Inertia emergency plan

It even sounds feeble to me, this resistance plan of surreptitious inactivity, so God knows how feeble it would sound to anyone reading this who didn't know me (or did, for that matter). Good job there's no one reading this I guess :)

I'm unlikely to change the plan though, because doing as little as possible for as long as possible has long been a tactic of mine when I find myself outside my comfort zone. I did it at school and was very nearly kicked out for my troubles; I did it again at university with the same results; I've done it in one way or another with most of the jobs I've had; I've even tried it in relationships, romantic and otherwise. It never really works but it's always what I fall back on when I can't think what else to do. I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if my default reaction to a challenge was to rise to it as best I could in a sort of American gung-ho kind of way. It's possible to spend quite a lot of time wondering such things, when caught in one of my periods of inactivity.

There's this guy I know who's been reading a lot of stuff on the internet. Perhaps too much. He's now convinced that the world has just fallen off a massive precipice and that society as we know it is never going to recover from the bump it's going to get when we hit the bottom. Capitalism is over, he reckons. It's in its death throes. What follows is as uncertain to him as it is to everyone else, but he's sure it will involve a great deal of conflict between the haves and have-nots. He's put his house on the market, and he's spending all his time and money on preparing his holiday home in Italy for a post-capitalistic existence - in a nutshell: self-sufficiency...survival.

Thing is, he could be right! We are in an unholy economic mess and it doesn't seem to be getting better however much money governments throw at the problem. Then there's the food problem; and the population problem; and the water problem; and the climate problem; and the fossil fuel problem. They're all still here and they're all still getting worse and we're still not doing anything very much to address them, not in the big scheme of things. I read a news story yesterday about the possibility of water, food and fuel shortages combining to cause a 'perfect storm' that will lead to global unrest and conflict. It's all very alarming. But reading my friend's posts all I could do was pick holes in them - to find reasons to deride his response to a series of problems he understands an awful lot better than I do. To justify yet another inert response to another threat. I'll probably get away with it again, as will most of the countless millions of others all over the world that won't take any steps to prepare for the worst. But this is how it'll be before the real apocalypse isn't it? Most people will be sitting on their hands, laughing increasingly nervously at those who are prepared to act on the signs they see and the dangers they sense. And they'll probably keep laughing until it's too late.