It's a Quora question I saw.

I’ll keep it super simple.

We could do this by:

  • taking the responsibility for our own lives and providing for our basic needs (I elaborate on this below)
  • shifting the balance between those that produce and those that consume.
  • stop wasting water, food, clothing, energy (resources)

That’s it…

What do I mean by taking responsibility?

Short version:

As long as the reality of life for you is that:

  • water is coming from the tap
  • food is coming from the shop
  • when you flush, shit just dissapears

You might be in trouble…

Longish version:

Most of us in the “developed” world does not know pretty much anything about providing for basic needs in our lives (water, food, waste, shelter, clothing…).

We get those provided for us through proxy => money, for which we labour often in jobs that do not require increasingly less skill, at least a skill that is actually useful for sustaining life.

What I mean by that?

I’m a software developer. Great right? Well paid job, really good money, comfortable chair, free coffee, game room…

Now, take away electricity. Suddenly I have no means to make money.

Well, take away electricity and most of us are left with no cash coming out of cashpoints, tills stop working.

Take it away for long enough and mains water stops being pumped to our taps, shelves in the shops get empty etc.

For most of us, we’re not bothered where the water comes from, where the food comes from. We lost the knowledge, we lost the skills. Damn, we even lost the interest to know, the inclination to be curious about these things.

We take everything for granted.

Let me tell you something…

No thing has been granted…

To me, taking responsibility means to start learning the skills that might help with sustaing these basic needs.

We need to relearn the skills we’ve lost. We need to become a community again where we’ll share these skills.

We need to learn how to grow food again. Even in the cities there’s plenty of space to grow food.

It’s doable…

It should be done, it needs to be done…

The thing is… You are responsible for doing it.

Nobody will come and do it for you. I mean I get the story that the government is responsible, that we pay taxes, that everything should be provided…

It’s just a story…

The reality is quite different.

We can change it though…

(and if we won’t, it’ll be changed for us, unfortunately for the worse…)