[WildRose]

Don't get me started...I had a rough night at work last night.

Anyway, for me it's a combination of:

- wanting to do more at home/prepping/realizing what's more important, but still needing the paycheque

- mid-life

- the realization that my work may very well be obsolete in a few short years

One foot in front of the other!

[Blacksmith]

I have concentrated on working for myself. I do not earn "big bucks", but I feel I do a better job both for my clients and for myself.

[mystiek]

Agreed Big Tex: my job is not who I am-its a way to provide a living for me and my family (and sometimes an opportunity to reach out as a Christian to someone hurting and in need) and I definitely don't advertise my profession on my car's license plate like some of my collegues. I have always had to some degree the PO mentality, but have been much busier putting up food and gardening.

[CarlinsDarlin]

I had the same feeling about a year and a half after I learned about peakoil. We also had some things going on with family members that meant I needed to spend more time at home. Thankfully, Carlin understood at least that much, and I finally quit my full-time job. I was just going through the motions at that point anyway. It was the best move I've ever made.

Yes, we did lose the income. But what I was needing more than income was TIME. I wasn't making enough to pay someone to do the work I needed to do. We cut back, scrimped and saved, and ate a lot of beans and rice... but now (four years later) we're far ahead of where we'd have been otherwise. Still, we're nowhere close to where I'd like to be. I doubt we'll ever be as prepared as I would envision we need to be.

[xerces]

Work is terribly mind-numbing for me. The money is excellent and is going towards my PPO preparations. And quite frankly the $$$ is the only thing left that still motivates me at the office.

[JJ]

never really cared about work, always wanted to learn something new; had zillions of jobs by the time I was 35. Then got married and busted a%$ to get all the stuff I thought I was supposed to have; children, house, etc. I mean I really bought into the package (now of course I regret it). Now I don't care much at all about work, always trying to figure out what kind of prep I could be working on. Leave work early (my boss is always trying to cut hours, so he's happy) It makes my on-the-dole co-worker NUTS when I leave early, he really goes ballistic. I haven't been able to figure that out; it's as if he were going to have to do some extra work or something. Now I'm fifty and my life is certainly half over, maybe MUCH, MUCH more so....

[catbox]

I'm able to spend 4-5 hours working M-F at a dot com 15 minutes by bike. This leaves me the afternoons, before I have to pick up our daughter, to prep and tinker about. I love what we've done!

I'll never work more than 5 hours a day!
What for?

cb

[coyote]

I'm a vocational college instructor. I still love my job and work hard at it. I would continue to do this, at least part time, even if I were wealthy and peak oil prepared.

I'm a lucky bastard.

[bodigami]

...

[wisconsin_cur]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('HEADER_RACK', 'I') have always been very competitve in my work life. I've always shown initiative in new projects and have taken the lead when I could. Some would have called me a workaholic with an undying devotion and loyalty to my company.
As of late that has all but disappeared. Now I just go through the motions never opting to do more than what is expected of me. I have lost all zeal for my job.
Instead my mind and focus is on prepping myself for TSHTF.My work life has taken a backseat. While to me this is a good thing, for in the end my prepping will ultimately do more for me than my job. I just thought it was a little strange on how a persons ingrained habits could do a complete turn around so fast and was wondering if this was happening to others besides myself.

[CrudeAwakening]

To the OPs question: Yes, absolutely.

Time seems so precious now, and spending such a large chunk of it on matters of ever diminishing relevance is hard to stomach at times. But, I tell myself, at least I have a job - I'm not particularly relishing the time when I have to obtain what I need by trading my other post peak skills, which are most definitely a "work in progress".

My enthusiasm for the continuing education that I'm supposed to engage in has plummeted, but life goes on, and, for the moment, it is the hand that feeds me.

[BigTex]

(I posted this in another thread, but it really belongs here.)

Any time a civilization collapses, the obvious question is "if they were smart enough to build that thing from scratch, why weren't they smart enough to maintain it once they had it built out?" The answer, of course, is that these societies start to fracture, and the cause of these fractures is understood to be a combination of resource limitations, overpopulation, poor governance, etc. Chief among these, though, is usually resource limitations.

Looking at the matter close up, how would members of a complex civilization be expected to react to news that their whole way of life is temporary and soon to pass away into the entropy hopper? I see one of two reactions--denial or acceptance. For those who deny it, they make no allowances for the processes that are chipping away at the sustainability of their society and thus hasten its collapse.

For those people who do accept what is occurring, and that is many of us here, strange things begin to happen. On the one hand, these individuals are going to make what personal preparations that they can, and not depend on the government to provide them with any protection from the coming troubles. On the other hand, and this is more subtle, these people are also going to begin to lose confidence in their society and way of life. They are going to simply lose the uniting vision that allowed the civilization to develop in the first place. Since these people are being guided by reality, their perspective will begin to be adopted by more and more people, and thus there will begin to be a collective loss of faith in the systems and institutions of their civilization.

As we all know, independence is very inefficient, so as more and more people begin to turn toward independent lifestyles to compensate for the failing institutions of their society, the whole society becomes less productive, and thus what made the society powerful or wealthy in the first place begins to be undermined.

This process proceeds on two tracks. There are the actual causes of decline--typically resource depletion and overpopulation--but there is also the psychological reaction of a growing section of the populace that I describe above. The effect is that rather than bringing the society together to face the challenge, as may have happened earlier in the society's existence, now a self-reinforcing cycle of deterioration begins to take hold.

I believe that's where we are at today. More and more, people are simply losing faith in this system of industrial civilization, and thus rather than putting their shoulder to the wheel within the system to preserve it, they find that they just don't have the will to try to save something in which they just no longer believe.

[darwinsdog]

The system doesn't deserve to be preserved.

[coyote]

Nice post, BigTex. I think that as things unravel, we'll see more people putting their shoulders to the wheel again, but it won't be for the cause of the greater good or society. It'll be for their own communities.

[Olaf]

I certainly feel like precious hours in every work day are going into a sink hole. I spend my day working on things that I no longer believe will have any long term relevance. It certainly makes work less fulfilling. While I still strive to do a good job, I do find that I am more willing to miss a little time here and there to work on things I consider more important.

The acting out the part anaolgy Big Tex used fits.

Olafr

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('coyote', 'N')ice post, BigTex. I think that as things unravel, we'll see more people putting their shoulders to the wheel again, but it won't be for the cause of the greater good or society. It'll be for their own communities.

[Fredrik]

I'm moving from a moribund office job to another, more physical job that might survive at least the initial stages of oil depletion. I'll have to get used to the idea of working as hard as I can, because I expect the less efficient workers at the new place to get fired anyway later, as the economy gets tighter.

It's not the hard work per se that's depressing, it's the monotony and lack of natural environment. At one point I semi-seriously thought about training to be a forest worker but they're getting laid off left and right...

[ShirleyKat]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', ' ')For those who deny it, they make no allowances for the processes that are chipping away at the sustainability of their society and thus hasten its collapse.

For those people who do accept what is occurring, and that is many of us here, strange things begin to happen. On the one hand, these individuals are going to make what personal preparations that they can, and not depend on the government to provide them with any protection from the coming troubles.

[sameu]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('HEADER_RACK', 'Y')es, some of us work to pay for our preps. Wouldn't it stand to reason though that the harder you worked the more money you make the more preps you should be able to do. Why then has my competive edge my will to strive to excell deminished in the work place. If anything it should drive me harder.

[alpha480v]

I gotta keep working to pay for preps. I'm not done yet. Hopefully Tshtf will wait for a couple months yet.