The basic problem is ignorance of the tools and techniques that can solve most of our problems today, now.
You can solve most of your problems. The first step is to realize that and the second step is "Do it every day." Make some concrete progress each day, build a habit and routine around the practices that improve your life.
Let's break it down into some categories. Personal problems come in a few main themes:
First and foremost, you have to get your metaphysics straight. It's a big joke: to be fully grounded you have to "space out" for a bit each day.
I was raised more-or-less in what I later learned counts as the "New Thought" movement. I didn't know it, and I don't think my parents would have identified as anything in particular if asked. They had gone through the 60's in San Francisco and adopted a variety of beliefs without much reflection on the stream of culture in which they swam. In any event, the list on the Wikipedia article on New Thought seems good to me:
Although New Thought is neither monolithic nor doctrinaire, in general, modern-day adherents of New Thought share some core beliefs:
That sums it up pretty well! Also, the perennial philosophy:
The perennial philosophy ... views all of the world's religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown.→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
In sum, my parents were part of the "New Age"
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_AgeSo that's me. I'm not going to tell you what to believe. I will recommend some techniques and practices that I've found helpful in my life, but the ultimate guide for you is you yourself.
It comes down to Faith. In what or Whom do you put your faith? You have to make the effort to figure that out.
I don't think much of economics as a science. To me it's pretty much indistinguishable from numerology.
To me it seems like a scientific basis for economics would be
economics = ecology + psychology
Ecology is grounded in physics...
Physics to Chemistry to Molecular Biology to Biology to Ecology
-and-
Physics to Chemistry to Geology to Ecology
...but psychology is still all over the place. Never mind. There's NLP which, although not yet a hard science, gives us a kind of operating system for our own minds.
So what does ecology + NLP look like?
I dunno for sure but I *like* that question!
I'm not very good with money myself, so this is one of those "do what I say not what I do" situations.
If you already have an accountant and wealth and such then you're ahead of the game and can skip this part. It's for the rest of us who are having some problems in the area of money.
Design a economic system for your household. The basics are pretty straightforward and are written up reasonably well in a book:
To get money in the first place there's an even older book:
Note that "The Richest Man in Babylon" is nearly a hundred years old and "Art of Money Getting" is a hundred and forty-one.
There's also the more modern "Index Card":
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_CardAn ecologically harmonious lifestyle is economically cheaper, both for the household in reduced expenses and the surrounding economy via reduced degradation of "ecosystem services".
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and from healthy ecosystems.→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service
You have to remind yourself that eating cheap junk food now leads to terrible medical expenses later on or an early grave. Paying extra for healthy food is actually saving money over the whole of your life, if you stay hale and hearty into your autumn years.
In order to help bring about ecological harmony you should do your best to purchase from regenerative businesses. I feel like there are a lot of people promoting ways to make more money, but most of them don't talk about the nitty-gritty of the other side of the coin (no pun intended): how you spend it. To be sure, many folks do talk about this. In addition to Right Livelihood we can coin the term Right Consumerism? Right Spending? "Every victory is a funeral for kin." "Every purchase is a sale for kin." (Hmm... strange inversion there, can't tell if funny or somber. So probably funny.)
Anyway, how you invest and spend your money ("Spend it, lend it, or give it away!") is as important as how you make it.
One thing I noticed in pretty much every homesteader video is that everyone is wearing mass manufactured clothing.
"Fibershed": watershed but for your clothing/fibers. TODO find the folks that coined that term and link to them.
Ecological living along with advances in technology *should* result in massive reduction of work required to maintain a given high quality of life. E.g. a 24-hour work week, and the option to retire after working only a few years.
→ The 24-Hour Work WeekOne's leisure time would, presumably, be directed towards things like spending more time with one's children, or participating in local politics via consensus building (the most expensive yet most efficient form of government I suspect.)
Consensus decision-making or consensus politics (often abbreviated to consensus) is group decision-making processes in which participants develop and decide on proposals with the aim, or requirement, of acceptance by all.→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
FWIW, Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have this level of technology by some time in the 1970's, and we did (e.g. the transistor, atomic power), but we have yet to engage our technology coherently to make it happen.
The great architect Christopher Alexander (of "Pattern Language" fame) has a site called "Building Living Neighborhoods":
Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging, places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes, Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possible conception and construction of living, beautiful communities→ https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm
I think that you can view Permaculture et. al. as a kind pattern language and harmonize it with the structural/architectural pattern language of building to get an eco-neighborhood pattern language.
E.g. Village Homes in Davis, CA, is a great example:
Village Homes is a planned community in Davis, Yolo County, California. It is designed to be ecologically sustainable by harnessing the energies and natural resources that exist in the landscape, especially storm-water and solar energy.→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes
It was built in the 1970's and remains very popular.
I don't know how to get from here to there. It's mostly a people problem and I'm not a people person.
I think you have to get some land, build some ecologically "green" houses and infrastructure, rent it to folks much below market rate on the understanding that they meet certain conditions (like you can't just move out and sublet it on Airbnb or something.)
The idea is that the folks renting these eco-flats and apartments at ~70% off market rate use the difference to live well.
To close the loop, at least some of them would be working to get more land, build more eco-neighborhoods, and rent them out to more people. And a certain amount of the collected rent would go to a fund to support wild land conservation and ecosystem restoration.
You could build something like Park Merced in San Francisco but integrated with regenerative farms and a wildlife corridor.
Park Merced is "a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments ... It contains 3,221 residences ... and over 9,000 residents..."→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkmerced,_San_Francisco