I’ve been a Hubbert Schizophrenic for the past seven years. Perhaps you are one too – the diagnosis is easy. The principal symptom is the attempt by the patient to lead two lives, one involving the Peak and its consequences. One of those two lives is the “normal” one, and includes a future predicated on a series of uneventful jobs ending with a decent collection of pensions, and a house with a half acre of grass and the occasional bunch of dark purple iris at the borders, and plentiful ice creams for many Junes to come.
The other life is darker. It’s one that may have to be hidden from friends and even family, as its implicit apocalyptic visions don’t make for polite dinner conversation. This life is lived furtively, in the interstices of the “normal” life. Its future involves no job at all other than survival, a house with gardens that have no iris, and few sweeteners, artificial or otherwise.
What I am trying to say, maybe too elliptically, is that it’s been hard for me since I “found Hubbert.” It’s been difficult to balance keeping my everday life moving forward – keeping my career on track, paying the rent, buying the occasional book or beer or weekend away – while trying to prepare properly for What May Come.
I am a “doomer,” one of those people who makes solar cell and powerdown enthusiasts fret. I don’t think we can invent our way out of this current energy crisis, nor do I think we’ll find the easy path “down” – down to lower energy consumption, a smaller population, and a more local life. I earnestly hope for this, because it will make survival a heck of a lot easier, but I think it’s decently unlikely. The only thing that I can use to treat my schizophrenia is doomer insurance.
Webster’s New Twentieth defines insurance as “a system of protection against loss in which one agrees to pay certain sums for a guarantee that he or she will be compensated for a specified loss.” More broadly one can think of insurance as giving a percentage of one’s time, money, or energy for the guarantee of compensation in an emergency. Coming from a family with a history of melanoma, I have to pay a “certain sum” every year to the Schering-Plough HealthCare Products, makers of Coppertone sunscreen. SPF 50 is expensive, and there’s no certainty that I would have gotten melanoma without it (or that I won’t with it), but it’s a risk I have decided to take.
Another certain sum that I have to “pay” is dedicating several months a year to fact-checking and rewriting my main writing product, a guidebook to the city in central Italy where I live most of the time. My investment of time is insurance against the calamity of no one wanting to advertise in an out-of-date guidebook. Another job of mine is translating. I could perhaps make more money doing this in August, but this summer I’m working on my second novel. I’m certainly writing partly for the pleasure of it, but there is a part of the writing that is an investment. I could make x euros if I spend the rest summer translating, but if I write a decent mystery, I could perhaps make 3x euros in the future.
The problem is that I also believe, as a doomer, that a Crash is possible, even likely. I don’t know if it would be the starving hordes, or rather a slightly less chaotic Long Emergency that writer James Howard Kunstler imagines, but either way, food, fuel, and work will be issues. Perennially, though, I have to ask myself how much time, money, and energy to devote to “insuring” myself against the possibility of a Crash.
In the summer, should I stay on in Italy and work, or should I head back to upstate New York and plant currants? Should I put out that anthology with my little publishing company, or should I buy more books on making cheese? Is the Crash far enough off that I can take a trip to see friends in Boston – or should I transplant more lovage and make more raised beds? There’s stress too in discussing what I think about the future with my friends. What do you say when a coworker comes to dinner and asks you why you have a scythe, or why on earth you make pickled ramps? It’s not hard to imagine for those of you who aren’t doomers that listening to those of us who are is depressing – we don’t make good dinner guests because if talk turns to the price of gas, we tend to follow the segue quickly to Hubbert, and right on to the Crash.
I’ve learned to keep quiet, but then I feel like I’m repressing my real self, or one of my real selves. The self-sufficiency-obsessed yeoman is just as real as the translator/publisher who lives in Italy, but the former is a lot less socially-acceptable than the latter. The doomer in me is like the strange uncle I’m embarrassed about but can’t leave home, because he’s me too.
What to do? First, recognize, O doomers, that you are not alone. Read comments from doomers’ and non-doomers’ alike at Kathy McMahon’s Peak Oil Blues site. This peak oil shrink is part of “a small but growing group of professionally trained psychotherapists who know the stress the dawning awareness of Peak Oil brings.” Second, try to integrate as much as possible your two lives. Take up beekeeping and jam-making as Crash skills and give honey and preserves as Christmas gifts. Garden outside the box and reduce your consumption as practice, not solely as virtue. You’ll likely not be cured of your case of Hubbert Schizophrenia, but it’ll at least make your alter ego more acceptable to your neighbors and let you prepare for an uncertain future without sacrificing your nine-to-five job.
