The Grid is an Amazing Thing, and We're All Going to Miss It
On the arrogance of "the doers."
My daughter is turning 7 next month.
Right now, she has Covid.
She feels it.
We know she has Covid because I slapped on a pair of nitrile gloves, pulled her poop out of the toilet, swabbed it, and ran five different tests. (The first two failed because, silly me, I used too much poop.) Finally, we got a hit. One test yielded a faint line that only a Covid-cautious person would understand, thanks to countless hours of research over the last several years and a small community that cares whether Long Covid upends the best years of our children’s lives. The vast majority of society thinks parents like us are nuts for going to such great lengths.
Moments like these remind me why my family still lives on the grid, even though we know it’s slipping away from us by the day. Ecologists like John Michael Greer tell us to collapse now and avoid the rush.
He’s right, and we’re doing the best we can.
And yet, I also know that…
Those Covid tests were made on the grid. The nitrile gloves I used were made on the grid. When I throw our medical waste away, a garbage truck will pick it all up and take it to a landfill that uses the grid. The HOCl generator and humidifier we’re using right now rely on the grid. They were made in a factory. Our N95 masks, they were also made in a factory. The poop I drop back into the toilet swims off to a sewage treatment plant on the grid that does things that I’ll never be able to replicate, not even with a compost pile and composting toilet. Realizing how much I rely on the grid, even with my preps, is an act of humility.
The grid humbles me.
I also know that John Michael Greer uses the grid. He does interviews on YouTube, and he seeks an audience online. We watch him on the grid. We read his articles on the grid. We buy his books on the grid.
His books are printed on the grid.
Recently, I offered the notion that none of us really know what it’s like to live off the grid, because the grid is still here. It performs functions that most of us take for granted until it goes out. We don’t know what’s going to happen as it goes away, not even to all the resilient communities out there. I’ve never believed any of this should stop us from doing what we can to reduce our reliance on the grid and build robust communities where we care about each other.
It just means you show a little humility. You don’t act like you have all the answers. You talk about your struggles and failures. You don’t go online and brag about living off the grid. I mean, are you kidding me?
How a utility company defines the grid right now doesn’t do justice to the size and scope of what we’re facing. If that’s how someone defines the grid, I would invite them to open their mind a little.
The grid serves all of us, even those who believe they’re living without it. The grid serves everyone who ever plans to visit a hospital when they get sick or injured. The grid serves everyone who puts solar panels on their off-grid cabins. After all, you didn’t hire a blacksmith to make them.
Did you?
The grid serves anyone who orders a composting toilet online and has it delivered. The grid serves anyone who can log onto the internet at night to declare how much they don’t need the grid to survive.
Even the phrase “off the grid” relies on the existence of the grid. When the grid finally fades out for good, none of us will be living off the grid.
There won’t be a grid to separate from.
We’ll just be living.
Some of the survivalists, preppers, and homesteaders out there read these words and label people like us copouts, fakes, and posers—simply because we acknowledge unflattering truths. Some of them have started calling themselves the doers. They’ve started attacking anyone who offers a viewpoint they find offensive. They stuff words in our mouths. They call themselves resilient. They say they’re too busy to argue online, but they have a meltdown over someone’s Substack. They say they won’t tell us what we can and can’t do, but they’ll tell us how to earn a living or what skills we’re allowed to use, and writing isn’t one of them.
Meanwhile…
The collapse of public health is happening right in front of us. If offers a great lesson in real time about our reliance on the grid. This fall, nobody in my family will be eligible for Covid shots. We face another fall and winter at the threshold of another pandemic, not to mention the ferocious return of flu, measles, RSV, and a long list of other diseases. We have an anti-vaxxer in charge of public health who yearns for the days before vaccines and modern medicine. When you get sick, this guy thinks you should pop some cod liver oil and walk it off.
Our government just cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid. It’s going to collapse rural hospitals and care centers around the country.
That would be a loss of the grid.
When you take airborne diseases as seriously as your compost pile, you see the world a little differently from many of these self-proclaimed doers. You know one of the greatest and most immediate threats to your family’s survival isn’t fire, flood, and famine. It’s pathogens, here and now.
It’s fascism and eugenics.
My family knows how to deal with diseases because we have the internet, not just for a few hours a day, but at our disposal 24/7. We know to test our daughter’s poop because we read about it online. Our neighbors were never going to tell us that. It’s also the reason we know about the most accurate tests, and you can’t get them in town. We have to order them online. A company ships them to us on a grid that uses fossil fuels. The most accurate tests we use need a power source. You have to plug them into an outlet. That’s all living on the grid.
When my daughter gets better, we’re going to pack our air purifiers and tests into a car and drive hundreds of miles for a birthday party. It’s a trip we make once a year, because family still means something to us.
But maybe we should ride there on a donkey.
Maybe we should try to coordinate our daughter’s birthday with snail mail and carrier pigeons instead of smartphones. Maybe I should tell my family, sorry, we’re going to give up our cars and see what happens, because we need to be more like the doers. Maybe my in-laws will give us their retirement savings so we can buy a plot of undeveloped land close enough to visit by horseback.
It’s easy to tell someone else to collapse now and avoid the rush, or to call yourself a doer, while ignoring other people’s reality.
We know what we should be doing to prepare for a world without the grid, and we’re doing it imperfectly, but we run into obstacles at every turn. We have bills, mortgages, and jobs that keep us tied to the grid even as we try to harden ourselves off. Even the people who preach community and sustainability pose a threat to us and make our lives harder. Even they heap judgment on us, expecting us to conform to their notions of care and support. Even they would inflict us with lifelong chronic illness, and then go right on preaching about resilience.
They tell us no one survives as a lone wolf, but they’ve given many of us no choice. Their actions betray their words every single day. Some of us don’t decide to go it alone. Everyone else makes the decision for us.
We don’t choose to be alone.
We’re abandoned.
A lot of us are trying to reduce our reliance on the grid. We’re doing our best to take pressure off the grid. We’re trying to adapt to a world that’s changing faster than it ever has. How you and I prepare will look different from how someone else prepares. We have different needs and different conceptions about what it means to build a community. Some of us are finding it rather difficult to do all of that these days, because nobody treats us like we matter.
As for the grid…
If you buy and sell stuff online, you’re on the grid. If you have a job on the grid, you’re on the grid. If you go to a doctor on the grid, you’re on the grid. If you take medications made on the grid, you’re on the grid.
It’s worth repeating:
We’re all on the grid, because the grid is here.
Whether you’re preparing by yourself, with a small group, or a big community, it’s wisdom not to take the grid for granted. It’s wisdom not to kid yourself too much or give yourself too much credit. That doesn’t mean we stop trying. It just means we go about these endeavors with a degree of humility.
I’ve never told anyone to give up anything because it was too hard. I’ve always said to forgive yourself when you feel like a failure.
That lesson applies to every single thing we do.
Calling yourself a doer, pretending you live off the grid when you have the internet on tap, telling the world who deserves to be listened to, getting offended, and attacking anyone who sees the world differently is not an act of community building. It’s an act of division and destruction. It’s arrogance.
The grid is an amazing thing.
We’re going to miss it.
All of us.
Am so sorry and hope she feels better.
I've written a couple of pieces for a series on Reddit called "Imagining the Collapse" about all the things we will miss after they are gone. The first one was titled "The Return of Virgin Field Pandemics". Because, once Collapse gets going and public health programs stop being funded. Once the pool of vaccinated people in the population shrinks.
Virgin Field Pandemics will return.
I never thought that this would be something we did TO OURSELVES, ON PURPOSE.
It changes the dynamics of being in a collapsing world/society when EVERY person you have to deal with may infect you with a deadly illness. We imagine "communities" and "local networks" through the lens of mass vaccination instead of the reality of deadly communicable diseases.
I expect some places will simply shoot strangers on sight rather than risking what they might be carriers of. Your daughter has Covid. The mortality rate for Covid is around 1% of an unvaccinated population.
In 1846, about 6,100 of the 7,864 people living in the Faroe Islands contracted measles. It had been 68 years since the last cases and no one had any immunity. 170 died, a case fatality rate of 2.8%. From MEASLES. The exact thing that's ripping through under vaccinated communities across the country.
The only reason we aren't having a measles pandemic with mass deaths is that we are still coasting on the mass vaccination programs of the past. With Collapse accelerating I don't see those programs coming back.
As you say, we talk a lot about "community" without ever considering what that means or how it will really work.
I hope your daughter recovers quickly and fully. I hope that your previous Covid vaccinations give you and everyone else in your house the immunity to avoid reinfection.
"The Grid" isn't just the physical infrastructure that supports us. It's also the social infrastructure that makes it possible for all of us to live together. It's also breaking down.
That grid WAS an amazing thing.
We’re ALREADY missing it.
And things are going to get a lot worse.