Choosing to Stay Alive

Life can be incredibly entertaining, incredibly boring, and once and a while completely terrifying, and hopefully some of the time incredibly fulfulling and useful to you. Otherwise, why are you alive?

But most of all, one reaches old age by mostly just choosing to stay alive through all the difficulties and fun and boredom and places and people coming into and out of one's life one moment and one day at a time.

I remember during the early 1980s when I was worried like many people right now are of physically surviving those times I decided to become capable of eating meat after having been raised a lacto ovo(milk and eggs and grains and vegetables) vegetarian. My thought about it was that because times were like now (with no jobs) that if I could eat meat I could always survive by hunting deer and other stuff in the wilderness if necessary. It never came to that even though I prepared for it psychologically by learning to eat up to about 5% of my diet as fish or meat. Do I regret not being 100% vegetarian? No. I think it was useful to prepare to survive anything that came in my life. But that's just me.

At that time I knew people who had buried food staples (non-perishables) like grains (wheat berries), rice, pasta, wheat grinders to make flour to make their own bread, peanut Butter, Maple Syrup, Cocoa, and powdered Carob(a health food type of chocolate substitute) and sprouting seeds like Alphalfa seeds and mung bean seeds and wheat grass seeds and whole powdered milk and other stuff in 50 gallon drums on their land or in a wilderness place. So all the food was wrapped in plastic buckets and bags and then set into a sealable 50 gallon drum and then buried. In this way no one knew where your food stash was except you and you were prepared for any eventuality like now worldwide. This amount of food was enough staples to last a couple of people or more about 3 to 6 months. At that time to protect my family (in 1980 I was 32 my new wife was 32 and we were raising her two kids from her first marriage and I was raising my son from my first marriage). So our kids were 5,6, and 8 years old at that time. And like now, unemployment was almost 10% nationwide and much higher some places in the U.S. So, from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s things were very similar to now in the U.S. jobwise. Things didn't really begin to pick up until the late 1980s and 1990s. In fact, when I went to Wikipedia to see just how many recessions and depressions the U.S. had had since founding it was almost 50.

If you consider the 8 Depressions(They just called them Panics before 1900) and they are calling the one from 2007 to 2009 "The Great Recession" at this point. Also, the 1980 recession was about 6 months from January to June, the early 1980s recession was from July 1981 to November 1982, the early 1990s recession was from July 1990 to March 1991, the early 2000s recession was from November 2000 to October 2001. So the early 1980s recession at 1 year and 4 months and the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 at one year and 6 months were the longest(and we also need to include the 1973 to 1975 recession which was 1 year and 4 months and caused by the then new OPEC Oil Cartel). But the longest recession in the last 100 years was the Great Depression which last 4 years and 7 months.

Through all these there were those who chose to stay alive through it and those who faded out or who gave up and weren't around anymore.

So, I remember in the early 1980s taking a survival training course to prepare myself psychologically for times like these we are in right now worldwide. So, I happened to take a course taught by the Air Force to prepare for plane crashes in the remote wilderness of jungles, deserts, or mountains with snow. The instructors said, "The people that tend to survive (who don't have life threatening injuries) are the ones who take a direct interest in their survival." Those who don't survive keep saying things to themselves like, "How did this happen? What will become of me? I can't believe this." And they just spin on and on in their minds like this. People who get caught in wishing for a different outcome are usually found dead or crazy within the next weeks or months. The people who actually survive the unexpected 1st take an interest in their survival and whoever else is capable of surviving that situation and join with any other like minded people to make a stand to find a way to survive in the short and long run whatever the situation actually is. So the people who survive these situations are the people that take an active interest in their survival. People who just spin in crazy ways in their minds and feel sorry for themselves are soon gone either mentally or physically or usually both.

This is the way this sort of thing usually plays out in the short and long term. So, basically the people who survive are those who don't have any life threatening injuries and who choose to find a way to survive whatever awful thing is going on in their lives at that time. The rest of the people are no more unless one of the people who take an interest in their own survival helps those who are psychologically incapacitated to survive as well.

If you look at the dynamics of every day life this is going on all the time everywhere. It just tends to be less obvious to people everywhere unless they take the time to actually think about it in detail like I have done here.

Below is my source for the facts about the recessions(and depressions "Panics") historically in the U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States