Even worse, they spend every cent on stupid prepper bullshit like freeze dried rations!
Rations will not help you or your family if civilization breaks down. Without a literal army, you are no more powerful than the ones who did nothing to prepare. All rations do is ensure that you starve to death a month later than expected.
Even better, those of you that collected guns and ammo as a hobby are about as prepared as the people who jokingly collect bottle caps in reference to Fallout. You have ensured you die first.
If you are not currently capable of planting, tending, and harvesting an entire acre of potatoes every year, you will not survive post civilization. If you do not have a stable of oxen and a simple machine shop to repair the old fashioned steel plow you own, you will not survive. If you do not already have fully formed pest control, without chemical inputs or external solutions, you will not survive.
It took humanity thousands of years to develop agriculture. Farming isn't a game. You will not pick it up after the end of civilization. You will not get it right on the first try. You will not reinvent it while hungry. Even if you get lucky and nothing goes wrong for a few growing seasons, you WILL have a failed crop eventually, and you will starve. Even successful farming is an eventual death sentence without civilization.
People who prep for "after the end" are not serious people. If you had a serious concern about the potential fall of civilization, you would not buy food and bullets, you would be throwing every resource you have at improving democratic representation and access, to prevent civilization from falling.
It might not be possible to restart if we kill it.
Prepping is like trying to develop a backup strategy after the datacenter has already burned down. Even if you are successful, have you really, honestly, considered what success looks like?
I'll throw in my $0.02 on this topic. I have a basement full of shelf stable foods, a reasonably large battery backup system plus some solar panels, and a couple of guns.
I don't see civilization collapsing overnight. I see it playing out as a series of scarce times that ebb and flow. I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, where there's not much selection.
And I'm aware that natural disasters are increasing in frequency and cost/impact to a degree that the government won't or can't do anything about them. So I need to be able to weather the storms for a few months at a time.
As an aside, I also prepared by living in a neighborhood where people take care of each other and is close enough I can walk/bike to places.
Basically, I picture the USA collapse as turning the place into Puerto Rico, not Mad Max.
> I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, where there's not much selection.
Yeah. My mindset is assume "2020" becomes a regular occurrence that gets progressively worse over time. And I'll mentally work through situations such as "2020 with an extended utilities outage", or "2020 but car travel is not possible", or "2020 plus pervasive violent hate crimes". Then we dry run for the weekend.
You learn a surprising amount in that first day. I.e., being stuck without power/internet/cell service/water, and realizing you can't watch DVDs on your laptop because they haven't come with disk drives for years. After the weekend, you end up with a list of issues to address, i.e., you buy a portable dvd drive and put together a Plex server with a bunch of locally-hosted media.
Honestly, I feel more capable and resilient than I ever have before. We had some tornadoes come through and we didn't even need to think about what to do, we went into our safe room which contains our go-bags, hiking food, critical docs, usb backups of key pass, battery backups and some ipads, and we chilled out watching a weather channel and listening to the emergency radio. Had a tornado hit our house, I'm confident we would have survived, been able to help the neighbors, and manage a few days until aid could come.
I think this is perhaps too negative. I'm not stocking up on rations or anything, but if you're out in the boonies and don't bring attention to yourself, what are the chances of post-civilization people coming across you? Having rations helps you survive until the rations run out, and having guns helps you negotiate with small groups.
Depending on where you are, food beyond the rations might be easy or hard. Where I live, we've got seasonal berries, and plenty of wildlife of various sizes. Potatoes grow easily, if you happen to have any to plant. Probably too many people around here to avoid detection though, but a couple hours drive in the right direction and you'd be in a better place for that. Plenty of fresh water if you know where to look; if the surface wells stop running, it'll simply come out of the ground most of the time.
If there's all of a sudden a lot less people, nature's abundance starts becoming more apparent. Indigenous peoples thrived in my area without modern technology. I'll have a damn hard time, but if I can find a peaceful community to join, we can probably make it work.
Picking up on your acre of potatoes: no, you don't need oxen for this. In fact one reason for the importance of potatoes historically is that you can grow them on marginal land with only hand labour. There are various techniques such as the lazybeds used by displaced Highlanders in Scotland, but they don't need oxen. In fact oxen had their heyday before the iron ploughshare, as you needed a team to pull the older wooden plough, and the plough was used for planting grain. Of course these days it is also used for planting potatoes on rich land, but that's not essential.
Rations will not help you or your family if civilization breaks down. Without a literal army, you are no more powerful than the ones who did nothing to prepare. All rations do is ensure that you starve to death a month later than expected.
Even better, those of you that collected guns and ammo as a hobby are about as prepared as the people who jokingly collect bottle caps in reference to Fallout. You have ensured you die first.
If you are not currently capable of planting, tending, and harvesting an entire acre of potatoes every year, you will not survive post civilization. If you do not have a stable of oxen and a simple machine shop to repair the old fashioned steel plow you own, you will not survive. If you do not already have fully formed pest control, without chemical inputs or external solutions, you will not survive.
It took humanity thousands of years to develop agriculture. Farming isn't a game. You will not pick it up after the end of civilization. You will not get it right on the first try. You will not reinvent it while hungry. Even if you get lucky and nothing goes wrong for a few growing seasons, you WILL have a failed crop eventually, and you will starve. Even successful farming is an eventual death sentence without civilization.
People who prep for "after the end" are not serious people. If you had a serious concern about the potential fall of civilization, you would not buy food and bullets, you would be throwing every resource you have at improving democratic representation and access, to prevent civilization from falling.
It might not be possible to restart if we kill it.
Prepping is like trying to develop a backup strategy after the datacenter has already burned down. Even if you are successful, have you really, honestly, considered what success looks like?