One of the things which bothers me a lot is the burden of knowledge.  Knowledge is a burden, in the same way that ignorance can be bliss.  As somebody who watches and learns and synthesizes vast swathes of information out there, sometimes the endless chatter gets to me.  It is not easy to sit and chat with the other soccer parents in good humor, while knowing full well that a lot of people are going to die in the next 10 years.

Do I need to explain why I’m certain a lot of people are going to die in the next 10 years?  I feel like I should at least provide an inexhaustive summary, yet again.  First, we have the hydrocarbon problem.  From peak oil production, to peak oil exports in the Land-Export model, to the war cycle causing supply disruptions with tanker wars and pipeline failures both manmade and not.  Knowing that hydrocarbons are the source of a bunch of pesticides and fertilizers, that hyrdrocarbons are required to mine the potash, that they’re required to run the processing facilities, to make the plastic bags, to make the cans, to deliver all the food hither and yon, and much more.  Our food supply is very entangled with hydrocarbons.  For that matter, so is our water supply.

Next, we have the banking problem.  The petrodollar has failed/is failing.  The debt can never be repaid, so it won’t be.  There are rumors of Russia/China going back to a gold-backed currency, and stepping up their financial warfare efforts.  Identity theft becomes more rampant.  Bitcoin is a sabot.  China is putting in the infrastructure for a completely new banking paradigm, and may be why the financial center of Empire shifts to Beijing.  The dollar gets rejected as the US chooses to become more isolated, bloated, bureaucratic, and police state.  Tax All The Things leads to dollar rejection, which leads to volatility and financial uncertainty, and financial uncertainty leads to demand destruction in a potentially deflationary spiral plus capital flight.

We also have a climate problem.  We have floods and droughts, winter turning straight to summer without spring, a reduction in pollinating insect life in certain locations, and a change in chill hours.  We still have wind and hail destroying crops, as well as things like wheat rust reducing yields substantially.  We have a sunspot cycle which isn’t helping things.  Plus the food we do grow has less nutrients because the soil has been killed, the microbiota isn’t there to make the extra nutrients bioavailable.  Plus 2000 more locations besides Flint, Michigan still have even higher levels of lead in their water.  That’s not even touching Peak Water, as aquifers run dry.  We also have deadly viral illnesses which are becoming more common, or maybe they just spread more rapidly than they did in the past.

Understanding that the future is headed downhill, that people won’t be able to meet their needs no matter what their ideologies say, can be difficult to tolerate.  Yet, I must.  I can’t handle alcohol, so I’m not one to drown my sorrows in wine or harder.  Instead, I go run, or swim, or bike, and do something that makes me sweat.  To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter whether the government is run the best way ever, if the oil, the food, the water, the medical care just simply can’t continue on at the same levels as before.  People are still going to die in much greater numbers than usual.  Even so, perhaps there is a reason that declining empires right after the peak have vicious warlords at their helm, followed by self-absorbed megalomaniacs during their further decline.  Perhaps the pattern is necessary to drive people to flee to better locations, to encourage the rise of the death rate before the resources run dry so that everybody else suffers less.  It isn’t clear that bad governments are a bad thing.  If they encourage self-reliance and self-resilience in the downswing of public confidence, perhaps they necessarily prompt people to decentralize.

Meanwhile, social media is cracking down on hate speech, and by the way, everything is hate speech.  At least, everything digital is hate speech.  Analog speech is still just fine, especially if you don’t show your anxiety over the future and can talk about the weather, or where they think the best burger place is within the soccer league boundaries.  For some reason, I value it more now than I did.  Perhaps, in the back of my mind, I know they’re going to die, so I seize each precious moment I’ve got?