Why self-reliance matters…

Featured image from Eat This, Not That! Follow the link for an interesting article on expected food shortages expected this year.

I don’t know if you’ve gone to the grocery store recently, or if you’ve gone out to eat recently, or have gone to fill up at the gas station recently, but the cost of things is much higher, there are fewer things available, and the things that we want are far more often on back order or unavailable due to supply issues. Microchips, air conditioning parts, meat, produce, canned goods, cleaning supplies… it’s becoming a normal thing to see that that the things we would regularly see available are now not so available.

We’re facing a labor shortage in this country, as the enhanced unemployment benefits and child tax credits help contribute to the continued depression of the labor pool and prolonged period of job openings. And, with inflation hitting 5.4 percent from July, per CNBC, and we have a record 10.1 million job openings in the country. Something is wrong here and I feel it.

I try to live on a budget. I work two jobs and am attacking my personal debts in order to free up money to both improve my credit score and eventually save for a house. I don’t try to live outlandishly, and have gotten pretty good at tracking my spending. I have a fair idea of where my money is at most times, and have the usual suite of apps on my phone so I can look at my finances at pretty much any given moment. But this was because I decided in my mid twenties that when I turned 30, I would begin to save for retirement and get out of debt. My parents didn’t start saving for retirement until their 40s, and have had to move out of California as they prepare to retire.

We’ve forgotten how to be self-reliant. We depend so much on others doing things for us, whether it is farmers growing food, truckers delivering goods to market, stores having all the things we need, want, and desire… we’ve bought into the notion that we must have all the latest, newest, most modern version of the latest thing, no matter how big or how small. Our goods are designed to be more disposable, and our attitudes towards passing things along to our family is becoming less and less important, both as we continue to live in this consumer materialist world, and we have less desire to have families to pass things along to.

As things go along, we’re going to have to re-learn a lot of very hard lessons from the Depression Era. Cheapism has a good blog post about some of the lessons we will need to relearn, I’d recommend checking it out. I’m trying to find the things, to buy the things, to spend money on things that are more than convenience driven. I am working on paying off my debts and getting an emergency fund in place that would cover my expenses for up to a year (admittedly I’m not even able to do so for a month yet…). I still need to force myself to get into gardening (my strawberry plants died from neglect) and generally I need to continue to become more self-reliant.

I think that we will have to return to this way of life in the near future, as the COVID 19 variants continue to pop up. And the notion that just one vaccine (either the one-dose Johnson & Johnson or the two dose Pfizer or Moderna) will be permanently effective is being dismissed. According to the BMJ, a medical journal that publishes over 70 medical information journals worldwide, “Data published by the Israeli government suggest that the Pfizer BioNTech jab’s efficacy against symptomatic infection fell from 94% to 64% after the delta variant began spreading in the country.”

All of the mandates, recommendations, and suggestions are essentially meaningless unless you have the wherewithal to do the hard things for yourself. I chose to get the vaccine because I was looking at the data and the analysis of medical experts and assessing my own risk. I generally don’t have allergies and have had few serious medical issues aside from obesity (which is also something else I’m working to improve), so to me it made a lot of sense to get vaccinated. Others make different calculations, with different variables, and make different conclusions. Personally, I find this to be perfectly acceptable.

At the end of the day, the only one you can rely on is yourself. It is good when your family, friends, community, or, to a lesser extent, government, can contribute to the well-being of society. But, if we become reliant upon that aid, and do nothing of ourselves to improve our own situation, then we are left helpless when that aid dries up. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read or stories I’ve heard about a football star going broke after leaving the NFL, or the horror stories of how the lottery ruined a person’s life. Living in a society that lionizes immediate gratification, calling it a good thing to be a consumer, to buy the latest model phone, car, clothes, or whatever else we would need, will leave many in the lurch when things inevitably go wrong.