Instead of being better able to provide for your children, you may worry you'll be less able to, even in 'mundane' things like basic household utilities.
You may begin to refuse your children expensive toys, trips, or even college monies, in favor of saving for alternative fuel sources or paying off debt.
Your teenagers might ridicule your suggestion that an energy poor future is imminent. Your younger children may scoff at eating the simpler food you now are 'rotating' as part of your food-saving survival plan. Your family may object to your plans to relocate to an area you judge to be "safer in the future" to live.
In the later part of this life stage, you may have refined the talents you bring to the world and created a comfortable and satisfying life for yourself and those around you. You may feel that you have spent many years "giving" to others, and now is the time to reap the rewards of that effort. Awareness of Peak Oil brings a shocking realization that even with all your efforts and hard work, a secure future is not a given.
You may have thought of the act of "creating" itself, whether through raising children or the arts, invention, social activism or any positive creative activity, as contributing to the welfare of future generations. In the light of Peak Oil, some are shocked to realize that their creative efforts have not served the planet and its inhabitants, and instead benefited only a small elite at the expense of most others.
It takes enormous courage to be willing to re-examine one's contributions in light of Peak Oil awareness and to redirect, if necessary, one's experience and talents in very different directions to benefit a broader slice of humanity.
The danger in this life period is one of self-absorption or over-extension.
Peak Oil may encourage the question: "What am I doing this for?" and a new focus on self-absorption may begin. In total focus on oneself, life loses its meaning as "meaning" is created through the process of creating and contributing to others. You may adopt the attitude that says "burn the oil quickly to save others from the evils of development," but it serves as little more than a thinly disguised justification for self-indulgence.
Financially, people in this period often start out with little money and end up wealthier. As you move from your 20's and 30's into your 40's and 50's, aging itself brings fear of one's own mortality and vulnerability.
In a panic over getting older, some in this age group try to recapture their youth. Peak Oil may exaggerate this tendency. Peak Oil awareness and fears of the aging process can operate to bring a dramatic attempt to "squeeze in" everything that they won't be able to do later. Now is the time to take that long postponed vacation to an exotic island, buy that gorgeous diamond, treat the kids to the video games they've been clamoring for, or get that divorce. You may decide that you 'aren't getting any younger' and see no future worth saving for any longer. You may decide if "everything is going to fall apart anyway" you might as well 'live for today.' You may no longer take your debts seriously, thinking "What's the point? There won't be anyone around to collect!"
At a time when retirement itself may be fast approaching, you may ask yourself, "Why am I saving for retirement when I believe my nation is facing economic collapse?" If you live in the US, you may have already seen quite a bit of your retirement disappear during the "dot com" crash or watched carefully as corporate corruption such as Enron caused pensions to evaporate completely.
In the second case, 'spreading oneself too thinly' leaves little to contribute to any single endeavor. With multiple demands on your time and energy, between work, children and their extra-curricular activities, Parent-Teacher Association activities, aging parents and home maintenance, most people have an exceedingly busy schedule. Awareness of Peak Oil brings a precariously balanced overworked lifestyle crashing down.
Peak Oil awareness can become the catalyst for exhaustive, relentless "preparations" and "learning." In a panic-driven quest to "learn it and do it now!" the life you lead stops being a nourishing, gratifying experience and instead becomes the endless job of "preparing for the looming crisis."
There may be the desire to "buy" your way out of any potential disasters. Physical and financial exhaustion and burn-out result. Some may spend the next 30 years "waiting for the end," and be an emotional drain on all who interact with them.
Withdrawal also is a possibility in this stage as the realization of being "unable to do it all" causes you to come to the conclusion that "nothing you do will make a difference."
In contrast, Peak Oil may radically alter what is "valuable" and "serious" from what is not. Couples sit down together, sometimes for the first time, and begin to talk candidly about how to rein in spending, get out of debt, and redirect limited time and energy. Televisions are shut off (or disconnected) and parents start reading to their children and to each other. There is a shift in focus from "what to buy" to "how to be," or from "what is fashionable" to "what we value." Planning based on one's values becomes an activity everyone takes seriously.
Some may begin to narrow their focus, discard activities that are no longer valuable to them, and redirect their efforts to community-focused projects that they believe will be most productive in helping their communities, thrive, prosper, and allow their neighbors to remain fit and healthy.
