1:22am

These are the things that keep me awake at night.

In March of this year I set on the path of overcoming the fear of (among other things) calamitous financial collapse in the United States and a Depression-era hoarding mentality that came with it. I feel like I have achieved that goal, having come to terms with a more sustainable lifestyle and released the need to hold onto every might-be-useful object in my home. The irony of having conquered these overly-pessimistic risk averse behaviors a few months before an undeniable major collapse of the United States markets, and just a few hours ago the precipitous fall of the Nikkei 225, is something of a bitter source of amusement for me.

Watching the fall of the markets has been a major source of distraction for me over the last few days. In the back of my head I feel like there is something that I could be doing to prepare more adequately for the coming storm. Do I have enough food in reserves? What happens if things start to collapse around me? What's important enough to take from my house and escape with if riots start to break out in the streets? Its the sort of chained anxiety I thought I had conquered and put behind me, but has suddenly returned to assert itself in an environment where all those things don't sound too far afield.

In the last few days nothing major has changed for me. Every routine is still pretty much the same as it was three weeks ago or three months ago. But there is this pervasive feeling I have that anything and everything has the potential to. Once our collective fantasy of money starts to break down, you wonder how many other unspoken collective deceptions are next. My entire industry is built around not actually building anything, simply changing one form of information to another and hopefully approximating knowledge along the way. Who cares about that when food is scarce? Suddenly the practicality of joining a roving band of philosopher-plumbers takes on a new significance. If only I knew anything about plumbing . . .

11:39am

As I drove to work the President was on the radio and the DJIA had dipped below 8,000 points.

1:10pm

Listening to This American Life show #365, called Another Frightening Show About the Economy. To quote Mark Peterson:

For those of you who have experienced an earthquake, some people call it a "soul wrenching" experience because you realize there's a power out there that's doing something that you have no control over whatsoever and it's massively moving everything and that's last week.

Anyone else feel that soul wrenching feeling?

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