It's Okay If You're Never Ready for The Collapse of Civilization

Everyone fails.

Photo by Nik Schmidt on Unsplash

According to FEMA, you’re supposed to store at least two weeks of nonperishable food for every person in your house, in case of emergencies.

I’m not sure what kind of living situation FEMA envisions for 80 percent of humanity, but my marriage started out in a studio apartment. We were thrilled to have a stackable washer-dryer in a utility closet. It was a first for us, after spending our 20s using this thing called a laundromat.

Storing two weeks of extra food?

Storing 50 gallons of water?

It wasn’t happening.

On the plus side, we lived right next to a gas station, and I’m pretty sure it was open 24 hours. You could walk down there and get a big gulp anytime you wanted. That was our disaster survival plan, big gulps.

We felt ready for anything.

Back then, if someone had told me to start prepping for disasters, pandemics, and supply chain disruptions, I would’ve laughed in their face. I was a tenure-track professor specializing in adult literacy, ESL, and “remedial” education, fixing all the problems caused by underfunded schools. My students dealt with hunger (“food insecurity”) and homelessness (“housing insecurity”) all the time. I was usually giving them any spare cash I had for bus money or rent. Even my department chair gave them interest-free loans when their financial aid got tied up, and they collapsed into a chair in our own main office and sobbed.

That was the kind of collapse I was familiar with, the kind when an undergrad or grad student fell apart after their house burned down, their spouse threatened to kill them, they got sexually assaulted in an empty classroom, or they needed an emergency abortion. We were their disaster plan.

My campus saw events ranging from bomb threats to shootings at the Little Caesar’s across the street. We had a serial killer for a little while. One time, someone even found a body on campus. No big deal, just a corpse.

Oh, and women got raped in the bathrooms.

Only once or twice, though.

Between student loans and credit card debt, getting blown away in a storm was the least of my worries. I was 100 percent devoted to teaching. Hit me with swine flu. Hit me with tick-borne illnesses. If I could stand upright, you’d find me in the classroom. That was the attitude American capitalism instills in every good little teacher. We were following our passions. Eventually, someone would return the favor. Someone would take care of us when we needed it.

So I thought.

Almost all of my debt came from buying supplies for classroom projects. It came from paying for professional development workshops, conferences, airfare to those conferences, hotels, journal subscriptions, and books. There might’ve been an espresso or two in there, but they were worth it.

Instead of prepping, I invested everything into my community. Nights. Weekends. Extra cash. My “summers off.” You name it. Department chairs, deans, and vice chancellors made my job hell, but I was still trying. I still thought education could offer salvation to an ailing society.

Then the pandemic began.

What I’m trying to say:

Even though things look bad now, even though we’re staring at social and environmental collapse in the very near future, it’s always been kind of bad for a lot of people, and many of us only recently started giving any thought to anything like prepping or survival. It’s easy for suburban preppers and homesteaders to forget all that, because they haven’t been living in it. Some of us were already dealing with the reality that terrifies the prepping public.

So, what am I so scared of?

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It occurred to me recently that the internet is full of preppers telling you how to do it right. Maybe we should try something different.

Maybe we should talk about doing it wrong.

So, the pandemic…

By then, we’d finally scrounged up enough money for a down payment on a house. It was about 1,200 square feet. That’s about half the size of an average house in the U.S. Can you believe that? We got it for dirt cheap, because it sat in a neighborhood where some of the houses didn’t have siding and others stood abandoned, caving in. We didn’t care. It was the deal of a lifetime. There was no garage, no basement, no dining room, no laundry room, and no pantry. The kitchen could barely accommodate one person at a time, and one little table to share meals.

On the upside, it had—get this—two bathrooms.

We still had no place to store emergency supplies, so we made one.

My first prepping project: Turn a closet into an emergency pantry. That might sound like an easy task, but it’s not that simple when you have a toddler, your daycare has closed, you can’t hire a babysitter, and your job consumes the vast majority of your time. Just getting the shelves and brackets posed a challenge. As new homeowners, we didn’t have fancy tools like levels either, so we got those too. But we did it. We found somewhere else to put our clothes, and we made the prepper pantry. We started keeping extra water and nonperishable food.

FEMA would’ve been so proud of us.

My 2020 doomscrolling led me to prepping sites. They made our little stash of food feel woefully insufficient. So we expanded.

But where?

We had a home office, but it was really just a room with a wobbly table, a computer, a futon, and a bookcase. So we started putting shelves on the walls, adding what we could, some peanut butter and powdered milk for our toddler, a couple of bags of flour. It looked terrible, by the way. It looked like we were renting to a hoarder. So much for my dreams of a home library.

On the nights I wasn’t grading papers, I was watching 12 Monkeys and scooping dried beans into mylar bags or drooling over homesteads on YouTube. As you probably know, there’s a whole class of videos by homesteaders and preppers showing off their root cellars and basements filled with canned harvests.

One night, I read a blog post by a guy who spent a few minutes shaming doomers and then talked about his new rooftop solar. Better get yours fast, he warned, before the Russians and Chinese cut us off at the raw material buffet.

There’s such a thing as prepper envy.

I’ve felt it.

The prepping community has split a little over the question of solar panels. Some consider them a valuable tool. Others say it’s a worthless expense—you might as well collapse now and learn to live without electricity.

For someone trying to spare a small child from heat waves and power outages in the south, where the heat index is already hitting 115F degrees some days, a backup source of electricity feels pretty important. Sure, mature adults can put up with all kinds of turbulence. Try telling a 6-year-old to tough it out.

Our house didn’t qualify for solar panels at first, but then something amazing happened. A stray cat crawled under one of our trees and died. That led to a discovery. The tree itself was completely hollow. At my spouse’s behest, we contacted an arborist who said that not one, but two of our trees needed to be cut down. If we didn’t, and the trees fell on our house, the insurance wouldn’t cover any of the property damage. They wouldn’t pay to have the trees cut down. We paid out of pocket. It only cost us $6,000 to cut down each dying tree. No big deal.

Our house qualified for solar panels after that.

So we got a small system.

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By then, I’d managed to pay off my student debt by banging out listicles on Medium. Replacing student loans with solar debt felt like a worthwhile burden to carry. As it turns out, we were right. An F3 tornado crashed through town a few months after all that and knocked down an unholy number of trees, including several in our neighborhood. It knocked out power for at least a week. One big tree keeled over across our yard and took out part of our fence. If it had fallen a different way, there’s the slightest chance I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.

That kicked off the year of storms. Every few weeks, the tornado siren went off. We hid in the bathroom. We didn’t have any kind of shelter to speak of. But as long as we didn’t get a direct hit, we would have solar power.

After the F3 tornado, we realized something.

“We need bike helmets,” my spouse said.

We had no idea if they would work, but we got them. It made sense. Then, after weeks of digging through the internet, and brushing past the CDC’s advice to crawl under a desk and curl up into a fetal coil, I found a study that confirmed that helmets do a great job at reducing your risk of death by tornado. You see, the most common cause of death in a bad storm comes from head injuries and lacerations. Makes sense. You can survive a broken arm. A broken head? Not so much. Specifically, the study recommended motorcycle helmets.

I asked my family, “Should we upgrade?”

My spouse made a face, and my daughter threw a tantrum. Eventually, I talked them both into it. We got a color and style she would wear. I convinced my spouse, “Nobody’s going to see you in your motorcycle helmet except us, and we’re also going to be wearing stupid helmets, so it’s fine.”

That’s how we got through our first season of collapse, not with a homestead, not with a tornado bunker or even a basement, but with a closet of food, hiding in our bathroom with motorcycle helmets.

This is how you do it wrong.

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Next up, it was time to start our backyard homestead. Here’s something they don’t tell you in all those prepper videos: If you’re trying to grow veggies in a so-so neighborhood, you’re going to contend with something called fill dirt. What’s fill dirt? According to the robots on the internet, “Fill dirt is a type of soil used to raise or level ground… It’s primarily used for structural purposes, like creating foundations or backfilling retaining walls, rather than for supporting plant growth due to its lack of organic matter and nutrients.”

Thank you, robots.

The whole time, I’d wondered why we kept finding screws, nails, shards of glass, and random chunks of metal in our yard.

It was all fill dirt.

So that’s why our beans and tomatoes kept dying. One time, our mailman chuckled at us for trying to grow okra in our front yard.

“That’s not gonna work,” he said.

So, we had to buy topsoil and compost—lots of it. We built raised beds, and we wheelbarrowed that crap around for days.

It was the backyard homesteading that made us pay more attention to drought conditions. That prompted me to dive through local history, and that’s when I discovered all the horrifying photos of cracked river beds and dust storms. While we didn’t live “at the heart” of the Dust Bowl, we were very much in Dust Bowl territory. So when the climate scientists talked about the return of Dust Bowl conditions in the 2030s, they were talking about us.

That was going to happen to us.

I may have freaked out, but it’s okay. I don’t know about you, but when I freak out, I don’t run around tugging at my hair and clothes. I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I sit in my chair and stare into the void.

That’s how I panic.

The piles of climate studies and history articles painted a vivid future for the family if we stayed here. It was already so hot that my daughter spent most of her summer playing outside under heat advisories. If I went for an evening stroll, it was under a 112F degree heat index for a quarter of the year.

One time, we traveled to see family. We were gone for three days. We tried to Macgyver an automatic drip irrigation system for our food garden, and it didn’t work. A heat dome settled in while we were gone, and it killed everything in less than a weekend. The corn. The beans. The tomatoes. The kale. Everything. The present was already confirming our worst fears.

One day, I just said it out loud.

“We can’t stay here.”

My spouse agreed. Sooner or later, we would have to move. None of our preps were a match for the wrath mother nature was planning for us. It doesn’t matter what kind of solar panels you have or how great you are at growing food, not if you find yourself in the middle of a Steinbeck novel.

Nothing spurs regret like investing in a little suburban homestead and then realizing you live in a future Dust Bowl.

But that’s what we had to do.

We moved.

You know when the solar gurus say adding panels raises the value of your home? Well, not when you live in the middle of Trumplandia, and especially not when you put solar panels on a tiny little home with a tiny little kitchen. Anyone who could afford the extra cost of solar panels would just buy a bigger home and buy a new system. There weren’t many sustainability nuts around here, only the kind of preppers who buy gas generators. We kinda got screwed.

This is how you do it wrong.

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It was tempting to stay where we were, with a cheap little house paid off that nobody wanted except predatory landlords. That would’ve assured us a reasonable amount of financial security, but you have to wonder what good financial security does you if you’re living at the edge of a Dust Bowl.

Sometimes, prepping is about getting the hell out.

So we got the hell out.

We have a garage now, and a place to store emergency supplies without cramming everything into a closet. We’re safe(r) from droughts, storms, and dust bowls, but we traded old problems for new problems. Hurricanes and wildfires are starting to impact us. We’re finally feeling in our bones what we already knew in our heads: Nowhere is really going to be safe.

Since then, I’ve focused on DIY projects. It’s not that easy. You can’t just tack a rain catchment system onto a roof in the suburbs. I called around. All the pros said if you have a standard asphalt shingle roof, don’t bother.

We thought about retrofitting a shed, but even that ran into problems. What good is a rain catchment system on a shed?

Are we going to run pipes from the shed to our house? Are we going to install a solar pump to ensure running water? What happens when it breaks down? What happens when we can’t replace the filters on our reverse osmosis system because tariffs and world wars have crushed our supply chains? Are we going to haul buckets of water into our home every day?

At one point, I was turning umbrellas upside down and screwing them onto rain barrels and trying to rig up a filter system with vinyl tubing.

I made a portable dew catcher, and it broke.

Long story short, all of my projects eventually work. It takes several tries to get them right. It takes a lot of time. It’s frustrating. They all look very haphazard. There’s plenty of days I chuck everything into a pile and think about quitting. My doomsday homestead in the suburbs will never look as nice as something you see on PrepperTube, but I suspect those people have lots of help. Sometimes, I watch these survival mom videos and I think:

“Where the hell are their kids?”

“How is the house so clean?”

Some of our ideas run into hard limits. I mean, are we really going to spend the time and money on a composting toilet in the suburbs?

Are we really going to risk pissing off the neighbors by trying to compost our own poop? What if we screw up, what if something goes wrong, and we accomplish nothing but stinking up the block and creating a biohazard?

How big can our backyard garden get before it inspires an HOA?

Is there really a point in installing a shutout valve on our plumbing system? Maybe it prevents our toilets from gushing sewage during a grid collapse, but doesn’t that just mean the pressure builds up at the valve? What if the grid collapses so bad, it bursts the pipe and floods us anyway?

I don’t know.

On a typical day, I don’t have the energy or bandwidth to call a plumber and walk them through my doomsday scenarios, convince them I’m not crazy, and then ask them how they would troubleshoot that.

Earlier this year, we had a big brushfire. It taught me an important lesson. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are.

You’re going to feel unprepared when you have to reckon with the prospect of abandoning your home. Sure, it’s just stuff. But it’s your stuff. You worked your butt off for that stuff. Maybe it’s not much, but it made you happy and maybe you took it for granted, just a little.

All those emotions you see on The Walking Dead… They’re real. You feel them when you open your door and see a funnel cloud. You feel them when you look out your window and see giant plumes of smoke.

They hurt.

If you’re going hard into prepping, then buying a home in the suburbs is a big mistake. Imagine the money you’re wasting to pay off a home these days, and then you have to spend thousands of dollars and countless hours retrofitting it for a life without reliable running water or power.

If I had it all to do over, I’d design a house from scratch and build it with completely different materials, something that could use a rain roof harvestor and a gravity-fed sink and irrigation system. I’d ditch indoor plumbing and opt for a composting toilet. We’d live a little further out, someplace we didn’t have to worry so much about pissing off our neighbors with our weird ways. It would be smaller, but it would use space better and we’d have room to store emergency supplies. We would have a real underground basement and a root cellar.

The homes most of us live in now aren’t suited for the future.

Not at all.

In hindsight, it’s a huge pain to turn a suburban house or an apartment into a survival fortress. At the same time, we can’t all just move to the country and start homesteads. Could you imagine if the millions of people who live in cities tried to do that? There wouldn’t be any remote properties left.

They would still collapse.

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You hear a lot of talk about community. A lot of it comes from people who don’t seem to have a lot of experience in that area.

Building a community has a way of burning you out.

A few years ago, I watched teachers at a hockey game crawling around all over the ice, grabbing wads of floating cash. It was the pregame entertainment. The video went viral. Rage ensued. After all that teachers had been through the last few years, their city was making them crawl around on ice for money.

That video woke me up a little.

The whole time, while I was giving everything I had to my community, everyone around me was focused mainly on themselves, their careers, their wealth, their health, and one day it finally seemed obvious. They weren’t going to be there for me when I needed them. They already weren’t there when I needed them to wear a mask for a little longer, until the FDA finally approved vaccines for young kids. They weren’t there when I asked for HVAC upgrades or air purifiers. I was there for them, donating masks and Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, maintaining them, and trying to get people to care about their children’s health, or at least their own.

This is how you do it wrong.

Sorry to be a bummer, but a lot of us need to hear this. A lot of what people call community is a joke, and you’re the punchline. I’m not telling anyone to give up and don’t bother building relationships.

I’m just saying, beware.

My biggest prepping mistake of all?

It’s probably not buying the wrong kind of house. It’s probably not accidentally moving into a Dust Bowl. It’s probably not even investing everything in my community when I should’ve been raising sheep in the mountains or something and telling everyone else to build community.

It’s probably spoiling my daughter.

Let’s face it, she doesn’t need four different flavors of ice pops to choose from every day. She doesn’t need a playroom full of toys, even if they’re all secondhand. We send her to an outdoor forest school. She’s learning survival skills. And yet, parents like me wonder what’s more important, moving them out to the country and forcing them to give up the grid early, or letting them enjoy it while it lasts.

Children are going to have it hard enough, but is it cruel to deprive them of creature comforts now, or is it cruel to let them get used to things they won’t have for too much longer? Honestly, I don’t know.

My spouse rejects the “collapse now” philosophy. He listens to that and says, “Why punish yourself? If the grid is going to give out, why not just enjoy it while we have it?” He’s all for making emergency plans, but he’s not going to move out to the country and start living like a Quaker.

He has a point.

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I’m not writing any of this to bum anyone out. I’m doing it for the opposite reason. I want everyone to see the mistakes someone makes when they’re trying to prep. I want them to understand it’s not a seamless experience.

A lot of us are trying to do with extremely limited resources. We’re trying to do it in situations that are far from ideal.

We’re still trying.

We see the value of communities, but we also see their weaknesses. Not everyone you know is going to want to join your community. Even some of the people who want to join aren’t going to do the heavy lifting.

It’s okay to have standards.

It’s okay if you’re not building community right now, because you need time and space to do something else. It’s okay to try and form a prepping group and it falls apart. It’s okay if you’re not building a rain harvesting system because you haven’t figured out how to make it work for you. It’s okay if you try to grow vegetables, and they all get scorched in a heatwave or devoured by insects.

It’s okay if you try to build something, and it breaks. It’s okay if you finish a homesteading project, and it looks like crap.

It’s okay if you can’t carry a bugout bag. It’s okay if nobody wants to help you prep. Maybe you already know it’s okay, but it’s just nice to hear someone else acknowledge that you’re not planning to do any of it.

It’s okay if you read all the survival books, watch all the homesteading videos, and it still doesn’t work the way you want. It’s okay if you get home from work, and you just don’t feel like doing any of it, not tonight.

It’s okay if you’re not ready to give up the grid yet.

It’s okay if you get hit with a disaster, and you still don’t feel ready for it. You’re probably never going to feel ready.

It’s okay if you fail.

Everyone does.