How To Go To Work When Collapse is Near

Alternate Title: A Doomer Reader

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It started with a tweet.

I'm gonna write a self help book titled "How To Go To Work When Collapse Is Near"

— Vidal Santiago (@hahasobsob) January 31, 2017

Somewhat tongue in check, but willing to help if taken up on the offer, I replied saying "Well, then, welcome to the doomosphere.  I have some books and authors to help you research, if serious." Interestingly enough, he took me up on it.  My first thought was to do it as a "tweet-storm," but then I realized that it was going to go a bit long for that.  Collapse has been my main intellectual interest for over a year now.  I want to do justice to those who write about it.

First, I would like to recommend John Michael Greer.  I believe he has the best understanding of collapse.  Luckily enough, this week's post on his site The Archdruid Report is as good any to start with [Update.  He took site down.  Here is a back up.  He now blogs here].   (I would avoid his more political pieces -- he feels he's a little too amped by predicting the Trump win, and a little too eager to see the "salary class" burned).  He also has several books.  I have read and recommend Green Wizardry.

Next up, is Early Retirement Extreme, a systems-theory approach created by Jacob Lund Fisker.  I would start with the quick explanations of the philosophy and the goals, and then browse the web-site.  He shows the kind of tools and skills it will take to either 1) liberate yourself from the rat-race (assuming it continues) or 2) become a type of Renaissance person who can make in a collapsing economy.  Fisker came out of the doomer closet to say as much.  Here is an even better piece where he lays out some doomer predictions.

Thirdly, James Howard Kunstler has a solid grasp on many of the aspects of our decline and writes a weekly rant on his website.  He has a real "old man on a porch" feel, often getting repetitive with terminology and certainly politically incorrect.  He is particularly bad at making specific predictions, though he often in the right direction on trends.  He is just so pissed all the time.  He does have a twitter handle, but doesn't use it much.

Now we get to some people who use twitter often as well as having a body of work about collapse. . .

Vinay Gupta is the go-to for information on dealing with down-side risk.  He tweets and retweets stuff like a maniac as well.  His twitter "about me" really sums up his life's work:

What do you do after it all goes wrong? And what about the poor, for whom it's never yet been right?

The guy is a genius.  He is now trying to play the venture capital game.  His current thinking seems a bit on the optimistic side to me, the basic thesis being that robots and cheap solar panels will lead to a reasonable utopia, but I need someone bullish about the future in my studies. . .

Ian Welsh tweets a lot and writes a lot of longer pieces.  There is a lot of raw pain and disillusionment that comes through because of this, but he is open and responsive on twitter.

Charles Hughes Smith only uses twitter to promote his blog posts, but he writes a lot of them.  He has books for sale on his site about how to be able to more or less make it in a collapse future, but I have not read any of them, so cannot make a recommendation.

I hope of this makes for interesting and helpful reading.  Good luck in building the future.

[Update: I moved the Gridbeam content away because I realized it was a bit off-topic]