Talk to enough preppers, and you pick up on something. A lot of them think they know what’s coming and how to survive it.
They’ll tell you to get solar panels. They’ll tell you don’t get solar panels. They’ll tell you cities are going to become death traps. They’ll tell you cities aren’t going to become death traps. They’ll tell you to store food. They’ll tell you don’t store food. They’ll tell you to learn how to grow your own vegetables. They’ll tell you don’t bother growing your own vegetables unless you own guns. They’ll tell you don’t bother buying guns because it’ll attract violence. They’ll tell you to hide in a cave or a bunker. They’ll tell you to hide in plain sight.
They don’t know.
We’re all making our best educated guesses about what’s in store for humanity over the next 20 years. We honestly have no idea.
We know it won’t be good.
That’s it.
We know grids will fail, but we don’t know exactly when. We know supply chains will fall apart, but we don’t know exactly how. We know another pandemic is coming, but we don’t know which disease. Bird flu in cows?
Nobody saw that one coming.
It bugs me a little when someone acts like they’ve got it all planned out for the rest of us and know what we should be doing.
Here’s my story:
If it were up to me, I probably would’ve cashed out my savings and built a tiny house in the mountains years ago. My family won’t do it. And I can’t blame them. Imagine telling a 6-year-old you’re going to give up all the comforts and conveniences of modern life in the suburbs, and you’re going to make them figure out how to live in a homestead with no electricity.
Yeah, good luck with that…
Life is hard enough if you understand that we’re still living in a pandemic, with another one ready to break loose at any time. Who among us city slickers wants to jump headfirst into homesteading now? Many of us can manage a backyard victory garden, a few rain barrels, and that’s about it.
It’s not like every collapse homesteader and survivalist knew we would be here in the mid 2020s. A lot of them are just in the right place at the right time. We’re not going to replicate decades of prepping and homesteading in five years, and we shouldn’t feel bad if we don’t have the resources.
The hardcore homesteaders think they know what’s coming. But do they? You can’t just turn back time and live like it’s 1870. It doesn’t matter if you have five years or fifty to get ready. The world that could support 8 billion homesteaders never existed, and it’s sure as hell not going to exist in 2030. If a homesteader falls and breaks their hip, are they going to insist on going to a doctor who exclusively uses technology from the 1870s, or will they want a hospital?
What would homesteaders in the 1870s have done if they saw a giant plume of industrial chemicals heading toward them?
Die, that’s what.
That’s one of the biggest things a lot of preppers don’t understand. We’re not just going to lose the grid. We’re going to lose the grid as humanity sinks into the hottest summers in recorded history. We’re going to be going up against forces of nature that no human has ever encountered before.
8 billion people will be doing everything they can to survive on a planet that has never been so depleted of natural resources.
A lot of them will have guns.
And anger issues.
I’ve spent a lot of time digging through history along with books on prepping, homesteading, and foraging to figure out what on earth you would need to maximize your chances of survival going forward.
This next part is a little sarcastic:
You’re going to need a remote little off-grid cabin in the woods. You’re going to need a rain harvesting system. You’re going to need a composting toilet. You’re going to need hot composting bins. You’re going to need a food forest. You’re going to need a permaculture garden. You’re going to need dew catchers. You’re going to need fencing to keep the animals out of your food gardens. You’re going to need a root cellar to keep your food cool, and it wouldn’t hurt to make it big enough to keep yourself cool during really bad heat waves.
In case a militia finds your cabin and takes it from you, and you survive that, you’re going to need a more urban dwelling where you can build community. It needs to be close enough to a city to benefit from the tattered grid, but far enough away that you don’t get overrun by the starving masses. You’re probably going to need all the same stuff from your remote off-grid cabin, but you’re going to have to squeeze it into your backyard, and you’re going to need enough trustworthy neighbors that you can scare off any militias that come snooping around.
You’re going to need solar panels if you want air conditioning, but you’re also going to need a cool basement in case they go down. You’re going to need all the knowledge and tools from the 19th century for bathing, washing clothes, growing food, gathering water, and entertaining yourself. Hope you have space in your home for a library. Hope you know how to dig a well. Unfortunately, knowing how to dig a well doesn’t guarantee you’ll find water. And even if you do, it might dry up in one or two bad summers. Ask someone who has a well.
It would be ideal to live near a river, as long as the river doesn’t become contaminated with all the remnants of dead civilization.
You’re going to need guns. You’re going to need bullets. It’s great if you know how to make bullets. You’re also going to need knives and machetes in case something happens to your guns. Get some chainmail.
Learn how to throw an axe.
Learn how to chop wood, but make sure you chop enough wood to survive a hard winter. Make sure you live near plenty of trees, but make sure those trees don’t fall on your house and kill you during bad storms.
You’re going to need gas masks.
You’re also going to need to grow a medicinal herb garden and learn how to extract the key ingredients in the right way in the right concentrations.
You can make insulin from pig organs.
Better get on that…
You’re also going to need to learn how to dress wounds and mend broken bones, likely in the way they did during the 19th century, because you won’t have reliable electricity. In addition to your bunker full of dry goods, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to convert a spare bedroom into a makeshift hospital.
Don’t have a spare bedroom?
Better get one…
If you live in a city, find some abandoned buildings somewhere to start your urban garden co-op. Make sure you hide it from all the nosy city council nerds who think you’re doing something illegal. If you’re really nice to your landlord, maybe they’ll let you grow kale on the roof.
That’s a lot of work. You’re going to need a community.
Start hosting grillouts now. Throw parties for your neighbors every weekend. Over a series of weeks and months, calmly, gently, patiently ease them into your worldview. Start out by talking about the latest natural disasters. Ask them very innocuously whether they’d like to come up with some kind of plan in case your local government responds to floods with thoughts and prayers. By 2030, maybe you’ll convince some of them to start growing tomatoes in their yard. If you’re extremely lucky, some of them will be slightly less likely to shoot you for your stuff or run screaming when the militias start terrorizing your neighborhood.
Whew, okay.
Here’s the thing. These are all good ideas, but when you present them all like that, it becomes pretty clear you can’t do it all.
You have to make choices.
That’s hard.
Every hour you’re doing one important thing, you’re not doing something else. We don’t have decades to get all this in order.
The people who’ve spent the last several decades preparing, they got to enjoy the most peaceful, prosperous time in human history.
No, it still wasn’t easy for them, but imagine doing all of this now, with so much stacked against you, and time running out.
No wonder we’re stressed.
It’s all to say:
If someone had a lifetime to get ready for this, that’s worth keeping in mind. If you feel jealous or guilty because you don’t know how to do it all, remember that the timetable for collapse got moved up on you by a good twenty years, practically overnight, and you’re not going to have the same opportunities someone did who started prepping or homesteading in the 1990s, 2000s, or even the 2010s. Not with a big orange cheetoh constantly threatening supply chains with tariffs and trying his hardest to kill what’s left of the economy.
As some of my readers remind me, a lot of people have been living in collapse their entire lives. They never had a chance to get ready for it.
They were born into it.
I spent the first half of my life getting out of a dangerous, unstable situation, only to find out that my escape was, at best, a reprieve.
When was I supposed to buy a farm?
Maybe you’re in the same canoe.
I’ve often wondered if you can prepare for a pandemic, a grid collapse, a dust bowl, a biblical flood, a megafire, a series of industrial accidents, a world war, a nuclear meltdown, and a global famine. You can try. You can even do a pretty good job, but one of those things will still get you.
When it does, don’t take it personal.
You tried.
Some people are just gonna get a solar generator, put away some dried beans, and see how long they can last. As much value as I find in prepping and learning all the different approaches, I can’t hold it against them. I’m not going to tell them that’s a bad plan. I’m not going to sit in judgment.
Imagine spending every waking minute for the next 8 years learning how to live like a Quaker, and then you die from the flu because you thought it was more important to go off-grid than have a HOCl generator. Or imagine investing your life savings in rooftop solar panels, then you get hit by a tornado, and your home insurance decides they can drop you with no legal repercussions, because the fascists let them. These both seem equally likely to me.
Imagine doing everything right, then a flood or fire still hits you at 3 am and destroys every single thing you ever built. Then what? So, you have to take the information you’ve got. You have to bounce it off your own life and priorities, and you have to make a choice. You can’t prepare for everything.
Unfortunately, that’s what we’re getting.
Everything.
Wildly relevant and a bit too close to home…
You’ve summarized my multi-decades old cognitions spectacularly, and your conclusion is mine as well.
There is no amount of adequate prepping for this sort of scenario.
When whatever happens finally happens, you just adapt. As best as you can.
I don’t think much about it anymore because of the decay in mental health it causes. Just live the best life you possibly can for as long as you can, and be kind along the way.
In the end, what else is there, really?
🫡
As a kid, I spent lots of time living in a tar paper shack with a wood burning stove, an outhouse, a pump that had questionable water and with a pantry filled with food on a 100 acre farm overlooking the Mississippi. My doctor grandfather purchased the property out of love ( he courted my grandmother there under the prior owner's peach trees) and because he was a "prepper" worried about nuclear war. Living in rural areas is hard and not one that I chose.
I live in an urban area. Oh I have a well stocked pantry and I have some knowledge of traditional skills. But as an older person, I am going to stay put in the city and make the best of it. I remind myself that for most of human history, people lived without electricity and in communities or cities. I try to have faith that those pockets of humanity who survive will include individuals with compassion and creativity to devise new solutions which include the diverse array of human knowledge and experience which we have acquired globally and which was diffused to people by the technology that will disappear without electricity. Communities of individuals have useful knowledge ( both active or passive) that may suggest how humans survive, whether it is how to maintain waterways using indigenous knowledge, how to collect water in stepwells, cisterns or qanats, or how to stay cool or warm without electricity, or the understanding of viruses, bacteria and public health.
My grandfather prepper was wrong about the end of the world then, and I think many of the current rural survivalists are thinking too narrowly. What is happening now is not pretty; but you can do what humans have always done, take one step at a time and do the best that you can, but do it with friends and family and find some joy.