If you were born and live in a first-world country, you should feel lucky that you were born in this era, for there likely will be no era like it, ever again, in the rest of human history.

The way that this society is set up is both luxurious, and fundamentally, with no recourse, unsustainable.

Once upon a time it was relatively easy for a nation state to obtain luxury when something faltered: invade another part of the world, enslave its populace, and pillage its resources. But that's fundamentally not possible anymore. Excluding a few things, first world countries and corporations have more or less taken and controlled near every bit of resource available. There is very little to expand into to improve demand anymore.

The black blood of our economy

The entirety of our way of life is dependent on fossil fuels. You might think that batteries or solar, or hydroelectric will save the day, but no. There is fundamentally nothing that we have discovered, that is both sustainable, and beats both the energy density, and the energy returned per energy invested for fossil fuel. Not even fission power comes close when you consider the incredibly deep investment required to even get a modern plant off the ground.

As only makes sense, we have decided to extract all the most easily available sources first. We extracted most easily extractable sources of oil by roughly 2006, and natural gas roughly 2011. Coal will reach its peak production by roughly 2020. After which, it will become increasingly difficult to hold the position that we are in; almost all economic activity is backed by these three sources of energy, and entirely dependent on it. The more we extract, the more sophisticated, and energy intensive it is to get the next bit of energy. The amount of energy extracted per the amount of energy invested has been gradually falling through the years. Expect the cost of living as you do now, to begin to skyrocket.

Hydroelectric will not save you, as it is limited by geography and can have serious ecological consequences. Wind and geothermal too, are limited by geography and will not be able to sustain economic activity by themselves.

Solar and battery power will not save you. Bleeding edge, better than coal solar panels are dependent on rare earth materials with most of the world's supplies of these things, mostly locked in China and North Korea in quite limited supplies given the rate of consumption. They also are required for most of your other high tech gadgets. Battery technology has more or less hit the physical-chemical edge for energy density. It's currently dependent on cobalt, of which, nearly all of the world's supply is locked in the Congo. It too is under increasingly high demand and we won't be able to mine these things in an increasing rate forever.

The rate of uptake for alternative energy sources is currently woeful, and even if we made it a global priority, it would take nothing short of a miracle to convert our entire economy to these alternatives with how high the cost of it would ultimately be.

Here's the raw deal: Barring the discovery of some magical sort of unobtainium within the next decade (like say, ITER actually being successful), the consumerist lifestyle that you have been trained to conform to is going to collapse. But it's not going to be a sudden, dramatic Great Depression-esque collapse where you're living great one year and having to go to the bread line the year after that. It's going to be a Roman empire style collapse in slow motion. You might not notice empire failing all at once, but bit by bit you will lose things until you don't have things at all. First, even if we pull out of the next recession you can expect your equities will slowly stop making any money; they will be roughly as worthless as the bond market for the less wealthy. Food will start being more expensive and you likely won't be able to get your exotic foods (say farewell to your chocolates and avocados), just locally grown ones. People won't make as many thin and attractive gadgets anymore, and likely people will be recycling parts just to keep the ones they do have working (if they can). Many more practical and easily serviceable designs might return simply out of necessity. The dream of the modern pension/401k will be definitively dead. Generational homes with children taking care of their parents will become common throughout the first world again.

And the empire that sustained this sort of relatively stable globalist commercial market – the United States – will, very slowly, lose its capabilities to maintain the highly global interconnected market. With the fear of the future, and loss of power, the forces of nationalism and tribalism will continue to rise. Like before, they will stick their heads in the sand and vehemently try to deny the inevitable fate of progress. As a result, expect Nicolas Maduro to actually be right within a decade, as the US attempts to gunboat them to secure oil resources. You might also see quite a lot more sabre rattling regarding North Korea as its mining resources start to be eyed increasingly by both Chinese and American allies. There will also be some side issues that will cause conflict across the globe, mainly centered around water and people wasting it spectacularly.

If you do not know any practical skills, learn them now, because when things fall apart you will not be useful and you will not know how to sustain yourself. If you are living exactly at your means and are above median income, learn to live definitively underneath them. If you don't know the community around you, acquaint yourself with it or move to where you will find more like-minded people, because you will need to learn to live with them and possibly act together in mutual aid (this will even help you now). The age where you can aggressively climb the ladder with a fistful of greed and a mildly innovative idea will be dead; if you're not on top already, you'll be on the bottom with the rest of us, where cooperation will be the only means to survive.

Don't trust the state, or the neo-state

I expect that because of the expected runaway cost of living, the state will initially become quite powerful; as people lose more and more, they will try to turn to strong leaders with strongman ideas, and the right wing forces of authoritarian nationalism will initially triumph as inheritors of a crumbling system. You'll see an increase in wars as the jackboots firstly crush the neoliberal's dreams, then secondly scramble to puppet the resources in the global south to feed their panopticon. While the bumbling idiots in the nationalist corners attempt to change the inevitable course of history, the rich asset holding classes will be consolidating their power.

The modern rich will be hold and consolidate their powers. At that point, under an increasing burden of debt and unustainable war, governments as you know them will begin to atrophy and collapse as small corporate enclaves begin to ration and desperately preserve the most remarkable elements of our scientific progress in increasingly dystopian conditions - perhaps around 10-20% of the first world populace might find themselves in this sort of situation, living a pseudo life in the human equivalent of a hamster cage. The rest, who survived the trials and tribulations of the collapse of government, will have to fend for themselves (Mind you, you cannot in truth, trust these things to protect you, even today; they only generally distribute punitive measure after the fact and have no interest nor capability to examine or solve root causes).

Obviously, this scenario is pretty far out there; history can unfold in numerous unexpected ways. Nevertheless, I feel it is pretty clear that humanity has inadvertently, through the sum of numerous individual interactions, overextended itself. And, what's more is that in the past 40-50 years we have essentially forgotten how to take care of ourselves and in the past 15 or so we've begun to slowly forget how to exist and interact with the world around us.

Since the only way we got into this rut is individuals making choices, the only way to get out of this rut is individuals making choices which consciously increases their self reliance and reduces their impact on the world. And the only way to do that is to get people to realize that there is both alternative ways to live, and to show that simplifying your life, and doing things on your own is ultimately in many ways to your own individual benefit.

And so, this is partially what I have recently been attempting to illustrate and practice. We really need to figure out how to take care of ourselves.