Yes, I want it. I want TEOTWAWKI.
Why am I so crazy as to believe I want that? And how many other doomers believe in impending doom more because they want it than because they actually believe, based on an honest appraisal of the world’s situation, that it’s really going to happen in their lifetime?
I can see it: I convince myself and my family that the End is Near, and we move to a farm where a sustainable, self-sufficient life is possible. And so that life, and the unrelenting labor and privation that goes along with it, begins.
But I’m still not happy.
We live out in the country. The roads around here often follow the borders of a section (one square mile), but in our case the roads trace out a rectangle to the North that is 1 1/4 x 1 mile. Close to the opposite corner of the rectangle from where we live, about 1 1/2 miles away, there’s a motorsports family. There are two young motocross-riding men in that family, and they have a little dirt track on their property. They’re pretty good, and they race, they’ve even gained some local fame for their abilities on the motocross track. I can hear them, off in the distance, practicing, riding around and around their loop. It’s not really annoying since it’s so far away; it’s just one of the background sounds in my little corner of the world (although I pity their next-door neighbors — living next to that would drive me insane — seriously).
But still, when I’m working out in my yard, and I hear them, I wish that gasoline cost ten or twenty dollars a gallon and that such a foolish waste of it was not just unwise and immoral (which it already is), but also impractical to the point of idiocy and perhaps illegal. I want something or someone to take those people and force some sense into their heads.
I could go on and on here about how those people are living in a fool’s paradise of cheap gas and past glory, but my intention here is not to analyze them. I’m trying to get at the root of what makes me want those people to stop.
I get the same feeling when I read or think about the Wall Street investment bankers making millions in bonuses every year. I want them to be forced to stop what they’re doing and to be forced to return to the reality most of us not on Wall Street inhabit.
Why?
Because riding motocross and being an investments banker are such peripheral things, that’s why. They are extra, unnecessary things, and they distract from an understanding of the meaning of life. I want everyone to be doing those things that are intimately associated with getting food and water and shelter for themselves and their families, and only those things. And I don’t mean making tons of money to pay for what it takes to keep your family alive, I mean making or doing it with your own hands.
There’s a part of me that wants to cut life to the bone, to remove everything that isn’t essential. I believe that’s how I should live my life. It’s part of wanting to experience and understand what is truly life without all the frills that make it so hard to see what’s at the core. I believe that is the path of wisdom. I believe that is the path of wisdom for myself…and for everyone (who doesn’t believe, in their heart, that if only people were more like them the world would be a better place?). And I believe that a sure route to that simplicity is to raise the price of gasoline to five or ten times its current level, and let that force people to live locally, to become personally involved in the production of food and provision of shelter, to get rid of that which is unnecessary and distracting. In other words, TEOTWAWKI.
Ending and Beginning 