Bonus Episode: Who is Coming to Save You?

I'm hearing across the board from people in the emergency preparedness community about people - irrespective of age, geography, personal situations, etc. - who want everything done for them. "Hey, could you just like rough out a survival game plan for me? K, thx!"

Who is gonna do that for you? Or are there people in your life who will expect that from you ?

I saw this years ago when I ran a CSA-style side hustle and had customers tell me, point blank, "I know you can't customize these produce boxes for everyone else, ha ha, but make an exception for me." 😒

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Transcript

0:15

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's bonus episode, I wanted to talk about people unraveling. And in addition to that, who do you think is coming to save you? Where is your knight in shining armor? Someone that's going to show up rowing a lifeboat and cordially invite you in? The reason why this has been on my mind is because I'm hearing from people within the emergency preparedness community across the board, about people just coming out of the woodwork wanting and wanting and wanting. And it's irrespective of geography, age, and the types of things that they want. I know people like to make generational clickbait and say, Oh, it's all those who Gen Z kids or it's all the millennials, as Gen Xers typically get forgotten. So it's not even worth mentioning us. Oh, it's all the boomers. Okay, Boomer, it's irrespective apparently, of geography. Are these people in a big city? Are they out in the suburbs? Is this person 70 years old? Or are they 50? Or are they 30? It seems to be something across the board, in regards to people waking up and then starting to unravel and wanting someone else to manage their life for them. Sometimes this manifests as well, I don't really know what I would do in an emergency. So can you just like do everything for me. Other times it manifests as Can you just like condense down your knowledge, whether that's 1020 or maybe even 50 or 60 years worth of knowledge and how to adapt how to deal with an emergency situation. And just like break it down for me and like an hour, because that's really all the time I want to spend on this. Okay, thanks. And people within the emergency preparedness community are like, No, that's not how this works. That's not how this works. If you're in the military, then you definitely understand this improvise, adapt, overcome, do what you have to do to get past the obstacles revert back to your training. It's not like people show up to go into the military and boot camp lasts for one hour. And then they automatically leave knowing how to do everything that that's not how reality works, folks. So going to someone in the emergency preparedness community and saying, Hey, I really don't know anything about how to like survive a natural disaster. If there was a hurricane tornado wildfire flooding, I really wouldn't know what to do. So could you just like break it down? To me real simple in like 10 minutes. Okay, thanks that. What are you? What? Or worse? Yeah, just showing up and saying, I don't really want to prepare and plan ahead myself, I don't want to rough out any kind of survival plan. So could you just like do something for me? Could you just show up rowing the lifeboat and tell me to get in so that I don't have to think ahead or plan ahead in any way for my own life? You know, I put that type of person into my basket of people who are probably not going to make it in my opinion, if you want everything in life done for you. You don't want to take the time to figure out well, what what would my game plan be? What would work best for myself and my family? Or do I feel that my job is in danger of a layoff? And if so, what's my job loss survival plan? I really like how Suze Orman said just go ahead and assume you're laid off, go ahead and run through that like a fire drill, run through it and figure out what would I do to take care of myself and my family in the event that the Poopoo hit the fan and I no longer had a job? Or if you're in a dual income situation, what if both of us were laid off at about the same time, and we went from having to cut everything in half to having to cut everything to nothing? I mean, I would rather think ahead just speaking solely for myself, because I cannot give you advice speaking solely for myself, I would rather think ahead and plan ahead. Like GI Joe is that knowing is half the battle, improvise, adapt, overcome, what would I need to do to overcome the obstacle? Are there expenses that I could cut? Are there subscriptions that I'm not even using anymore? Where's the nearest food bank? If they were out? What would I do? I mean, I would rather have some kind of gameplan roughed out. And like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face in the event that I got punched in the face by life or the economy or whatever. Could I pivot in some other direction? I mean, there is a sense of peace and serenity that comes from making up your mind that you're going to survive. I think sometimes people put up a straw man and they say, well, everybody else except this particular generation, and again, US Xers are always forgotten about. So it's usually Oh, it's those boomers. Oh, it's those millennials. Oh, it's those Gen Z kids. They set that up as a straw man. And it's a distraction. It's a bunch of silly distraction, in my opinion, away from the things that really matter. And I saw this firsthand several years ago. So I've had the entrepreneurial bug for quite some time. I mean, I've wanted to work from home and kind of be an introvert heaven and do my own thing for a long time. Back in 2007, when Tim Ferriss published The Four Hour Workweek, I was like a lot of people, I couldn't wait to read it. I was skeptical. I thought it might be full of hot air, but I wanted to try. And the idea of having a four hour workweek sounded absolutely sublime to me. So I read the book, and I listened to his stories, success stories about people who went to the boss and said, Hey, I want to work from home, or, Hey, I want more PTO, hey, I want to take a sabbatical. And no offense to anybody. But in the book, he makes it sound relatively easy. So I went to my employer at the time and said, You know, I want to either work from home, or have more PTO. I mean, something's got to give here. And I was pretty much slapped down and told, Well, no, if we do it for you, then we have to do it for everybody. You know, you're working in a small company where everybody kind of knows everybody else's business. And so if we give you additional PTO, then we have to do that for everybody. If we give you a laptop and let you work from home, then we have to do that for everybody. And we're not gonna so thanks anyway, I was basically told, Hey, we don't blame you for trying, we don't fault you for coming in here and making a very coherent argument about why you want to do this. But no, no, get your butt back in that cube and sit down. So I, it just always felt to me like something that was unattainable like some kind of great Xanadu to be able to work from home and call your own shots. So a few years later, flash flash forward in time, I had moved down to the country, but I wasn't farming yet. I had planted a garden and it was doing really well. I do have something of a green thumb. Now, not this year. Okay, I do need to do a completely separate episode about what it's like to be a farmer right now. Because it's incredibly difficult. There were seeds that didn't sprout, there were crops that literally got burned, they were burned up and desiccated. In the flash drought, some people in other parts of the country where they've had difficulty with flooding, their crops are just washed away and destroyed by floodwater. So it's very difficult time to be involved in agriculture. But under not so bizarre weather circumstances, I have a pretty good green thumb. And I started this side hustle of doing produce boxes. And I ran this little side hustle based on the CSA model, which is community supported agriculture. That's where you get like some bags or a box of produce from either one farmer or a group of farmers. And it's really run on the model of you get what you get, and you don't pitch a fit, meaning whatever the farmers have on hand, things that are fresh in season and in good condition, they're ripe and ready to be picked. That's what goes in your produce box at the time. It's not Walmart, you don't get to go in and fill up your basket with exactly what you want, like you would at a farmers market or like a roadside stand. Maybe it's all about what the farmer has to put in that box for that week or for that month. That's what you get. And you're not supposed to have any pushback about it. Like if you want to support agriculture, and you want to eat fresh and local. This is one way of being able to do it. Well, yeah. Yeah. So this was was before any of the Gen Z kids were even out in the marketplace yet. My business participants were, I would say, a pretty good cross section of boomers, Xers and older millennials. And I was already seeing this. Well, I know that you don't take special requests. I know that you don't make modifications. But wink wink for me, you can your other customers can be peons and plebs, they, they won't get any modifications. But wink wink, I mean, you'll do it for me, right. And some people were just whining, my husband doesn't like yellow squash. So I don't want yellow squash in my box. I want this and I want that. And it's like, oh, man, it got to the point where I just said I can't do this anymore. Like I remember going to the SBA and talking to a business advisor and I'm like, What am I missing here? I feel like I can't possibly make it any clearer to these people that I run on a CSA model. I can't pull fruits and vegetables out of my rear end like it's either in fresh and in season or it's not and if I don't have a ripe watermelon to give you then I can't control nature. I mean, one time I had somebody that was asking me for things like mangoes and coconuts, okay, I live in the Midwest. I don't grow up mangoes and coconuts here and the breadbasket of the USA. nighted states what the hell? You can't make stuff like this up. And so the adviser at the SBA was like, Well, you know, Sarah, we're living in the age of stores like Walmart and Costco and Amazon. People want what they want, when they want it and how they want it, which is usually right now, you know, we're living in a very like fast paced on demand culture. And you may find that trying to do things on a CSA model, it just is not a sustainable business, you may have to compromise in some way. Or maybe you give them some things that they can customize, and some things that can't and see if that helps. But as the growing pains and the headaches of the side, hustle started to get worse, the business inside my day job was ramping up, I was getting busier and busier. And it got to a point of diminishing returns, something was going to have to give, and I wasn't getting enough out of the side hustle to justify the pain of doing it anymore. It made more sense financially as well as emotionally and mentally to double down on my day job and really make my money there and just closed down the produce box business. But to me, it's ridiculous to say well, it's only millennials. It's only Gen Z kids or it's only baby boomers, I saw it across the board, in in my produce box business. And I know you don't customize but and like I remember there was one lady who she called me up and she gave me this very sad story about how she was having health problems. Her doctor told her she had to eat more fruits and vegetables, no more fast food, no more pizza, she needed to exercise and lose some weight because it had just got to a tipping point with her health something was going to have to give. So she wanted me to meet her at the parking lot of a gym to give her this produce box, which I did. I was tired. I'd worked all day, I could not wait to get home, I'm still gonna have to go outside and work in the garden. Because Hello, that's something else about agriculture. Your your work is never done. It's never done. You know, you can try your best to get a handle on it. But it's never completely done. So I was tired. And I was waiting on this lady. So she comes out. She takes the produce box and she's like, Oh, well, I don't really like any of this. And I'm like serenity now. And so I will I asked her like, what what did you have in mind? Is there anything in particular that you do? Like, well, really the only thing I wanted from you was like a good fresh ripe watermelon. I really don't want any of these vegetables. Meanwhile, she had called me and said I have to eat more vegetables, my doctor said so I don't I don't really like any of these vegetables. I really just wanted a watermelon. So I was like okay, well, you know, right now I don't have any ripe watermelons to give anybody. They're still growing. They're still on the vine. It's kind of early in the season for watermelon. But you know, I can call you I have your number I can call you and I have some ready and see if you're still interested. Oh, yeah, that'd be great. And for me, it was kind of like that. It's like a cup of coffee. You know, you've run into somebody from high school when you're out somewhere. Oh, hey, how you doing? Okay, great. We don't have anything in common anymore. And we'll maybe one day we'll go get a cup of coffee and it just never happens. You know, it's just some pleasant tree that you say. So you can go on your merry way. Yeah, okay. I'll call you, you know, sit and be sure you sit there and wait by your phone lady after you've treated me this way. So I was seeing this type of behavior. Long before the Gen Z kids were ever out of the house and living independently as adults. Rules for all of your other customers, but not for me, I deserve to be the exception. I deserve for you to do everything for me. I don't care if your business is not set up to sustain this. i It's all about what I want, when and how I want it. So whenever I hear people in the emergency preparedness community talking about seeing the same thing, people just showing up out of nowhere and being like, well, I want you to do this for me. I want you to rough out a game plan for me and my family. And I know you don't know anything about us. You don't know our finances. You don't know our situation with food. Maybe Tommy has an allergy and Sally can eat this. And but you know, we want you to tell us everything that we need to do. I don't want to put any brainpower into that. I don't want to do any research. I don't want to you know, like read a book or something boring like that. I want to binge watch NetFlix all day while you rough out a game plan for me. Oh, and can you do that free of charge K thanks. It'd be great. Who? Yeah, some people in my opinion are not going to make it they are not going to make it. I would say what concerns me about this is if if there are people now who are finally sort of tuning in, you know, they're aware that every time they go to the grocery store, it's more expensive than it was the time before they're starting to hear whispers on the wind, the price of gas is going to go back up. There could be some type of warfare that breaks out you know, there was that PSA that New York City put out about what to do in the event of a new some type of nuclear bomb or some type of nuclear attack. Oh, and by the way should have a bug out bag. And we're gonna call it a to go bag. But really, it's, as the preppers have always called it a bug out bag. You shouldn't worry about any of this. But you know, you should be prepared in case of a nook or in case you have to take your to go bag and leave, as people are starting to wake up to these things and go, Wait a minute, what, what what is actually going on here? There seems to be some kind of unraveling. Like, I'm nervous and I'm tense and I'm not sure what's going on with the economy. I'm not sure what's going on geopolitically. But I don't want to like solve my own problems here. I want somebody else to do that for me. And I think, for me, a troubling question is if it's starting to happen in small pockets of people in all over the country, regardless of age, regardless of location, you know, how bad could it get? If more people wake up to the fact that it all feels like we're in a ruse? It feels like we're in some big Sham, where we're told Hi, everything's all right. Now than just seeing here, people move along with long. What's going to happen when we're finally told? Yeah. So this is an epic poopoo storm. Sorry, we made some bad judgment calls, but it's pretty bad. Now what what will happen, then? What will happen then? Can't give you advice. You know, I've always said, this is just my opinion. And I could be wrong. I'm just sitting here opining for your entertainment only. If it were me, all I can, all I can do is speak for myself, my family, my household, the way that we're approaching things. If it were me, you know, I would, I would want to plan ahead, I would want to at least have some kind of something rough down and put together whether we're talking about a natural disaster, we're talking about warfare, breaking out food, shortage, famine, difficulty with the water supply, whatever it may be, I would want to feel like I had done something I had made some kind of provision, rather than living in some kind of fantasy land that someone is going to roll the lifeboat to me and just say, well, here you go. You know, you don't have to be an adult. You don't have to solve any of your own problems. You don't have to think ahead or use any critical thinking, you just get in this lifeboat and we'll throw you to safety and everything will be fine. In my mind, if that's how you are approaching life, you are doing so at your own peril. Just my opinion, and I could be wrong. Stay safe. stay sane. I'll see you in the next episode. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you haven't already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.