I've always been.....

a not so material person. A simple person, almost.  Which may be a side effect of me being amazingly cheap, but I think that it serves me well. We usually have enough to live on - a little extra for fun.  And of course, I could have much, much, much more extra to live on if I wasn't quite so enourmously anal about escaping the little bit of debt I've incurred as rapidly as possible. And - that actually makes me feel better about not living a life of luxury - because I'm choosing it, I suppose. But - there's always been a - deep grinding feeling in me that living with a high amount of debt is dangerous. Not foolhardy, not risky, but simply dangerous. That - incurring debt for a newer car, or a designer pair of shoes goes far beyond fiscal foolishness and starts to waver close to the edge of out and out fiscal suicide.
Of course, it might be how  I grew up - living off of welfare, and WIC, and the occasional odd job my stepfather deemed worthy, and that briefly adventourously terrifying episode of homelessness. So - living ABOVE my means - esp. as I've gotten older - has become - instinctively scary. Ya'll all remember the long tirades I went on as I was 'debating' buying an Ipod. And - mind you - that was EXTRA money. Basically gift money, and I had a very hard time 'gifting' myself.
Gah. I'm rambly, because I've been thrown a little off kilter (and a little on track) by this.  It's about a phenomenom called 'Peak Oil'. The basic concept is that oil production - like most things - operates on a bell curve. Currently, we (as a world) are hitting the downslope of oil production all over the world - and - it's not renweable - and we are too far away from having REAL,  CHEAP, TRANSPORTABLE alternative fuel sources to carry us through. The really - creepy part (which I never even thought about) is that everything - Everything - EVERYTHING - that we use to LIVE on uses oil to be produced. EVERYTHING ya'll.
It's scary enough to be nutty, and logical enough to make perfect sense, esp. considering the swiftly sliding increases in gas prices. I mean - hm. Those alone have - shook me up. I'm not THAT old, and I remember gas being 99 cents a gallon. I'd be suprised if gas was UNDER 3.00 a gallon by Thanksgiving.
So. I'm thankful that I'm not a material person. I'm thankful that I'm training to be a midwife because two things will reamin constant - no matter what.  People will be born, and people will die. I'm thankful that I'm crazy about paying off my debts so that I can start to BUILD a true nest egg. I'm thankful that my fear of debt has held me back from buying a house. I'm - rather relieved actually.

And I'm nervous as hell. It might not happen while I'm alive (for which I would be throughly thankful - though guilty about leaving that kind of mess in the hands of my kids) but it's going to happen.

*shudder*