SCARCITY + SHORTAGE
The World is Sending Us Tests. More are Ahead.
How we react to shortage and scarcity will determine how we survive.
The power went out in our neighbourhood on Sunday morning at 9am. It was a planned outage to allow for road work to occur in the area and was set to be restored by 4pm. And it was, in all the apartments in our complex. Except one: ours.
What followed was 60 hours of no electricity, aside from occasional spurts of life from a noisy, polluting, inefficient and expensive generator. Irritating. Inconvenient. Uncomfortable. Disruptive.
But what really followed was my reaction to a real scarcity (the lack of electricity) and the realisation that this was a test. And that it was the kind of test I better get used to. But that realisation didn’t happen while I was immersed in the moment, it only came after. It has only come now.
Scarcity and shortage are coming. For billions of people on the planet, it’s already here and it’s been a fact of their lives all along. For those of us just now coming to an understanding of this, there is the further understanding that no amount of wealth will be able to protect us from it and its impacts.
It’s clear to me that I won’t be able to control what happens with my electricity supply or any other commodity in the coming years, but I can control my preparedness to deal with it before my supply is interrupted and my reaction to it when it does.
It was a disruption, no question. I am very accustomed to being able to flick any switch and have it work. You are probably the same. It’s unusual when it doesn’t and suddenly everything stopped as a result. The creative roll I was on, the mossy feeling I had built up in my brain, the fulfilling routine I had cultivated in my days and nights, the healthy habits of mind, body and soul, all of it went out the window and was subsumed by a need to get the electricity going again. I did little else over two solid days besides spending time on the phone with the local power company.
It was a vortex of telephone customer service, the kind we’ve all been in. Listening to automated instructions, pressing the right buttons, finally getting through to a human, explaining the problem, realising that that person I was speaking to had neither the interest or ability to solve it, (nor had they been given the tools necessary), being told “I am sorry for the inconvenience and I understanding your frustration” and all the usual meaningless platitudes. Being cut off, starting over again with another person and repeating this over and over again because the desired results weren’t arriving as I needed them to.
Minutes turned to hours.
It was all consuming. I couldn’t read, couldn’t write, didn’t run, didn’t practise yoga, couldn’t cook, couldn’t sleep because it was too hot and the air conditioner didn’t work. Worse, I didn’t look for ways to work around it and I didn’t look for other things that this event gave me the opportunity to explore. I instead chose to just wallow in it.
How I handled this will need some serious examination and looking back the next morning (with electricity now), I can hear myself saying, “you better get used to this and adjust your attitude for when it happens next time and the time after that”.
I also didn’t like the feeling of helplessness that my lack of knowledge about how electricity works gave me. The silver lining is that now I know better how to solve the problem when the power goes out again, as it surely will whether I’m living in this or another developing country or a developed one.
In the end, someone from the power company did come. They did a few routine troubleshooting checks, found the relevant switch and turned it to the on position. As if by magic, the lights went on again — in more ways than one. Life resumed.
It’s interesting. Just when you get on a roll and are full of life and creativity, things happen (often in succession) to put a stop to that, or at least to force you to deal with speedbumps. I’ve just experienced the same thing.
It’s not an apocalypse yet, at least in my world. But there will be much coming up in the years ahead that we won’t be able to control, but we will be able to control how we prepare for it and react to it. I just relearned that after three days without electricity and I didn’t like how it went. I see now that it was a test. A test meant to stretch me.
I plan to pass it next time.
I really do hope that you like what you have just read. If you want unlimited access to thousands of writers, consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back $5 a month and if you use this link, then I get a slice of that. I plan to do an online course in basic residential electronics.
