Where Will We Spend Our Vacation?

Watching TV this time of year, we are bombarded with commercials extolling the wonders and enjoyment to be had vacationing in their particular state. Some of these states are close by, others far away. Vacation 2011 isn’t looking very promising for most families this year. We are all seeking some escape from the constant bombardment of bad economic news, bad political news, bad local news, and an overstressed work environment. Vacations used to provide that. But with the miracle of iPhones and iPads, the bad stuff just goes with you anyway, unless you take a cruise.

This year, I believe many will spend their summer vacation (holiday for those in Europe) at some different theme parks than in the past. Where they will spend is at Service StationLand, GroceryLand, and SchoolClothesLand. Our old nemesis, Peak Oil started moving out of the shadows in January, and shows no signs of disappearing into the mist anytime soon, if ever. Peak Oil brought many of his colleagues along for this year’s vacation time; Higher Fuel Prices, Higher Transportation Prices, Higher Food Prices, Higher Medicine Prices, Higher Clothing Prices and Higher About Everything Else Prices. Talk about a bunch of wet blankets at a vacation planning session! Now we have to talk about spending our vacation budget not at some exotic, relaxing, fun location, but at some everyday, routine places, hopefully no more than a mile or two from home.

The old saying “Well, there’s always next year!” may no longer offer much hope either. Affordable vacationing next year will probably be less likely than in this one in terms of energy availability. The summer vacation in 2011 may be where we begin to feel the first raindrops of the approaching energy storm. The clouds have been appearing all spring, with oil prices climbing above $85 a barrel to close to $114 a barrel before falling back somewhat. As with most rainstorms, there can be short lulls and even a ray of sunshine here and there before the rains return. I’m afraid our old nemesis, Peak Oil, will behave like the rainstorm. Except there may not be clearing in a day or two, maybe not in a decade or two.

Vacation 2011 may be your first of many tests in planning for a reduced lifestyle. The first thing you have to adjust is your mental thought processes. With all vacation planning, (now and in the past), you have to manage expectations. This will be a vital skill for the other Peak Oil tests that will follow. No longer can you rely on past experience to predict future outcomes. For men, this goes entirely against our built in wiring. In the corporate years I had a motto for decades with which I managed my life. It was “Deliver what you promise”. A simple statement, a great guideline to use in the work world. But now, in our personal world, it is best we not promise what may not be deliverable. Not even to ourselves. That is the hardest part. In past years we would set our expectations and finagle this, tweak that, delay this, delete that in order to shoehorn a vacation into our budget. Not once did we ever modify our expectations. Now there are things external to us that we cannot tweak, delay, or delete to fit our needs.

For some the turning point in their expectations was 2009, for others 2010. I believe 2011 will become a turning point for a large segment of the population as they find that personal expectations will have to be shoehorned into a declining budget. Ouch. That’s not fair; I haven’t seen all the places I planned to see. We didn’t realize that our expectations come with a finite shelf life. In the past decades, the natural process of aging tended to trim our expectations year after year. What we didn’t expect, even 5 years ago, was that Peak Oil would vastly accelerate the trimming process, even when age was not a factor.

For most of us, over the next 24 months, we will have to readjust our mental processes in a constantly accelerating manner, much like a race driver changes gears on a Le Mans race course. For many, frequent change of mental gears will introduce added stress, from which there will be no vacation available for relief.

So what can you do to lessen the rising tension creeping into our new ways of life?
For starters, develop close at home activities that are rewarding to you and your family now, not when stress is at the boiling point. It is interesting that in watching the “vacation with us” commercials, one of the nearby states that we lived in for ten years had so much to offer that we never knew about. Instead of planning for Vacation 2011, start planning for your reduced oil future. There are no roadmaps, you will have to design your own.

Good luck, may your new map take you to new and exciting places and opportunities.

Chuck

Peak Oil Blues