Oil and gas were generally so cheap and plentiful throughout the twentieth century that even those in the lowest ranks of the social order enjoyed it… - James Howard Kunstler

The denial about [the] global peak in the United States is already fierce, as investments in car-dependent, oil-addicted infrastructure are greater here than in any other nation and Americans consider their way of life a[n]… entitlement. […] The economic... [struggle] among... all nations, [...] will be considerable and is certain to lead to increasingly desperate competition for diminishing supplies of oil [and every other resource].

What one also saw in the America of the 1980s and 1990s was commoditization and conversion of public goods into private luxuries, the impoverishment of the civic realm, and, to put it bluntly, the rape of the landscape—a vast entropic enterprise that was the culminating phase of suburbia. The dirty secret of the American economy in the 1990s was that it was no longer about anything except the creation of suburban sprawl and the furnishing, accessorizing, and financing of it. It resembled the efficiency of cancer. Nothing else really mattered except building suburban houses, trading away the mortgages, selling the multiple cars needed by the inhabitants, upgrading the roads into commercial strip highways with all the necessary shopping infrastructure, and moving vast supplies of merchandise made in China for next to nothing to fill up those houses. The economy of suburban sprawl was a systemic self-organizing response to the availability of inordinately cheap oil with ever-increasing entropy expressed in an ever-increasing variety of manifestations from the destruction of farmland to the decay of the cities, to widespread psychological depression, to the rash of school shooting sprees, to epidemic obesity. Americans didn’t question the validity of the suburban sprawl economy. They accepted it at face value as the obvious logical outcome of their hopes and dreams and defended it viciously against criticism. They steadfastly ignored its salient characteristic: that it had no future either as an economy or as a living arrangement. Each further elaboration of the suburban system made it less likely to survive any change in conditions, most particularly any change in the equations of cheap oil. It wasn't until the traumas of the 1970s that the finance sector mutated from being an adjunct of the industrial economy to becoming an “industry” in its own right helping to “drive” the economy. Among the distortions and perversions engendered by the “stagflation” economy was the rise of corporate cannibalism in the form of “creative” mergers and acquisitions, specifically hostile takeovers, the aggressive use of voting stock shares to gain control of companies that did not wish to sell, with the subsequent filleting and sell-off of assets, and discarding of the bones and offal (employee payrolls and obligations, careers, livelihoods, communities).

I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important you were.