Hey, this will be one of my first impromptu and regular posts on this site.
I came up with LiveResilient as a concept pretty soon after college with the notion that I would write the solutions to the world’s problems. The notion was that the future is probably very dismal in a lot of ways on the grand scale – I don’t think that energy and natural resources can hold up a continued growth model of civilization, which is the only model that we use in most of the world. The writing of any grand pieces was shelved as my career took a nosedive, but I always kept a focus on what individuals can do to change not just their circumstances, but the circumstances of those around them, and keep themselves from being swept away by historical forces as best we can.
When I was a kid growing up in 90’s to 2000’s America, the threat of annhilation or social breakdown was quite remote. My hometown in Southern California was the safest large city in the country for many years running. But, as a nerdy kid who lived out in the world of fantasy, of science fiction, history, and the internet, there were always the stories – of past historical periods, of conjured scenarios of zombies or nuclear warfare, that made us examine how we would fare under some sort of catastrophe.
I believe the catastrophe is now, it’s been here a while – the catastrophe and apocalypse being merely the of apocalypse – revealing of all. Modern state systems were built on foundations of the industrial revolution, of religiously adhering populations with millennia of social devleopment behind them. Now we live in a connected world, where materialism reigns, and nothing truly justifies you feeling secure in it, except perhaps in personal relationships, or in the older culture of belonging you may feel in your land.
For those of us in the New World, we’re often estranged from any long-term culture with connection to the land, we’re uprooted from the places of our upbringing by typical social or economic mechanisms of displacement (college, job-hunting, etc.). We’ll have to rely on ourselves first and always, and if we’re lucky we’ll have a few close people. But often we’re lost in a sea of other similarly displaced and rootless individuals.
Within the context of rootlessness, displacement, breakdown, and uncertainty, however, we can appeal to fundamentals of human existence on this planet to guide us. We can find in the currents of nature around us handholds to steady ourselves in a context that has more stability than can be offered by human-built institutions.
Even within our bewildering world of human interactions, one that is changing more rapidly than ever before, we can look to the past to find fundamentals of humanity – in interpersonal relations, in religion, in history – that will reduce our distress and provide the raw material for constructing resilient worldviews even as the world goes potentially to hell around us.
In a world where nothing is certain, it is certain that the will to adapt is the strongest weapon we have, and it’s one that will always be within your reach. So that will to adapt, which you certainly have, reader, even if you don’t put it in the terms I use here – is what I will attempt to equip and support with my work on this site.
