liquid light

i’ve been thinking a lot about “the tribe” lately. some would say that i’m being too apocalyptic but looking around, i don’t see how our current societal model in the technologically developed world can sustain itself for much longer.

on a purely economic level, we have a skyrocketing oil price coupled with massively increasing demand from China & India, extreme levels of personal debt and a cabal of leaders who believe in perpetual & pre-emtive war, which some economists have estimated has already cost around $1 trillion.

this brings me back to the question of the tribe & how i feel we need to begin to restructure our lives at a practical & grassroots level, to become much less dependent on the status quo system for our survival.

at the moment we’re considering buying a piece of land in France. our thinking is that if things start to unravel fast, we would at least have somewhere to go that we owned outright, with no debt. we’d have enough left over to build a simple dwelling, which would still be more comfortable & secure than what the majority of people on this planet live in.

however i wonder where this leaves the “tribe”.

a key question is: do we believe that our current trajectory is sustainable and if not, what are we doing to bring our lifestyles more in line with that belief? too often as humans, we expect the worst but prepare for the best.

as an example, a few months back i was talking to a family member about the stock market & challenging them to consider selling their holdings. at the time, the UK FTSE index was sitting at 6700 and my point was, what good reason do you have in the current climate to believe that they will continue to climb? i couldn’t see any. three months later the index was at just above 5400 - a drop of 20%.

i’m no investment guru but for me, it highlighted our human tendency to see the signs and then seek - unconsciously or otherwise - to avoid making the necessary changes in order to adapt to the direction the signs seem to be pointing in.

i don’t see buying a piece of land in a rural area as the grand solution but it makes at least as much sense of continuing to live in suburbia, 100% dependent on an unsustainable system. so i ask myself and i ask you:

who/what/where is the tribe? and how should we then live?