The Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Once a quarter I go up to Santa Barbara to a beautiful retreat center. I go there to rejuvenate and just have a very peaceful and quiet weekend.

Well the last time I was there, they had signs posted everywhere and they told us in person

that there's a severe drought in Santa Barbara and we had to be very careful not to use up too

much water.

I've been going to Santa Barbara for decades, so I asked them. I thought that

Santa Barbara built a desolization plant. They said they did, but when the water shortage

wasn't short anymore anymore they stopped building it

and now of course they're building it again because they need the water

but now of course because they delayed it's going to take a couple more years to finish

it and by the time to get close to finishing it,

the water shortage may be gone again. Now we can laugh at this and say, silly Santa

Barbrans, why are you guys doing this? You know there's going to be a water shortage,

why don't you just prepare, finish what you built, and get it done? Seems simple, doesn't it?

But we don't do that either, unfortunately. We expect things to stay the same.

And I don't want to pick on Santa Barbara too much either,

because governments around the world do this all the time.

When they have lots of money, they spend it.

And the second they don't have any money, they go into panic mode. And guess what? There are

always times when they don't have enough money. And so we cycle over and over and over again.

It really is the course of life, the course of nature. Things change and unfortunately we're very seldom prepared for them.

What happens is governments around the world,

when the crisis come, get into panic mode,

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