Yes, move heaven and earth, use your personal family/friends/professional network and resources to get into an office job - for a business or for a non-profit or for an university. Even if it is sales assist or accounts payables clerk. Then bust your ass and arrive early and stay late to get assigned to projects - even if it means helping the IT staff roll out new desktops on their next cycle after first developing a reputation as the "Excel" guy, or volunteering to help the contractor/consultant implement something because it is a small office, or volunteering for training, or offering to do analytical assistance for the sales staff of two guys or the controller. You are still young, you can do it. The point is to be in a position to step into roles that open up for you, or allow you to propose analytical ideas to managers, directors, etc.Being in the kitchen, chopping onions and slicing carrots, puts you nowhere near the kinds of opportunities you are looking to get yourself into. "Contributed to the efficiency of kitchen operations by preparing food in accordance with safe handling practices" pales in comparison to "Analyzed the contact/no-contact and close ratios of sales calls to time of day and week to optimally schedule customer contacts" when you are trying to get your foot into the next door towards analytical.
Do something free for a nonprofit if you must. But the kitchen is not where you should be earning your minimum wage. If anything, if you stay where you are, someone else with a degree (and onerous student loans) from some culinary academy is probably going to get promoted over you into an assistant or line cook position that pays slightly better. Even if you did get the promotion to something else in the kitchen, the longer you are in that line if work, the more typecast you will be.
I really don't think society will collapse in one fell swoop as you seem to think. Even in Argentina, it is more like people scrounging, hustling, getting by as each year is worse than before. But life goes on and you apparently get used to it. Kids still laugh and play.
According to John Michael Greer, we are transitioning towards a world of scarcity industrialism. This will last at least a few decades. The aging demographics and debt challenges will be tough on the United States, but it will not be a massive collapse. But yes, poverty will hit more of us. (I include myself.) The Boomer seniors will vote themselves some kind of rescue package offered by politicians who couch it in terms of retirement with dignity as if they have earned it all. Yet you won't be forced to take up farming or moving to a rural area to survive, just as the almost 3 million residents of Buenos Aires still live in the city.
Learn entrepreneurial skills. Learn to barter and bargain, deal and dumpster-dive, hustle and handyman, repair and re-use, sew and sow. But don't think that will butter most of your bread yet. The scavenger societies come after scarcity industrialism, and will last at least a century, if not longer. That is when having the latter skills will really come in handy. By then you will no longer be in your 20s or 30s. You could be in your 50s.
Scarcity Industrialism: "…The world is in the midst of a transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar to us over the last century or so, which I've called 'abundance industrialism,' and a new kind that may as well be called 'scarcity industrialism.' Where abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of cheap abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels, scarcity industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. One of the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions that control significant amounts of important resources will find those resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same sort of clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the Seventies, and may reclaim in the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or cartels of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource."
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity-industrialism.html
"When transportation accounts for most of the cost of many commercial products, that fact will write R.I.P. on the headstone of the global economy, because goods made overseas will be priced out of markets dominated by local production and regional trading networks. We’ve already begun to see the cutting edge of the new resource nationalism, as energy reserves and strategic raw materials become the mainsprings of political and military power, and governments start treating them accordingly. Expect this to expand dramatically in the decades to come, as dependence on foreign resources becomes a noose around a nation’s neck and economic independence – even at a sharply lowered standard of living – the key to survival.
"More generally, the pendulum of power could well swing away from the multinational corporations that have exercised so much influence in recent years, toward those national governments willing to use military force to maintain territorial integrity and control over resources. When most resource transfers across borders are negotiated between governments according to a calculus of political advantage, rather than being purchased on the open market by the highest bidder, those whose power comes solely from money will find themselves with a great deal less clout than they have today. Those governments that master the new calculus of power soonest, in turn, will dominate the age of scarcity industrialism.
"However it unfolds, the age of scarcity industrialism will no more be a permanent state of affairs than the age of abundance industrialism that precedes it. While it lasts, access to fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources will be the key to international power and national survival, but by that very token fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources will continue to slide down the curves of depletion. As resource production in one nation after another drops below levels that will support any kind of industrial system, industrial economies will unravel and give way to other forms of economy – in the terms I’ve used in several recent posts, other seral stages in the process of succession that leads to the ecotechnic societies of the future.
"What remains unknown is which of the current industrial societies will manage the transition to scarcity industrialism, and which will falter and crack under the strain. The United States could go either way."
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/10/age-of-scarcity-industrialism.html
Salvage Societies: "…The age of scarcity industrialism will be self-limiting, because the exploitation of nonrenewable resources that gives it its power also puts a time limit on its survival. Once those resources are gone, or depleted far enough that it stops being economical to run a society by exploiting them, another round of new social and economic forms will replace the structures of scarcity industrialism.
"At this point we may just find ourselves in something like familiar territory. Archeologists around the world have learned to recognize the distinctive traces of a collapsed society, and one of these is the recycling of old structures for new uses."
"The logic behind it, though, has not often been recognized: when a civilization breaks down, the most efficient economies are most often those that use its remains as raw material."
A "village blacksmith could smelt his own raw material from bog iron – that's the technical name for the iron sulfide deposits laid down in most temperate zone wetlands by chemosynthetic bacteria. There’s a lot of bog iron to be had, since it hasn’t been used commercially in centuries and most North American deposits away from the Atlantic coast have never been worked at all. It's easy to smelt bog iron into workable form – people in Dark Age Europe and early colonial America did it with simple charcoal fires – and it’s also quite easy to do the same thing with rust, which is iron oxide, the standard commercially worked iron ore in the days before huge fossil fuel subsidies made it possible to use low-grade ores like taconite.
"Still, the steel stocked up for the future by today’s civilization make a far more economical source. A small proportion of that consists of high-temperature alloys that require modern technology to work with, but the huge majority – girders, pipes, auto frames, sheet steel, and much more – can be forged at temperatures much lower than the ones you need for smelting ore, and yield better metal into the bargain. They will be the obvious metal source in the age of salvage that will follow the time of scarcity industrialism. Furthermore, there are billions of tons of the stuff all over what is now the industrial world, enough to keep the deindustrial cultures of the future supplied for a very long time.
"Mind you, steel is only one of hundreds of raw materials that will be accessible in the ruins of today’s cities and towns."
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/10/age-of-salvage-societies.html
Poet
P.S. I met Robert and Kim Kiyosaki once at a seminar, have a picture of him and me (blurry, as he hates flash). I have one of his books, signed by both him and his sister, a Buddhist nun. I have several of his books. Entertaining to read and helps you think. However, do take what Kiyosaki says with a grain of salt. He is trying to sell his books after all.
