The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [135]
Work
Living and working and playing should ideally happen as close to each other as possible. We looked for an area that did not require significant amounts of driving to address all three of those needs. While many communities will figure out the relocalization details by necessity, we wanted to start in a place where at least some of the details had already been worked out. Do bike trails exist? Is there navigable water nearby? Does public transportation exist? Do people tend to live close to where they work? Some areas don’t offer the perfect answers to all three needs, but creative solutions may already exist . . .or perhaps they’re waiting for someone like you to implement them.
What Should I Do?
What should you do? The list is potentially endless in its details, but simple enough in total: Begin preparing for change. This chapter has offered just a sampling of potential areas of change. I invite you to visit my web site, www.ChrisMartenson.com, for more information on the many subjects that are involved in preparation and to stay abreast of current developments. I have done my best to make this process easier with a free, online preparation guide that addresses the suggestions raised in this chapter in more specific detail (www.ChrisMartenson.com/what-should-i-do).
The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll begin to feel happier, more in control, and ready to face the future with your eyes fixed on the opportunities and options that do inevitably exist.
CHAPTER 28
The Opportunities
The story that I’ve told here is one of change. In any such story, both challenges and opportunities await. I’m hoping for a favorable, less painful outcome, but I’m also prepared for things to get worse before they get better. One thing that I absolutely don’t see happening is a one-way descent into chaos. Yes, there may be dips in the road, and, yes, it may be a long slog toward the light, but even so, we’ll pick ourselves up and carry on again. I see enormous opportunities waiting to be claimed, both during the period of adjustment and afterward.
The first opportunity in this story is to take advantage of this information to make changes in your life, investments, and community now, while the options remain abundant, reasonably accessible, and relatively easy. As I shared in the introduction to this book, my family and I have made enormous changes in our lives in response to this information, and we feel strongly that we are better off and enjoy a higher quality of life as a result. No matter how the future turns out, I will enjoy a better outcome because of my actions.
One set of opportunities that the future will not offer is anything that relies upon or requires a simple continuation of the past: an uninterrupted extrapolation of the past trajectory into the wild blue yonder. The energy for such a jaunt will be insufficient, and whether or not that turns out to be a limiting factor (as I believe it will be), the Great Credit Bubble will need to deflate quite a bit more before a renewed bout of debt accumulation can possibly begin again.
Below are the opportunities that I see, based on the understanding that energy and resources will have to be more carefully utilized in the future. Their careful stewardship and higher cultural value will support certain types of jobs, investments, and wealth accumulation, but not others. In most cases, I’m assuming that primary and secondary sources of wealth will triumph over tertiary forms, as we “get back to the basics” for a while. You may not share my assessment, and that’s perfectly all right; nobody has a lock on