What you do when you discover you're out of step with your culture? When you feel that the world is crumbling, and no one admits it? It seems like authority figures, advertisers, and the culture is determined to distract you from the truth.

As we've grown richer in material goods, we seem more unable to cope. We live in a country in which a majority of people cannot scrape up $500 in an emergency. We're a nation where many families are one paycheck from financial disaster. Yet the culture encourages us not only to spend money, but to go into debt to pay for a new car, or an oversized home, or a college education. We're bankrupting our future to pay interest on our past spending. Is that right?

"Fed, Safe and Sheltered" is Teresa Peschel's manifesto memoir about her quest to drop out of the rat race, embrace her peasant ancestry, and prepare her family for an uncertain future.

Casting a gimlet eye on the world around us, she describes how our emphasis on a consumer economy and cheaply priced goods has forced us to become debt slaves for economic growth. Where once a middle-class family could afford a home and a few material goods, we're having to patch together part-time and "gig" work to pay the bills. Instead of a balance between work and life, we're all-work all the time, chained by our smartphones to the jobs that haven't been replaced by automation (yet).

In our pursuit of material wealth, we're taught to ignore the value of family, friends, and connection, the pleasures of a comfortable home and good food, and that it is possible to save money and enjoy ourselves with less exploitation of people around the world.

Peschel describes not just how we got here, but how we can escape, by not playing the game where the rules are set by corporations and economists and rigged by politicians and the media. Escape into a world where we pay down debts, save money, buy a home we can age in, keep ourselves secure, and cut spending through simple tasks such as insulating our home, hanging laundry, searching for mongo and obtainium, and effective grocery shopping.

"Fed, Safe and Sheltered" will not teach you how to garden, fill your arsenal, and prepare for zombies and the fall of civilization. It will teach you the value of organization, public libraries, heating and cooling your home through the Window Dance, enhancing your home's natural light, installing hedges and fences to improve your privacy, learning the rudiments of sewing and cooking, and grocery shopping like a Jedi master.

"Fed, Safe and Sheltered" is a manifesto, a polemic, and a chat with your smart neighbor over coffee about your families' futures. It is for people who seek answers to the dissatisfaction and apprehension they feel. Following its advice can't prevent the bad times from coming, but it can cushion the shock when they arrive.