I assume it means something like “discretionary spending” but it’s not clear.

The song was about SoCal in the 1990s but it could equally apply to Florida or Texas circa now.

It has gotten to be dogma that “Malthus was proven wrong” on all sides of the mainstream’s political spectrum. I always found that odd, because he didn’t make any predictions. All of his work was based on historical data and known cases; he was very much a British empiricist. The only prediction in his essay, to the extent he made any, was that the principles wouldn’t change in the future because of some nebulous “progress”.

And they didn’t. What happened instead, as the article rightly notes, is that we temporarily increased carrying capacity. And in so doing we built a trap for ourselves from which we won’t be extricated in the coming decades. No one knows exactly how the trajectory of energy and resource descent will play out, but that it will happen, is happening now, is not in doubt.

The peak oil movement had another renaissance in the 2000s, but it went completely out of style about a decade ago. Most of the people who were aware of it like J.M. Greer, J.H. Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov, for example, just threw up their hands and stopped posting about it, because by that point no one outside of the subculture cared or intended to do anything about it. The “black pill” here, as I see it, is that we are just going to use it all up, whatever is accessible from the economic feasibility view anyway, and then suffer a traumatic economic disruption/contraction when it runs out.

Ever since Covid, by far the most money I have spent is on transport (gas) and food, apart from housing. Beyond that, most of my discretionary spending has been entirely on items that can be immediately used like clothes/outdoor wear, kitchen ware or books. I also try to buy whatever I can used, since there’s such an excess of unwanted stuff in consumer society that you usually can find things used. The next step would be more DIY projects for a range of things and accumulating hard skills instead of items, but I haven’t quite crossed that bridge yet. That would stand me in good stead for the future that’s actually coming, though.

The system has been broken for pretty much my entire adult life and I’m doing my part not to make the problems of our time worse.

I read Ages of Discord and it was very interesting. For example, he had kind of contrarian takes on the Great Depression (e.g. deflation was bad for the financial classes but actually helped the working and middle classes achieve broader prosperity). Which others would you recommend? A friend recommended Secular Cycles a long time ago but I haven’t got around to it yet.