “opting out.” They are—consciously or unconsciously—under-enthused to blindly follow the American Dream recipe of: go to school, get a job, get married, buy a house, and consume, consume, consume! Many rightly see this instead as a recipe for lifelong debt serfdom, especially when they’re also being asked to pay for the excessive debts and unfunded entitlements racked up by the generations that preceded them. Oh yes, and all while inheriting a national infrastructure that is quite literally falling apart.
Is it any mystery then why millennials are much less able, let alone interested and willing, to make major purchases (car, home, etc), get married, have children, or work a standard 9-to-5 corporate job as previous cohorts their same age?
We see similar pressure brewing between the haves and the have-nots. Across the world, the wealth gap between the rich and poor has rarely been as extreme as it is now. Remember that competition for pie slices? Well, as the pie itself stops getting bigger, those in power use their authority and influence to keep their share of the pie growing for as long as possible afterwards. This results in less and less for everyone else.
We can see direct evidence of this reality in the dramatic jump in wealth disparity that has happened since the 2008 financial crisis. For a few years, the credit pie stopped growing—and what happened? The response engineered by our governments directed trillions of new dollars into the asset classes owned by the already-rich, resulting in a robust boost to their portfolio values while the rest of the 99% has been left to simply watch and struggle onwards.
The outbreak of protest the world saw during the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2009-2011 was an immediate reaction to the unfairness of this class dichotomy. We are likely to see this pattern again, this time with more vitriol and violence, as the wealth gap grows further.
There’s a similar dynamic at the geopolitical level. A general East vs. West tension is brewing as developing nations increasingly look to wrest resources from the clutches of the OECD members, whom they understandably argue have consumed more than their fair share
