...if you're TWO steps ahead of the curve, they'll call you crazy.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I truly believe that the type of lifestyle that I have designed over the last few years, and the types of ideas that I come up with, are decades ahead of the current time.

In a future involving a drastic decline in energy and resources, environmental collapse, and the crumbling of the complex systems that society depends on to function and exist, the uncomfortable fact is that everyone will need to adapt, or die. So, the ability to not only survive, but to thrive on a mere 5-10% of the energy, water, money and material resources that the average American consumes would be an indispensable skill set.

People may look down at me, think I'm paranoid or crazy, or think the way I live is "extreme", and to an extent it is extreme... But not nearly as extreme as the fact that Americans constitute 5% of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy. That is far more extreme, and it is going to have extremely horrific consequences for everyone on earth, but at this current moment in time it's still normalized in our society, so we don't realize how extreme and horrific it truly is. This is not to blame the average American *individual* at all, this system was designed before we were born by the ultra wealthy and top capital owning classes, primarily to their benefit. The average American didn't sign up for this system, we were all simply born into this late stage capitalistic hellscape.

The point is, collapse is inevitably coming, and I'll be more likely to be ready for it, but I want to make sure our communities are ready for it as well, the challenge is persuading them without sounding crazy. No politician will ever be able to acknowledge these truths because it would necessarily entail drastic economic degrowth, which would be career suicide to any politician who dared propose it. They need to be cheerleaders for "more jobs" and Infinite economic growth on a finite planet, and business as usual on a fundamental systemic level. But that system is killing us, there is no reforming it. It's revolution or death. And as much as I try to remain hopeful and optimistic, a lot of the evidence is pointing to death. But that won't stop me from doing everything I can to turn things around, by both living the change that I want to see at an individual level, while at the same time advocating for a fundamental systematic restructuring at a collective societal level. And in the meantime, I'm doing my part to help create a parallel society, prefigurative support structures to meet all of our survival needs, essentially creating the "new" within the shell of the "old", so that during and after the dominant society's collapse, there will hopefully at least be some anarchic support structures to emerge from the rubble.

But since I'm thinking so many steps ahead of the curve, they'll keep calling me crazy... All the way up until they can't deny their reality crashing down on them anymore. But by then, it will be far too late. It might already be too late. But I have to try anyway.