Hi all,

I thought it would be a good idea to make a note of a number of key blogs I track the on-going decline of our industrial civilisation.

An excellent resource is the SEE blog – run by Tim Morgan – see here, which is a consistently brillant reference. Tim has developed what seems to be a reasonably robust methodology to track how our economies will decline over the coming decades and it isn’t pretty.

Essentially, discretionary spending will contract (first in the developed world as per our on-going “cost of living crisis” since the early 2020s) and very soon, the still developing economies of India and China. Investment will also start to contract and will accelerate after 2030 which seems to be a turning point in terms of these metrics.

Obviously, central banks and governments won’t do nothing as these trends progress, but in reality they can’t do much more than print money, intervene in the markets and try and arrest the worst of the coming crisis. All this is inflationary and in some ways, counter-productive in the longer run. Tim also tries to scope out how this will play out in the financial realm and when the overinflated assets in equities, housing, crypto and so on, will pop.

To keep it really simple – and this aligns with my own reading which I’ve discussed extensively in this own blog -a turning point is coming around 2030, for multiple reasons, which is likely to trigger a Greater Depression in the 2030s. This will involve a massive crash in most assets, including likely gold as well, and a reset moment for our global monetary and economic trading system. Any Greater Depression is going to be a rough time indeed going forward and depending upon where you live, there is a real risk of civil unrest, wars and massive migration pressures as economies buckle, infrastructure degrades and governments flounder.

The second blog I follow closely is the Honest Sorcerer, which focuses heavily on energy, see here. Again, their writing concludes that we are on a type of plateau until around 2030 in terms of overall energy production, after which things deteriorate in terms of overall quantity and quality of energy production. This will trigger the end of economic growth as we know it, and a period of radical simplification of complexity, forced by the end of economic bubbles and the realities of energy depletion.

When you combine the insights of the above two blogs with John Greer’s comments and articles on peak oil and wider resource depletion over the years, you can get a reasonable idea on what is coming.

So, how am I doing with my adaption to these long-term trends? Well so far, my overall drive to simplify my lifestyle and “collapse first before the rush” is doing well. We rarely eat out these days, I don’t drive much anymore and largely use bus, bike and walking to get around. We buy in second-hand shops for discretionary items like clothes, children toys, books and so on which over time yields significant savings. We have also tried to cultivate a wider 1970s mindset of repair rather than replace and again, there is a developing eco-system which encourages people to fix items rather than throw them away.

I’ve discussed before that folks (outside the very wealthy) need to accept that lifestyles in the developed world are being forced back to the 1970s/1980s. That means cooking at home, growing some of your own produce, rarely eating out, not getting takeaways, not buying new when second hand or repairing an item is feasible, travelling less, and when you do within your own region rather than long-distance holidays to the other side of the world. Hand me downs for the kids, no fancy technology if it isn’t required and so on.

Frankly, a more frugal and sustainable lifestyle is ahead of us (and for those in denial and racking up the credit card debts, they need to get the memo soon given the growing risks of a serious financial crash).

Longer term, as we descend into the 2030s and 2040s, with a likely Greater Depression and potentially wars coming, our world will start to look closer to the earlier decades of the 20th century. Globalised supply chains will unravel, goods will become increasingly scarce and/or expensive and lifestyles will be forced to adapt to what I call a 1950s/1960s lifestyle. If you look at what a typical lifestyle in your area is from that era, you’ll get a sense of what it was like. I expect that to start emerging towards the end of the 2030s and certainly in the 2040s/2050s.

That could also mean some other ugly traits of that era. Where I come from in western Europe, the mid-century Europe was a dark place. A brutal war in the 1940s, which had followed a Depression in the 1930s and a tough economic period after the war with rationing lasting into the 1950s. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it and it could get very ugly indeed. Military wars, occupations, forced transfer of populations, rationing, migrations and horrendous violence.

Luckily, I don’t see such things happening anytime soon and these are longer term risks. Wealthy people from where I came from during that period generally left to sunnier, safer and fancier places to live in their mansions and hotels as it became obvious a war was coming in Europe. Cape Town, Bahamas and Barbados were popular places during the war and afterwards for such folk until things really started to get better in the 1950s.

And that’s a key lesson for you all. You don’t have to stay where you live. Wealthy Ukrainians live in Monaco, enjoying the good life whilst their fellow men are dying in the trenches of eastern Ukraine. I’m not justifying such behaviour but it is much more common than you realise from reading conventional history books. The very rich generally flee trouble and try and preserve their wealth far away from wars, revolutions and chaos.