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.
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.