The paralysis of the old and the poor

How do we make decisions about current and future actions when we have no idea what variables to plan for?

I am so tired of being shouted at by the “awake and aware” to DO something about the awful trap we are apparently sleepwalking into. But I am not asleep. And I am not sleepwalking.

I am paralysed. I can do NOTHING. And I believe that there are vast swathes of the population who would also love to do SOMETHING, but who are unable to even go on living in a sensible way, let alone to do ANYTHING to change the trajectory of mankind.

I am old and sick and poor

I am 72, a pensioner living solely on a state pension, with health issues, so I am living significantly BELOW the poverty line and in persistent nagging pain. Every purchasing decision I make involves what I am NOT going to purchase in order to purchase something else. Every purchasing decision is a trade-off of one “essential” against another. Do I keep my old car on the road, do I eat better food, do I experiment more with nutraceuticals and other health aides to combat long covid or EMF toxicity, do I heat my flat this coming winter, can I keep my air filters running, can I afford to buy and run a dehumidifier to keep the mould down, can I stockpile in case of supply line collapse? Can I move to somewhere that I can grow food?

Currently these are decisions I am trading off, one against the other. They are all essential but they are not all possible.

I am paralysed

I could make these spending decisions more easily if I had any idea what life would be like in 6 months or 2 years, but none of us knows that any more. The last three years have thrown us into such disarray that we can no longer plan for a future we cannot, in any way, see or predict.

When we have to choose our priorities, based on financial, age or health limitations, we need to know what life will look like in 12 months time - so that we can plan for that. And we just do not. We know our culture is collapsing, we know our government services paid for out of tax dollars are collapsing. We know each and every institution of our world is collapsing. But we don’t know what will go first, and how far any particular area of life will collapse.

We know our medical system has collapsed, but the empty shell is still there going through the motions. We know our financial system has collapsed and is currently being shored up by all sorts of financial shenanigans globally. We know world trade is in a mess by the number of times that imported goods disappear from the shelves.

But we do not know what will collapse first, how far it will collapse, how long it will take for the phoenix to rise out of the ashes, and just what that phoenix is going to look like. So we cannot plan. We cannot make informed, intelligent choices about the most mundane aspects of our day to day lives.

So how deep are our, as yet, Untapped Depths?

If we lead a good life, we tend to hit limits every now and then, brought on by previous decisions we have made, only to find we have Untapped Depths, that we can access to see us through the impossible.

But now, at this time, the whole of humanity is facing a crisis that is not based on our personal choices and that is requiring us all to access those untapped depths, at the same time.

Do any of us have any idea whether or when we reach the point where we have no more Untapped Depths to draw on in times of need? When do we exhaust our lifetime’s allotment of Untapped Depths?

I personally don’t know how to be old or how to be sick, and I am now both, at a time when none of us can hide away from what is upon us. For me, life is currently an adventure of finding the next thing I can no longer do, and finding the workaround or allowing myself to give up. That kind of adventure is not fun. I recall the moment when I realised my old dog was never going to “get better”: that she was now in palliative care, and it was my job to help her see out her days as comfortably and happily as possible. Am I now in palliative care? Is it too late for me? Or do I have another round left in me, of tapping those Untapped Depths?

Many times I have wondered why I did not die during my 2 weeks in ICU last year. Should I have died? Am I past my use by date?

I don’t know. Age is a bitch.

So tell me please, what part can I play in the struggle to somehow mitigate the collapse of our civilisation?

If this post has changed the quality of your life in some way, and you would like to say thank you, you can make a one-off donation through PayPal below. I am retired and live solely on a state pension, so every little bit really does help.