Survival in the (not really) wilderness

When I was in boy scouts, back in the day, I used to teach first aid, wilderness survival, and camping classes to the other boys. I really loved going out into the woods for days on end with just a knife, and seeing what I could come up with. Because I enjoyed it, and was good at it, it seemed natural to teach it.

I know that a lot of people think of some crazy, grizzled-old man out in the woods building huts out of leaves, and trapping dear with his bare hands. There's a reason for that. A lot of stuff in survival classes really assumes the worst. "What if you crash-landed in the mountains, were the only survivor of the crash, and all you had left after the ensuing chemical fire (because flammable toxins is what was in the cargo hold) was a single shoe and half a stick of gum? GO!"

I stopped doing that stuff once I realized that the worst situation I was likely to find myself in was that a breaker tripped and my computer turned off in the middle of a really important quake match...

But have you ever known someone, or been the guy yourself, who says things like that? Maybe not regarding actual wilderness, but just in your day-to-day life. "If we don't get our ROI up, we'll all lose our jobs!". "What if the economy totally crashes and I can't fend for myself?". It's a tempting road for a lot of us to go down. Fixing problems is something that our culture tells us is a good thing. So, we try to think of problems that we might someday be able to fix.

But what about the much more mundane problems right now? What's more likely? The whole country descends into chaos because the dollar devalues, or that the people you are around every day secretly hate you because of your crazy conspiracy theories? I'm not judging here, btw. I used to be the crazy theory guy. I loved the stuff! Hell, I taught classes in it for Pete's sake!

It seems to me, that among all the problems facing our world right now, the far-off ones are not the ones for people like you and I to be dealing with. It's our jobs to just make sure that our lives, and the lives of the people around us, are happy ones. Whatever that looks like for you. It's our responsibility to make the world a little brighter where we can.

That's why we made Propits. It's not that money is evil, and when it all comes crashing down the wicked will see their folly. It's that money represents a feeling, not an economy, to the average person. So let's just bring back the feeling. Let's just remember that there are things in our lives, right here and right now, that matter. And that those things are the ones that we should be focusing on, not some imaginary problem that has yet to come.