Your reactions to Peak Oil may have to do with the extent to which you've accepted and embraced your current community values and norms.
If you've been an active and accepted member of your community:
You may be active in your community, your union, your civic organization, your religious institution. You may have successfully adjusted to your community, having lived by its rules and accepted its rewards and limitations. You are invested in keeping something that has "worked" for you.
The more rewarding your life, the more painful the shock of Peak Oil may be to you.
You've watched "The End of Suburbia" and realized that the house you are working so hard to maintain and furnish now seems like the dinosaur of the future. Instead of a sign of your wealth, the debt feels like a noose around your neck.
Maybe you've moved quite far from your work to give your family a larger house and yard. Now, you are watching your commute to work get a whole lot more expensive.
Maybe you have big dreams you've been saving towards implementing: to start a business, to spend a month in Europe, to head off to a prestigious university, to get married or have another child. Now, instead you wonder whether you'll be drafted into the military to fight for more oil, lose your job, or be able to feed the family you now have.
If you've had doubts about the viability of your world:
Maybe you've already been cynical about the trade-offs offered by traditional culture:
Maybe for these and related reasons, you have harbored various fears about
In the wake of Peak Oil, these now seem totally justified to you. Your loved ones however, say you are using Peak Oil as yet another "excuse."
This same cynicism might leave you feeling disconnected from the people around you, or unable to make any decision that can lead to positive changes in your life.
This same 'disconnection' from the culture at large may cause you to increase your isolation from others closest to you and those who can be helpful in forming a viable community. You may feel that there is no sense trying to make friends if 'mankind is doomed.'
If you have never "fit in," anyway, why try now, when one sees a 'dog eat dog' world competing for scarce resources?
A certain hatefulness may start to compensate for your loneliness.
The challenges are slightly different, depending on whether you've accepted and became a part of your community or have remained skeptical and distant from it.
In both, there is a learning to accept the differences and antagonisms that exist between people and create what Eric Erikson calls a "mutuality of devotion." This is a kind of love in which enables a person not only to find a good marriage and love one's family, but extend that attachment to one's friends, neighbors, co-workers and community as well. The phrase "think globally, act locally" implies the capacity to recognize the interconnectedness between people and their needs.
If you are already well integrated into your community, the challenge is to now be willing to 'stand apart' and keep a different view of what the future holds. It is a given that when a lifestyle "works" for a person, they are reluctant to dramatically change it. Therefore, you can notice this reluctance within yourself to accept a dramatically different view of your future, and gain empathetic connection to those who are equally skeptical of the 'new view' you now propose to them. A true community leader guides their neighbors toward what is best in the long term, not just what is most agreeable and easiest to accomplish today. People aren't 'born' leaders. They are individuals who see a need present itself, develop a vision of what needs to happen, and work diligently to bring that vision into reality.
If you have never been an active part of your community, have felt alienated or distant from the people around you, you have an important decision to make: Do you leave to find a group of people who share your values, or do you decide, instead, to search more deeply within your existing community for those who see things the way you do?
Maybe you have the ability to stand firm and take a different point of view from those around you. Now is the time to begin to find ways to work with others in a cooperative way, to bring your vision into reality. Recognize, as the Firesign Theatre once said: "We are all Bozo's on this bus." No one can prepare for a life worth living in total isolation. Reach out to those around you, and prepare to be (sometimes profoundly) disappointed in the response. Only through trial and error and repeated attempts to connect with many people around you, will you create the community that will sustain you in a post-oil world.
