My brain was not built for the current times, it was built to function in a time approximately 100 years ago, which is why I can’t function in this era. I can’t hold down a job, maintain a home and raise a family – at the same time. I barely have enough brain capacity or energy to deal with one of those, and working and raising children aren’t it. My brain, however, is a blessing and here’s why.
The current times we live in were created at the end of WW2, based on building the economy and the population. There was an explosion in housing, white goods, cars, fast clothing, the population and it was all seen as positive. The quicker these things got going, the sooner countries would recover from the devastation of war. People born after the war, baby boomers, grew up marinading in a society that saw abundance and expansion as good things, any sense of loss was seen as traumatic because the adults had experienced great loss through the war and for them, loss (or less) and trauma were fused together. They raised their children – our parents or grandparents – to strive for more! more! more! because more meant safety. Baby boomers then raised their own children to think this way, and those children, Gen X, grew up to be the driving force of the ‘Greed is Good’ decade in the 1980’s.
The natural consequence of this ever expanding production on a planet with finite resources is what we see today, destabled weather patterns, land degradation and species either extinct or dangerously close to it. Add to that the super rich who have monopolised every market, turning housing, water, food and basic health care into commodities for making them more and ever more money at the expense of every person, you have a catastrophe in the making.
It can’t last and it’s not going to.
We are already seeing signs of instability in food supply and production, we are already feeling the effects of disruption to oil which we see at the petrol bowsers, many are not having to decide between eating for a week or paying the electricity bill. It’s only going to get worse from here, even if trump doesn’t take us all into WW3. The good times could not last and they are coming to an end. We are heading back to a pre-WW1 society in terms of living conditions and this is where my brain comes in.
As a toddler and young child I would sit with my grandmother in the kitchen while she cooked. She never taught me directly how to cook, but watching her gave me a love for cooking up interesting and nutritious meals that sparked to live the centuries of cooking and baking that had run through out ancestral line. When I was 2 or 3 my grandmother hand stitched a dress for me with a unicorn and star on it, I loved watching her sew or iron and still today, I choose hand sewing over machine any time. My mother taught me knitting and I taught myself crochet in my late 40’s.
My brain likes to focus on one interest at a time, known as a Special Interest or SPin. For me, the vast majority have been around learning practical survival skills or knowledge. In my life time, along with sewing, cooking, knitting, etc I have also gained experience exploring growing food, basic wood working and repairing furniture, simple food preserving, first aid, bush survival, building fires and finding the best way to have something I want as cheaply as possible. I may not have been able to build up a life time of work experience and money, but I have built up a life time of survival skills that will keep me alive, no matter what. THAT is why my brain is a blessing.
In the early 1990’s I made a prediction that the stock market would dissolve within 50 years, that we would experience a depression so bad it would make the Great Depression look like a picnic. I can see it coming now and I realise the end of the stock market isn’t going to be some sudden implosion, it’s going to happen slowly. As more and more people are dealing with skyrocketing living costs, they don’t have the money left over for luxuries like investing. Bit by bit, people are going to drop off the stock market until the only ones left are the mega rich and even they can’t keep the massive number of stocks going. Once they own 90%+ of all stocks in all businesses and there are no people able to afford the products those businesses produce, the businesses are going to close down. How will those stock holders then make their money? They won’t be able to sell the stocks either, because the only people in the game will be other mega rich people who know the signs of businesses in trouble and they’ll be dealing with their own stock troubles anyway. The stock market was nothing more than a rich person’s gambling game they conned enough non-rich people into participating in.
I have no crystal ball, no way of knowing what will actually appear in the future. I do have a brain that spots patterns and trends very quickly and can making connections between them faster than I can think about them. It’s like my brain produces the answer before the question has finished being asked. I have learnt to trust my brain in things like this than any other person alive. This is why I am now building a pantry of staples and things we like, to help weather any disruption to the ‘just-in-time’ supply system we now live with. Not brand products in convenient packaging sizes, but things like legumes, lentils, sugar, rice, salt, oats, etc. Buying in bulk then repackaging at home into smaller portions and storing in a way they will last a couple of years. This ensures I have the basics to turn into meals myself so I don’t have to rely on supermarkets. It also means going forward, I only have to buy items to fill in blanks in my pantry, when something is running low. That alone drops the weekly grocery spend to under half what it costs now. Imagine a grocery spend coming out to between $100 and $200 a month. I stocked up before COVID and that taught me how valuable doing so is. I’m setting up my pantry now so I will never have serious anxiety over food in the future. I don’t know why my brain decided to obsess over survival skills but I am so glad it did. My brain has turned out to be a true blessing for me.