We need plans. Personal plans and societal plans. Where will you live and work if personal transportation is prohibitively expensive? What will you and your family eat if mechanized agriculture and distribution systems can’t provide you with cheap corn from Iowa, let alone fresh produce from Chile?
On the personal level, the 2 most important things you can do to prepare for the difficult times ahead are to get into decent physical shape and get out of debt. You’ll need to move around more on your own power. Credit will become a very dicey issue.
After that, you should think about where you live and what you do. When gasoline is too expensive, how will you get to your job? When the focus is on necessities of life, is your job something people will pay you for? Where could you go and what could you do if you need to leave where you are?
On a societal level, we should obviously be building a new transportation infrastructure that moves as much as people and freight as possible on vehicles that use electricity. That suggests a lot of electrified rail. I’ve also mentioned that natural gas may be a very important transition fuel, but we would to do a lot work and on vehicles and distribution systems to scale that up to something significant.
In your local area, what is your community’s mass transit resources? Do they even have plans for such things? What is the local economy based on? The service and tourism economies of my part of the world aren’t too reassuring a base, I’m afraid. What can be done to promote better transit systems that tie reasonable commute living places to jobs that produce something? What are the prospects for developing those jobs? And what does agriculture look like in and near your home? Local food sources will become much more important as production and transportation of commodity crops from far away factory farms becomes unsustainable.
Think about scenarios and strategies. Do you have an adaptation plan or exist strategy so you don’t feel trapped in a faraway suburb with no job, in a body that can’t do what you want it to do? Interesting thing about all this is that if you pursue lower debt, better health, and better job prospects now it would still make your life better if none of this comes to pass.