How Average Folks Survived the Great Depression as We Prepare for Trump's Great Depression Part Duh

An AI generated image from the prompt: Donald Trump's second Great Depression.

It's coming. Anyone with half a brain knows it. It's what The Regime wants. Kill off the poor, take everything we have, further enrich the already obscenely wealthy. Blah, blah, blah. So, how did real people survive the first Great Depression? Let's take a look, shall we, as we plan to weather Donald Trump's second Great Depression. Make sure to thank a non voter, a third party voter or a Trump voter!

According to my personal research assistant, DuckDuckGo Search Assist, everyday people survived the Great Depression by pooling resources, sharing food through potlucks, and growing their own vegetables in community gardens. Many also adapted their lifestyles by finding inexpensive forms of entertainment, such as radio shows and board games.

DuckDuckGo Search Assist responses are auto-generated based on online sources and may contain inaccuracies. I do NOT use AI to "write" my articles for me nor do I rely on it for my information. I use it as a jumping off point to begin research, find sources I consider trustworthy and write my own stuff. In case anyone was wondering.

Pooling Resources/Potlucks

This one is going to be very important. Families and communities are going to be forced to pull together and help one another out. That's not the worst thing in the world. We could use a good lesson on how not to be selfish jackasses. That's part of what got us here in my humble opinion.

I read a short story in elementary school called "Stone Soup." I reference it often because it made a real impact on me. It would not be and probably is banned and would be called grooming children to be dirty rotten socialists or communists or whatever the slur of the week is. Eye roll. Anyhoo, a stranger shows up in a little village where the people are poor and hungry. He claims to have a magic stone that can feed the entire village. Well, first he goes door to door and says he's hungry, asking if they have any food to share. Each one says something like, "Sorry dude, all I have is this one potato." So, then he tells them all about the stone. All they have to do is bring their one pitiful food item to the town square where he has this big kettle set up over a fire with boiling water. Throw what you have in there, then I'll throw this here nifty magic stone in and voila, dinner for all, he says. They do, he does, happy ending.

The moral of that story is your one potato isn't going to feed you and your kids for long, so if you get together with your neighbors and throw together what everybody has, you get to eat. Share. Cooperate. Survive. You can update this in a variety of ways by literally hosting community potlucks or even going in with a neighbor on a Costco membership and buying in bulk and then divvying up the haul. You might not need that whole case of canned green beans, but you and Sally down the street can split the cost, save money by buying in bulk and split up however you agree. Get me? I did look into it and a Costco membership can't technically be shared with someone living at a different address, but one person can be the delivery point and coordinate the orders. You can make it work. You split the cost of the membership and the cost of the items you buy and everybody comes out ahead. Of course you'll need to be sure you can trust whoever you're dealing with on something like this. Check out the great budget recipes here at Better Trailers & Double Wides like Deliciously Delightful Chicken Noodle Soup Casserole.

Grow Your Own/Community Gardening

A lot of people have already been doing the grow your own thing. Food, I mean. I tried it and I could kill a cactus so it would be great if my neighborhood would do a community garden but I live surrounded by MAGA trash and that's never gonna happen. But, if you can, consider a small garden, a front porch container garden or even indoor gardening. There are a lot of great resources online to help you get started. DuckDuckGo it! If you're lucky enough to live in a better neighborhood than I do, talk to some neighbors about a community garden. Urban areas do this a lot and I've read some really nice success stories about community gardens. My downtown has the perfect spot where a historic building burned decades ago and an unused empty plot of land sits to this day. Somebody should really look into that. Somebody with more resources at their disposal than I have. I don't know the ins and outs of caretaking, distribution of the food or whatever but if you're truly interested a little online research will get you there.

Free Entertainment

This is one of my passions. I don't pay for a single streaming service. Never have. Never will. I don't have transportation to go to movies, festivals, events, etc. so I have to entertain myself at home. I'm now thankful I've had to get used to this because it's gonna be a system shock for a lot of people who have been used to shelling out cash for entertainment and now suddenly don't have it to spare.

During the Great Depression, radio shows caught fire. People gathered around their radios and listened to the greats like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. I might be off on the timing of that one, but you know what I mean. I doubt you want to huddle around a radio these days, but free streaming is my update. I personally use Fawesome TV which can be found online at fawesome.tv. and they also have an app and are available on like a bunch of platforms. There are short, infrequent commercial breaks in some programs but it's not enough to be annoying at all and some don't even have any advertising interruptions. They have a huge selection of movies in your choice of genres and TV series, etc. It's not the latest blockbuster Hollywood hits but you'll survive. It's free.

Board games also took off during the Great Depression when Monopoly and some other big ones were first released. Families or even groups of neighbors or friends gathered for game nights. No update needed here. Break out the board games you probably already have or hit a thrift shop and pick up some new to you ones. Just make sure all the pieces are there. Good luck on that. You might want to invest in a new board game or two. I live alone with cats so Yellow Cat would just eat the pieces making this not an option for me but I used to have friends who came over and we'd have family dinner and board game nights. It was freaking awesome and I miss it. Great way to share food costs plus a free evening of entertainment. Plus, socialization that most people are lacking and really need. We keep blaming the pandemic for the American isolation crisis, but we were doing it to ourselves long before that. We stopped talking to our neighbors, started living in fear of others or whatever. Got weird. Time to socialize again, folks.

Side Note

One thing I'm reading in my research that's surprising to me is that movie theater attendance boomed during the Great Depression, but theaters were smart enough to keep ticket prices low. Back then it was a cheap outing. I'm sure a small popcorn didn't cost twenty bucks. That's not really an option these days but if movie theaters really want to make a comeback and were smart, they'd price those concessions within reason or even take a loss on the damn things to get people back in the seats. That's up to them. The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind reportedly came out during this time and we all know how successful they were and still remain.

Mini golf actually was planted and bloomed during the Great Depression from what I'm reading. It was a cheap outing for families and allowed kids to blow off steam, release some energy. That actually could be an option today. It's been ages since I've been but the last time I did go, it wasn't expensive at all. My college friends and I used to go on occasion for some cheap fun. The idea is to look for the least expensive options you can find if you do have to spend money at all on entertainment.

Working Women

Another way families coped through the depression was through dual incomes. I guess this is pretty much when it all started. Women hadn't traditionally worked outside the home for pay but that all changed when times got tough. Unemployment skyrocketed but more women became employed than ever before. A silver lining to a dark time, opening up new opportunities to women in my opinion.

The modern version of this to me is the side hustle. Most couples are already dual income households. And there has to be something for us single folks. So, side hustle it is. I have an entire article devoted to no cost side hustles. Please do check it out.

Off to the Library

Public libraries became a source of free entertainment and knowledge during the Great Depression. People borrowed books and used them as affordable escapes from their troubles or a means of learning new skills.

Libraries served as havens of information and provided an inexpensive way to expand horizons during lean times. Much like they do now. Bonus, libraries have a ton more than just books now. Some offer free classes, have DVD movies you can check out. Some even have tools and other useful items you can borrow. A library card also gets you access to some free streaming options online. If it's been a while since you've visited your local library, time to check it out, pardon the pun. Have kids? Drag story hour! I'm half kidding. There usually are free activities for children like craft projects, story hours with or without drag queens and more.

Crafting & Selling Handmade Items

Crafting became a valuable skill during the first Great Depression. Knitting socks, quilting, and candle-making were popular, and these handmade goods could be used at home instead of having to buy from stores and were often sold or traded to neighbors. Crafting provided both an emotional outlet and a small source of income, essential for keeping spirits up during difficult times. Today you could consider opening an Etsy or other online shop, selling handmade crafts like jewelry or your paintings at local craft fairs or art shows. I'm considering an online shop selling handmade jewelry and candles myself.

Bartering was one of the other ways my research said people survived the times but I'm just gonna include that here since you could trade handmade items with neighbors for theirs or whatever they have that you need. You could also barter with things like fresh eggs if you keep chickens which is another thing a lot of people started doing during the Great Depression. Keeping chickens, small livestock, hunting and foraging for food really took off because, well, people had to eat.

Homemade Toys

Store bought toys were just too damn expensive, so people got creative with corn husk dolls, sock puppets, and wooden toys made from scrap materials. These homemade toys fostered creativity and showed children the value of simple pleasures and imagination, which didn’t cost a dime. Today's iPad from birth children probably aren't gonna appreciate a corn husk doll very much, but an update on this could be going gently used toys from thrift stores of even some homemade projects like the dresser to dollhouse I have an article on. It's just going to require some creativity to meet some needs but we as a people are pretty good at that when we have to. On toys from thrift stores I'll just add that I wouldn't do plush items like teddy bears or stuffed animals just because of sanitary concerns. And always clean and sanitize anything you do get and check for loose or missing parts, sharp edges and things like that.

Living Without Electricity

This one's pretty extreme but desperate times call for desperate measures. During the Great Depression people would sometimes go without electricity altogether because of high utility bills and lack of money to go around to cover everything. Thanks in large part to Trump's temper tantrum tariffs, we're already seeing skyrocketing utility bills again. While you probably won't want to willingly have the power shut off, you can do some things like they did in the old days like using oil lamps or candles for lighting. I'm considering that one very seriously. I've already done everything I can think of to lower my consumption like switching to those low energy LED light bulbs but I'm always looking for more ways to save. I'm thinking candles and or oil lamps might even produce a tiny amount of heat that could potentially allow me to cut back on the space heater usage. Be sure to check out how I personally save on cell phone service.

If you like these tips you'll really like my other article entitled How to Break Free From Giant Corporations, Save Money and Get What You Need. Please do check it out. And if you're looking on tips on home budgeting hacks check out this old school method.

My sources for this article are an online article I'm not linking to because it had ten thousand annoying ass pop ups, my own brain and this article: Top 10 Surprising Ways Average Joes Survived the Great Depression. Thanks for reading! Please share! Some comments would be great, too. Hey, consider joining the mailing list, too! I don't spam. It should just alert you when there's new articles.

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