If You Can't Leave The Grid, Be The Grid

Some thoughts about the future.

Photo by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash

There’s a little plaque on a shelf in my room. It’s an outstanding research award, from one of the top organizations in my former field (education). I was thinking about it today, specifically how hard it was to publish the article that won the award. Journals didn’t want it. Job search committees laughed in my face about it.

I almost gave up on the whole thing.

That’s the real point of an award. It’s not just a glorified paperweight. It’s something to look at when you feel overwhelmed and defeated. It’s something that says everyone has doubted you before, and you overcame all the obstacles and the self-doubts that come with the territory. It reminds you that, sometimes, nobody will see any value in an idea until you polish it harder than a diamond, and that’s the kind of work that eventually wins the highest forms of recognition and contributes the most. It’s something that someone like Donald Trump wouldn’t understand, even when someone else like Maria Machado gives him the Nobel Prize he’s always wanted. Some people will die before they ever understand what it feels like to earn anything. Many of those people go on to enjoy positions of extreme wealth and power, and that’s the world we live in.

It’s a little insane that we’re letting people who have no clue how to actually accomplish or achieve anything dictate the terms of our reality.

Isn’t it?

Last week, someone asked me how they can keep living in this world, one run by a cabal more depraved and corrupt than our darkest conspiracy theories could outline, with many of our darkest fears about the planet coming true in real time, years if not decades ahead of schedule. Well, I guess you do it by adapting. You decide the terms you live on, and it starts with how you engage a collapsing world.

On that note, I’ve decided that I’m leaving the strange limbo land I’ve inhabited since leaving my job as a tenured professor two years ago.

I’m studying to become an electrician.

Let me explain why...

For all practical purposes, we’re living in a 1.5C world. Climate scientists have gotten quite comfortable declaring the world’s ambitious targets, goals, promises, pledges, whatever you want to call them, dead as a dust bowl over the last year, with all those conferences and summits increasingly overrun by grifters and fossil fuel lobbyists. You can’t prevent something that’s already happening. Meanwhile, the current regime has officially rejected the basic grounding principle that greenhouse gases and carbon emissions drive climate change, leaving agencies like the EPA with no mandate or mechanism to regulate much of... anything.

When the head of public health goes on a podcast and brags about snorting cocaine off toilet seats as a response to an unprecedented resurgence of airborne diseases, in the middle of the worst flu season in 20-30 years, you know nobody is coming to save you. I mean, they couldn’t be saying it much louder.

That’s how things will go for the rest of this decade. In the best case scenario, the U.S. resumes a less suicidal climate policy in 2029, at the end of the decade that every expert has described as our last real chance to save the planet. With any luck, the AI bubble will pop soon and shut down all those data center plans. But as many experts have predicted, the early 2030s will bring the big pain: the bread basket failures, the severe droughts and water shortages, the scorching heatwaves, the famines. Those are baked in, and the best we can do is prepare and mitigate.

If you thought the Biden years were marked by a bizarre retreat into Barbenheimer vibes, imagine what a Gavin Newsom presidency is going to look like in 2030. And that, sadly, is one of the better deals on the table.

So, now what?

It’s so easy to look at that future and collapse into a heap of doom on your couch, or to go shower yourself in the same vibes that draped 2024. Both reactions lead to the same place, passive acceptance. Despair convinces you to do nothing because we’re already screwed, but hopium convinces you to keep drinking out of paper straws and driving around in your EV, as if that’s going to help.

What you do now depends on your worldview. Protest. Rebel. Prep. Give up. Some of us have decided to hang on as long as we can.

Personally, I’ve decided to take another big step in my journey. I’ve been working on making myself useful to my family and my community. That’s one of the reasons I started working on this illustrated guide.

Toward that end, I’ve started studying to become a licensed electrician. I’m enrolling in a course and planning to enter an apprenticeship later this year. My spouse is going to keep working on our backyard homestead. Between the two of us, we stand a chance at raising a child with real skills and a real foundation.

This feels like real prepping.

This is not playing homestead on YouTube with family land and money. This is not talking about giving up electricity while continuing to live in a house with lights, internet, and running water. This is not shouting into the void.

My reasoning:

I’ve been interested in this topic for a while. I’ve wanted to know how electricity works, in every possible way. When all the DIY solar folks stop and tell you to hire a certified electrician, I want to be that electrician.

Many of us don’t have the luxury of simply escaping from the grid. We can’t go off grid. We’re stuck. Even the hardest homesteaders are forced to admit it. I’m not sure there’s any logical path back to the 1800s short of becoming Amish. As one homesteader finally admitted on his channel, the grid has a way of following you everywhere, even to your farms and bugout cabins. It just won’t leave you alone.

Besides, electricity isn’t inherently evil. It runs schools. It runs grocery stores. It runs hospitals. The problem is reckless consumption. Maybe we shouldn’t have built a society dependent on it, but now, simply cutting it off would condemn billions of people to suffering and death. I would like to try to keep some of them alive.

Meanwhile, a collapsing civilization is going to leave behind plenty of scraps for us to work with. They won’t save the planet, but maybe we can figure out how to use them, to build something of a bridge to whatever comes next. Engineers and electricians will be doing that work, and I think that’s where I belong.

Everything we need to live, including the water that comes into our homes, needs electricity to get there. I can either spend thousands retrofitting my home to live like a pioneer in the middle of the suburbs, or I can adopt a trade that works with the systems we already have in place, to help keep them going. I can learn a skill that I can share with others, and deploy in emergencies. Maybe one day I can even volunteer weekends to build solar power setups for people. I can trade on it.

That would be nice.

No doubt, some people will call this idea pointless and doomed. One person recently told me nothing matters anyway, so why bother?

I have no answer for that.

All I can say is that, for me, someone who wants to live, someone who can’t join the Amish, someone who can’t move to a farm, someone who can’t spend the next twenty years hiding in their house and waiting for the militias to come, this path makes the most sense. It’s the best approach to the world in front of me.

There’s running from collapse, and there’s leaning into it. There’s stockpiling beans, there’s doomscrolling on your couch, there’s sitting back and thinking you can simply vote or organize your way to a better future, and there’s this. There’s forging the life that you’re going to need if you even want to try and survive. I think this counts as leaning into it. You don’t have to become an electrician. You could become a plumber. You could become an EMT. You could scale up your homestead. Now is the time. If you can’t, you can support someone who is. For a while now, I’ve been talking about big decisions. Hard decisions. Necessary decisions. In times of doubt, I’ve got a few little tokens to remind me that I’ve done hard things before, and they tended to work out.

Time to start following through.

Time to be a student again.

Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported project. It also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund, which focuses on individuals driving meaningful change.

Survival Illustrated focuses on practical topics, because outrage won’t save us. You can offer one-time support here.