My thoughts exactly, probably because we have very similar backgrounds. It's taken me years of continual effort to get my garden established. Living in an area affected by snowstorms and tornadoes I'm prepared to make it a couple of weeks in the event of a natural disaster. Preparing for the end of the world is irrational.
I see what's being described in this thread as at least three different things:
1) Disaster preparedness, like you are describing, as a sane and prudent thing for many people and places. Know your local conditions and put in place some resources you could use if there were a fire / tornado / earthquake (whatever your local threat) for some period of time.
2) Simple living. That is, if there are things you can do that make you more self-sufficient and create pleasure, then go for it. Many people plant a garden, raise some chickens, etc not because they are prepping for the end of the world but because they enjoy it.
3) Actual off-grid preppers - people who for one reason or another plan for some time in which they will need to be entirely self-sufficient and may even wish to explicitly separate themselves from other people (war, zombie apocalypse, etc).
I think it's really just this third category that raises eyebrows and questions.
That sounds more like prepping than staving off environmental disaster - I'm learning how to grow vegetables on the off chance civilization collapses and I'm left to provide for my family on my own, but... no, you're right, I'm not willing to live that way permanently until I have no other choice.
I have an artesian well, solar, wind, and hunt/fush/grow most of my food. The neighbor has a small farm. I'm also very remotely located.
It really isn't a prepper mentality. It's just how I prefer to live. Quite a bit could happen and my life would remain fairly unchanged.
I don't have these things so much for what people picture as emergencies. I have them because they are pretty necessary to live here. We have fairly high winds and blizzards that mean mains power is not very reliable. We have ice storms that shut things down for a while.
Agree with this. It's common for preppers/survivalists to believe that somehow the chaos isn't going to devour them.
I'm really fine with being prepared for disasters, human-made or natural, but in a complete upheaval of global civilization you need more than property and a castle loaded with ammo to thrive. Looking at foreign countries ravaged by civil war, can you really imagine riding that out because you bought a farm?
I'm curious if home garden farming is big among the "preppers" - but then I think that planning a more self-sufficient food supply is only valuable to non-nuclear/chemical warfare doomsday thinking (such as the author's economic collapse bias).
That leads me to wonder if the kits the article goes over would reveal which scenario is presumed by the owner through deductive reasoning... Does anyone keep a personal seed bank? Or do most people assume the apocalypse will have a relatively brief duration and then the supermarket will have fresh produce again?
How does anyone practice for the end of the world? Putting in time at the shooting range isn't enough, and just fishing or gardening for fun can be very challenging. I cannot imagine starting a farm in the middle of the apocalypse without at least a few years experience of preparing the land, planting, cultivation, and harvesting---and once you've brought in a harvest, you have to figure out how to preserve it. Having all the seeds, fertilizer, water, gear, and books in the world but none of the relevant experience seems like a good way to starve to death. Never mind the fact that the guy who lives in Downers Grove (a humorously apt name given his expectations) is going to be in for a world of hurt when Chicago gets nuked:
You love seeing people fail? (At least according to your own logic?)
There seem to be plenty of preppers who actively garden, probably more than you do and I bet you would enjoy learning something from them. Of course if you've made up your mind about all of them based on "every one [that you've] met", I guess it's time to just ignore the subject, since you're done learning about it?
There's a weird place between "preppers" and "homesteaders" that's pretty much this.
I'd say I'm "prepper" enough that I'm heavily armed and have enough shelf-stable food to feed by family for a few months in an emergency - but I'm also "homesteader" enough that our garden seems to get bigger each year, I know all of my neighbors, and we regularly share skills and information.
I don't think anything catastrophic is likely to happen, but it's had an overall very positive impact on my day-to-day life. If something does happen, I have far more tools to deal with it than either approach alone would give me.
Prepping is hard. I've had the privledge of having access to enough land to theoretically grown enough food for me and my family. Howver, it isn't trivial. This year was a prolonged winter, which delayed planting. This summer was incredibly hot, which has been devasting on our crops. Also... the grashoppers this year have been insane, like nothing I've ever seen. If we were going at it alone, we might not be making it through the next winter. Haha.
I grew up in a 3rd world small farm, raising pigs, chicken, setting traps and planting a bunch of stuff, not to mention a light version of WROL (without rule of law). Reading this article I feel that I'm more prepared for the apocalypse than all the "super-rich"...
As you say, apocalyptic thinking seems to be deeply wired into the human psyche.
If your threat model predicts a high probability of nuclear war, civilization-threatening pandemics, or other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios, you should probably move to a defensible rural homestead with solar panels, a long growing season, and a fresh water supply -- that's an hour away from the nearest interstate. I hear the intermountain west is nice this time of year.
What's interesting is that few prepper/survivalist discussions -- that I've seen, maybe I'm missing them -- mention the opportunity costs of moving to the backwoods. I interviewed Y2K prepper/survivalists who quit their jobs and followed approximately the above advice. The problem arises when the collapse, well, doesn't happen. And you're two hours (in the summer) and six hours (in the winter) from the nearest emergency room.
Also once you sell that city condo or suburban house and move to your self-sufficient rural homestead, you then have a strong incentive to predict the collapse is coming. Maybe it's not going to be Y2K after all, but how about suitcase nukes in big cities? Or bioterror? Etc. There's also a subset of religious survivalists who seem to want an ungodly and immoral secular society to meet its doom; I wrote about this for Wired here: http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/1719...
>I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.)
Could you share this insight? The US gov't recommends that you do some amount of emergency preparedness ("prepping"): https://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit
It's not irrational IMHO to be prepared to live a couple of days or so without power or grocery stores, as that's happened dozens of times all over the US for a variety of reasons. A total collapse of civilization on the other hand, not so much.
I will also say that I've wondered how many of the people prepping are capable of spending a day hiking in the woods with a decent pack on their back. Having a ton of stuff may not be very helpful if you don't have the physical capabilities to adapt to unexpected circumstances.
You know I used to really freak out and have panic attacks about the possible world ending catastrophes from the collapse of the Eurozone to missing Soviet Smallpox.
I eventually realized I can't change anything about it my worrying about it doesn't do anything, and realistically there is nothing I can really do to prepare for the total collapse of civilization so I try and just have 2-3 months of food and water on hand, grow a garden, try and find a way to get solar and a diesel backup generator, try and stockpile medicine when I can, etc. My goal is just 2-3 months of each thing in case there was a natural disaster or I lost my job and I put the rest of it in the hands of God.
If civilizations burns to the ground then I'll do my best to survive while also doing my best to help other people. After all to quote Brandon Sanderson "Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination."I'll die one way or another, so why stress about all the ways that can happen, especially when I can't do anything about it. I just live my life the best I can and hope things work out.
>the grid goes down for longer than a month a lot of us are dying regardless of how we prepare.
This. When trying to make provisions for even modest disruptions, you quickly realize how herculean a task it is to be truly prepared. Unless you're already a self-sustaining farmer with a well/water source and other resources or (ideally) billionare-bunker capable, you can see how prepper-ism becomes a lifestyle beyond prepping for a relatively short period.
Making a choice between living life as it currently is and being prepared to survive indefinitely is a hard fork in the road.
Because you absolutely are. I've always thought that anybody who seriously thinks society is going to collapse should just move to a developing country, buy a farm, and get-on getting-on. Because there's really no way to prepare other than to get started on your post-collapse life.
I grew up on a farm in very rural USA and we often face mini-"disasters". The roads would be impassable due to snow, power would go out for weeks sometimes. My life has shown me that you don't prepare for disasters, you just do without.
You're cold, hungry, and miserable. Guns and ammo doesn't help because there's nothing really to hunt, same goes for fishing (most people don't live within walking distance of a non-polluted waterway). Better not get too attached to electricity or driving because it's going to be impossible to store any significant amount of fuel.
A collapsed society resembles rural Afghanistan or India more than it does whatever wild west these people are imagining.
My thoughts exactly. Best one can do is plan for the worst. I bought a property at an altitude high enough so that if sea levels rise won't affect me (I am likely going to stay here that long anyway, but my goal is to develop habits), I de amazoned where possible and gave up habbits alltogether where not possible but can cope without, rain barrels and solar panels on their way and so on, playing around with microgreens, learning about plant seeds (I don't think i'll ever pick up farming but it's a good skill to have).
I always find it funny preppers tend to get made fun of for … being loners and preparing for the worst.
Seems kinda similar to what many of us do for work (think of the worst case scenario and mitigate the risk), albeit it in the physical realm.
As an aside, preppers are often some of the most knowledgeable people where I’m at. They also know the odds of a solar flare and I’ve spoken with them about this very topic before. Perhaps they simply know the risks and what they mean better than we do haha.
My neighbor is a prepper, he build his own off grid house, grows his own food, etc. definitely like having him around if I need help any day of the week.
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