> If you think you're going to defect from the social contract but still get to enjoy all the benefits of society,
Yeah, you can't do that all by yourself; that's for politicians and movie stars and business tycoons.
There are preppers and "self sufficiency" fans who are not seeking to "defect from the social contract"; apparently that's a difficult distinction to make for people taking a quick survey of the field.
They're the ones whose advice includes lots of "know your neighbors" and "coordinate with your neighborhood".
I'm a fan of the Alone series on the History channel. Contestants are dropped off in a remote location and have to survive on their own with minimal gear. All of them are highly trained in hunting, wilderness survival, etc. but only the best (and luckiest) make it past two months.
Humans are not meant to live alone. Even a small group could divide the labor and survive orders of magnitudes longer than a single individual. The most important survival gear is family and community.
You've been downvoted, though not by me, because you introduced a petty insult about an unrelated topic. You then doubled down with an even pettier edit. It's not rocket science mate.
> You've been downvoted, though not by me, because you introduced a petty insult about an unrelated topic.
What's unrelated? Many vegans claim that veganism is the natural human diet. That humans originally were vegan but became meat eaters. I've come across crazy vegans here who spout that nonsense.
> You then doubled down with an even pettier edit. It's not rocket science mate.
My guess is only silly vegans would take truth as a petty insult.
Also, I really don't care about the downvotes. I know why I was downvoted by silly vegans. My edit was a lure more than anything. So I can get a big laugh at their expense.
Maybe many vegans claim that, but you can find many of any group that claims something because there are many people. Most vegans will probably warn you that the diet is likely to be nutritionally incomplete and require B12 supplementation, for example.
One of my observations, not sure if an artifact of editing or accurate, is how everyone progressively talks about missing their families more and more right before they decide to tap out.
The winner from last season(?) mostly seemed to win by keeping relentlessly positive, whatever happened on a given day, thinking of his family fondly, and keeping his mind engaged with hobby crafts (i.e. making a fancier X for his shelter).
You do realize that Alone has a lot of limitations, right? The show begins at the start of winter. Participants are geofenced, and hunting activities must abide by local laws. Not to mention, they don't even get to choose their sites, which is crucial in a real-life survival situation.
The way they handle bears is very limited, for instance. Humanity's main defenses against bears have been 1) being in groups of more than one person and 2) sometimes you gotta kill a bear. In Alone you've got your airhorn and bear mace and that's it.
I will say I enjoyed the early episode of one of the seasons on Vancouver Island where a cop tapped out within a day or two because there were bears. He even said (I'm paraphrasing) that he's not used to not being able to shoot them or call for help on a radio.
Agreed it would be way easier to survive as part of a small tribe rather than fully alone, but I wouldn't use the TV show Alone as proof. They purposely pick some of the least hospitable places for life, drop people off at the end of fall with no summer to stock up/prepare, contestants have to follow all the local regulations around how/what game they hunt, and (most importantly) nobody is allowed a gun. Plenty of small-time trappers and other pioneers survived on their own during the westward expansion!
As with all (and especially self-identified) doomer literature, this piece stops just before the important realization: you can't do it yourself, but you can do it with your community.
Our lives are going to get worse. Many people will die. If we form sustainable local communities, and build political coalitions to lessen the damage going forward, fewer of us will die, and our lives will get "less worse".
It mentions it in one sentence and then caveats it with saying oh but they're crazy and irritating. It then moves on to talk more about how we're all doomed. It's just unnecessarily negative.
It doesn't. It says that once you've built a proper community, you've built "the grid." You're not living "off grid." That's like the whole point of the article. You're never going to make it on your own. Like it or not, we're all in this together. And it's pretty clearly aimed at the folks that don't think they need anybody else to make it.
As with all (and especially self-identified) doomer literature, this piece stops just before the important realization: you can't do it yourself, but you can do it with your community.
The article mentions it, and it calls "community" a grid. I mean, what do we think a "grid" is? A collective effort to more efficiently bring $GOOD_STUFF to...you knew it was coming...a community of people.
I live near the Amish, they are going to make it. Yes life will be harder for them, but they are prepared for a breakdown in civilization.
As others have pointed out, it may be more difficult for a single individual to make it, but a large family or small community has a decent shot of survival.
Especially a community that is already self-reliant to a large extent. Preppers are doing the IT equivalent of making untested backups. The backups may work, but since you didn't test it they might not work.
I thought the Amish were strictly non-violent? Isn't it one of the Christian tenets of "turn the other cheek"?
Their predisposition for non-violence may change when they encounter roving gangs of wasteland bandits (from New Jersey) venturing about but that's not guaranteed.
They aim for it, certainly. They're quite likely to have good relations with their neighbors who are less restrained or forgiving, and who value the company of the Amish and other neighbors.
Non-violent in context is just not violent by nature. Exercising violence in the course of self defense does not make one violent by nature. Self preservation is innate in both violent and non-violent people.
Wouldn't the Amish community be considered the "Amish grid". I think the point of the article is trying to make is that you still need some type of community and a chain of production of some sort, someone is the carpenter, another is the smith, etc.
“This community of farmers will definitely be fine when their farms fail, because they don’t rely on technology. Please ignore their tools.”
Like, there are a whole lot of reasons the article listed for why this won’t work in the future. You can’t just negate them because it works now.
It’s not just a breakdown in civilization - it’s a dramatically changed and broken planet in this scenario. The Amish will starve just as fast as anyone else when crops fail or it doesn’t rain for years on end.
They use some tools from advanced tech, but already have their own blacksmiths and carpenters who make tools for their farmers. For the long run, they will have to develop some type of mining or smelting operation from scrap metal they find (which will probably be abundant for a few decades if society really does collapse)
Okay, so every Amish community is outfitted with a defensible shot tower, and these are pre-built to be used after SHTF and society collapses around them? Where are they importing the lead?
I fear the Amish would quickly get invaded when food gets tight. The Sentinel island people might have a better shot, since they are out on an island. Or the groups deep in the Amazon jungle.
I mean people genuinely living off the grid know exactly where your shit is going — into your compost pile. That's how subsistence farming has worked for thousands of years.
Lots of rural houses have septic tanks. If you have a large tank relative to number of people living there, and the right biological additives, you can go without pumping it for 10-25 years -- in which time, the prepper will have failed in other ways.
That's the funny thing about life. No one gets out alive. Nobody's going to make it. Articles that try to scare me with collapse just can't anymore.
(I have made peace with the likely possibility of not making it to 50 or having a "normal" death. I was suicidal for so many years that it just feels like an old companion.)
Whenever I see people talk about how they are planning for a societal collapse, I get the sense that deep down, a lot of these people want to see it happen during their lifetime (or at least they think they do.)
If you look for hints about their motivations, it often strikes me as a way for people to feel like they have some sense of control over their future in a world they are disillusioned with. They sleep a little better at night thinking that they are going to get the last laugh while the boss that embarrassed them three years ago starves somewhere. The whole thing then morphs from “I’d better be prepared on the off chance something happens” to “I hope I get to show all of them before I die.”
I don't think it's necessarily that vindictive. Large-scale civilization is a very recent thing in human evolutionary terms and from a certain angle, a survivalist prepper life in nature does have some appeal, even if it's no doubt over-romanticized.
anecdotally, every prepper type I personally know falls under that category (the petty vindictive hope of everyone else getting screwed while they have the last laugh)
While Reddit is hardly a representative sample, it's not a bad example – and there is basically zero vindictive content on https://old.reddit.com/r/preppers/
as a counter-opinion, to the extent that I think about such things - it gives one a sense of agency. Almost certainly a false one. But the notion that I could have some control over my own life as my trust in the support network around me erodes is a small comfort.
The toilet paper thing/general hoarding is heavily misunderstood.
I was/am a massive covid skeptic. None of the data made sense to me, from February into the summer of 2020. Im also unvaccinated for covid now.
But when lockdowns were starting... My family bought tons of supplies. Amounts you'd call insane or who knows what.
Do you know why I bought a lot of toilet paper and food and salt and flour??
In case I was wrong about covid.
If covid turned out to be as bad as the media was talking about (videos of Chinese people shaking in the streets, newspapers in Italy full of obituaries, morgues full and digging mass dirt graves on islands), I wasnt about to go back out into ebolla-ville and buy paper to wipe my ass.
Everyone presented it like hoarders were stupid to think supply lines in America would break down. That wasn't the point.
If covid was actually deadly and easy to transmit, I wouldn't want to go into the streets to restock items even if they were technically in the stores.
And the unwritten point being, if it turned out to be not so bad, your worst case is that you have a bunch of toilet paper that doesn't have an expiration date (or food you were going to eat anyway, or salt and flour that keeps for a long time, et al.). COVID skeptic or not, it seemed to be the smart hedge.
Exactly. But the people who stocked up were labeled as some kind of idiots and nutjobs that didn't trust the system, by the exact people who swore the system was correct about the severity of covid.
Call it anti-social if you want, but don't call people preparing for health preservation stupid.
Sorry but if it's as dire as the media made it sound, survival is first come first serve. Am I going to run out of food or have to venture into a deadly virus so that I can leave some stuff for the next guy?
Good practice run for everyone.
We had this tropical storm in SoCal last weekend. It was confusing to see people crowing that they didn't suffer any damage as some sort of victory in being right (which is also confusing, because they were conflating awareness of the storm with panic) rather than luck that the storm changed paths, etc.
I try and search my feelings a bit for this sort of thing, and what you describe probably does play a bit of a factor - I'd say it's more of an "I told you so" feeling.
But the thing is that I am truly worried to my core about global warming and I have been for more than a decade at this point. This year has brought anomalies that are terrifying and I think the majority of people at least now feel that something is going wrong. I don't want to see collapse - I like my showers and air conditioning as much as anyone. But the way things are just looks more and more precarious to me.
The fun realization for me has been that we're in a no-win scenario now. Even if climate change (which has been re-defined) is overly-stated, the policies that are being and will continue to be enacted as a response to it, guarantee immense suffering for billions and a general decline in quality of life.
The good news is that you can mitigate for much of the consequences by simply not being in the West, ideally in a commodity rich country.
> The good news is that you can mitigate for much of the consequences by simply not being in the West, ideally in a commodity rich country.
That's interesting, my impression has been entirely the opposite, that Global South is going to suffer the worst of the consequences; as most parts of the West can afford to mitigate the effects with large investments in infrastructure and for western countries these consequences are outweighed by secondary-order effects i.e. migration and conflicts due to the more affected places.
If we do nothing about climate change the everybody's quality of life is going to fall off a cliff. We can fix this problem without going back to the dark ages.
Exactly what has been enacted to reduce anyone's quality of life? Electrifying appliances and transport? Most of the alternatives are literally strictly better than the fossil powered equivalents.
But to anyone who cares about this, the clarion call is that we haven’t yet done nearly enough. From my understanding, doing enough is impossible (with current tech: fusion would change this and nuclear best option now) without massive energy consumption reductions: sure, some via Teslas and EnergyStar appliances (which if you look in certain corners are definitely registered as QoL reductions. More annoying but more efficient CVT car transmissions and engine-stop-at-stoplight features apply here too) and but much more via less A/C and heating or more of your income being spent on such, displacing other spending which presumably would bring about more quality of life as well. People the world over have also shown preference for eating meat and that is energy intensive as well, so pile that and other oil-intensive agriculture (effectively all of it: this is how we feed the whole planet) up in how we can project QoL to be reduced down this path.
Those are all suggestions, pretty much none of them are the Law; and many of them have a zero effect on you, especially when building new. You can use less AC and heating by building a much better insulated house + geothermal heat pumps, for example. There is no inherent improvement in a gas furnace v some electric solution to the same problem.
Pretty sure many appliance and auto requirements are indeed law and not suggestions. Much like ‘smoking in bars,’ these are things that the providers won’t do unilaterally because some large segment of consumers strongly don’t prefer it (and I greatly appreciate no smoke in bars!) But nobody actively wants an A/C or toilet or fridge that works worse, modulo the negative externalities that some care about but even they would want the better appliances if possible.
And I promise you many people including most serious chefs would say there is a giant quality of life improvement from using gas stoves.
Your obversations might be true, the cynical bend is offputting.
The problem is living 'off grid' is not new. Monasteries have been doing it for a while. Boomers have been doing it for a while. The article drives home a sense of hopelessness about the whole affair.
If a war ever broke out, I'd much prefer to be living in the countryside like a ww2 british mom in a roald dahl novel, than sitting next to the local recruitment office and thirsty government official making "no, sir" a very difficult proposition indeed.
I know ww2 references are basically irrelevant in this day and age, but given the articles bleak outlook, it seems that the Hope of living offgrid in world war 2 and the infinite religious commitment of a Monastery, though difficult, is somehow more realistic and a tonal 'step up' from an American blogger in 2023.
> The problem is living 'off grid' is not new. Monasteries have been doing it for a while
To the contrary, monasteries were very often at the nexus of trade, serving as the middle-men between peasants who produced goods and markets in larger cities [1][2]. Monasteries were on every grid available in their day - road, communication, etc. They were even connected to social grids to recruit new monks.
Monasteries also had chaplains whose literal job was to interconnect with the outside world. A monastery near a city could have half a dozen chaplains.
I've got a whole hypothesis around this, but without getting too political... your statement "a way for people to feel like they have some sense of control over their future in a world they are disillusioned with" fits really well with the people I've met via real estate who are looking for these types of properties. At the root, they are scared and this kind of lifestyle is a way for them to channel that fear.
Ironically though, every cabin in the woods / prepper camp that I've seen as a real estate agent, wouldn't even last someone through a winter. Still way too many reliances on the modern world. Oh you've got a giant water tank and a well, but the pump (or your generator) runs on gas? Yeah good luck with that. Ok you've got a year's supply of freeze-dried meals, but no greenhouse, no setup for animals, no access to hunting, so... how are you going to produce more food? So you've got woodpile, but no more trees on your property and your only source of heat is a wood stove, so...
It's good to be prepared - earthquakes, tornadoes, and certainly fires are going to continue to be a thing. But I feel a kind of sadness for a lot of these folks who have survivalist fantasies that are a manifestation of their fears.
There's a part of me that feels the urge to prepare for disaster. And yet I know it's a reaction to fears I have that won't be helped by being prepared. My main concern is that one of many possible AGI disasters will come to pass. None of them are really solved by prepping. But I can speak to this being driven by fear, at least for myself.
To be honest, I have fantasies -- but they are fantasies of a simpler life without all the craziness of the world. Or rather, if I had to spend all my time getting food and staying alive for the next few days, I wouldn't have a lot of mental energy to worry about all the ways that things could go really badly that I don't have any control over.
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.
I'll add one more: my ex and I spent six years full-time RVing. During most of that time, we had approximately 30-days of off-grid capability, depending on where we were camped.
And that was without trying to push it. Realistically, we could have extended that by months - limited only by food - by camping near a water source.
Our lifestyle at the time wasn't at all "prepper" driven, but I think it's another category worth recognizing here.
Many full-time RVers have similarly, surprisingly-long off-grid capaciy at all times.
We did meet a few 'real' preppers along the way, though. The kind who have a reinforced "bug out room" deep in their basement, with positive pressure air ventilation, shelves lined with MREs, many crates of water, and an substantial arsenal. Interesting dude, but the prepper thing wasn't my speed.
Wow, now you've got my mind spinning, as yes, the nomad crowd is yet another whole genre of characters and stories. You've got everyone from essentially homeless people with wheels to trust fund kids / FIRE with total freedom. I'm sure you have many stories if you were on the road that many years.
Another layer to this is that even if they have an active hobby farm that is self-sustaining, do they have medical skills? Can they set a broken leg, deliver a baby, and pull a rotted tooth? Do they have the technical skills to maintain various equipment, even if its renewable?
The irony for a lot of the prepper community is that the most efficient "off grid" social structure is concept that they strongly oppose, the commune. A small community working together for a common good in a shared space.
> The irony for a lot of the prepper community is that the most efficient "off grid" social structure is concept that they strongly oppose, the commune. A small community working together for a common good in a shared space.
I have a feeling that the opposition of preppers to the commune is a rather US-American thing. In other countries I rather sense that some kind of small commune is at least accepted as a necessary evil among preppers to increase the chance of success/survival.
My understanding is that in almost all cases, communes that were established in the US during the 1960s devolved into leadership by the most sociopathic, rather than a true community governance. I suspect the resulting backlash is why we in the US aren't attracted to the idea.
This makes no sense. Why would people that want to survive these end-of-the-world scenarios be opposed to the one thing that makes survival more likely?
I'm not doubting you, but it makes no sense to me.
It doesnt make sense, but many americans have been conditioned to think helping anyone but yourself is socialist/communist, and they would rather die than potentially be labeled one.
This happens, yes, But oftentimes preppers start off from rational or at least semi-rational bases, but then entrench themselves in the psychology you describe due to the sunk-cost fallacy.
For example: let's say you bought into Matt Simmons' peak oil hypothesis in 2008. The data is there. Hubbert's peak is a real phenomenon and mathematically, it will eventually happen. So you moved off-grid, spun up a sustainable, regenerative ranching effort, and started rolling over long-dated NYMEX crude contracts, losing your savings slowly for a decade and a half, while tight oil technology expired your options worthless, every single month.
Some people might say ok, I was wrong. Shit. Time to get back to the real world.
But many more of them will convince themselves no, it's just the timing, I was just a little early. See the Bakken and Eagle Ford production is already peaking, and the Permian Basin will peak in just a couple more years. THEN I'll be right. I have to be right. July 2025 will be my swan song. I'm going to go watch The Big Short again.
Humans are gonna human. And I suspect you're going to see a LOT more of the left-leaning, tech-bro type of this prepper emerging due to climate change concerns than you will of the traditional Bible-beating Soviet-EMP style of prepper in the coming decade.
That seems to be almost certain now. I'll admit I'd followed the debate fairly closely for a while and was convinced by the arguments that an oil supply crunch was going to have a fairly dramatic effect on civilisation as we knew it. It may still happen, but it seems a fairly minor risk compared to many of the others.
But I never really considered prepping - if some sort of dramatic collapse does occur I'd rather just ride it out as best as I can with family and friends and local communities going through the same thing. I don't expect it to be at all pretty but nor do I think it'll be all bad.
> And I suspect you're going to see a LOT more of the left-leaning, tech-bro type of this prepper emerging due to climate change concerns…
while i’m sure we’ll see an uptick, i don’t think we’ll see anything like we did with the previous batch of paranoid types.
the modern left is much more about “we need to rely on and help each other” rather than the “im gonna become a survivalist and die alone in the woods.”
and honestly, anyone who thinks going off alone is somehow the intelligent move is fooling themselves and obviously hasn’t thought it through. we know this. we have thousands of years of evidence of this. when we come together we thrive. when we go off in the woods to show how “strong-boot-straps” we are, we die of an infected toe nail or something equally as stupid. that’s why every survivalist disaster “expert” recommends to prepare for disaster with your neighbors in your town to help each other and distribute the load. it’s not rocket surgery.
again, i’m sure we’ll see a slight uptick in every type, but nothing like we did in the past, i think we learned too much from watching their mistakes. we’ve seen too many shows and videos of people with even strong survival skills be absolutely miserable off on in isolation.
Laugh all you want, but during the worst months of covid, when some items were impossible to find, I was all stocked. And my neighbors were very grateful that I was able to help them procure some necessary things.
Most preppers don't do it to be ready for the zombie apocalypse, but just for when the SHTF just enough that you can't count on the government showing up this very week.
It could be an extreme version of FOMO: you see the end of humanity, nothing left afterwards. That's nice, sense of completion, I followed until the end.
For me the dream stems more for the realization that there is almost no way of living an environmentally sustainable lifestyle while participating in society.
I want to have a zero carbon footprint now, not in 50 years. This is just not possible if I have to buy food at the grocery store, take fossil fuel powered transport or just generally participate in the economy of a system which still strives for infinite growth.
Meanwhile, when living in a self sufficient community, it becomes absolutely possible to reach that goal, or even be carbon negative.
Of course collapse is a very real possibility. But collapse is often asynchronous, occurring at different times in different places. In first world countries, I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't even happen within my lifetime, or at all In that case, will I feel bad that I decided to disengage early from a destructive society and live by my own beliefs? I don't believe so.
Undoubtedly lower status/income individuals wish for higher status from some tragic event that reshuffles the deck. "Your book smarts aren't worth so much now are they?"
This is article is wrong on both sides of its reasoning. On one, yeah, people built grids and started farming, this is how our civilization came around. These people were more numerous and more dominant, pushing hunter gatherers out. However, they lived worse: they were shorter, worked more, played less, had less interesting routines. It is only recently that we matched hunters in health. And then almost instantly became massively obese.
On the other, we* are not headed for any widespread climate disaster. Yeah, fires, waves of migration, etc, sure. None of that will be worse than things we have deliberately caused ourselves (like the collapse of Libya and its aftermath). It won't even come close to pointless slaughters of first and second world war after which our civilization flourished to new heights.
I really think you need to study more history.... there are massive chunks of what was once fertile land in Iraq that will never be cultivated again. Humans had settled and cultivated it for millennia, but salinization has ruined the dirt.
Humans moved away from there and now depend on other land. It was 'easy' back then because the other land was empty. But uh, we've ran out of that empty land. As we burn up more land with climate disasters, over farming, and land destruction via building and run off we aren't getting new land back. These are not short term problems like wars. These are problems that last at geologic time scales.
If the climate warms significantly, we are getting millions of kilometers of previously unusable taiga in what is now largely empty regions of Canada and Russia. And the population in most countries is already in decline. We will need less food and farming, not more.
The fall of ancient civilizations is always a great story but I think we have fundamentally changed when we attained systematic knowledge. There will be no great collapse with massive loss of capacity because we put our understanding of the world and our tech into models and then wrote it all down millions of times.
Basically, we know how to build a nuclear reactor, an internal combustion engine, and a computer, we will never forget it, and therefore can always run an industrial civilization.
Sorry to say, the ideas in your comment are false. It's engineering hubris at its worst.
Primarily, this idea that we've written it all down so we'll never forget it, is not true. Advanced technology requires industrial infrastructure and gobs of tacit knowledge that absolutely can be unlearned at a societal level. It would be quite easy for us to forget how to build a nuclear weapon (much less a nuclear reactor) or a microprocessor. Sure you can learn the conceptual framework and think you know how to do it, but when it comes time to actually pull it off, you're going to have to figure out a lot of the secret sauce again--and that process looks like redevelopment, not just filling in some gaps.
And as that development process will require the coordination of millions of people to set up and maintain the supply chain of materials and logistics, it won't be possible in an unstable society that doesn't have the natural endowment
of cheap energy that we've had for the past 100 years.
> It would be quite easy for us to forget how to build a nuclear weapon (much less a nuclear reactor) or a microprocessor. Sure you can learn the conceptual framework and think you know how to do it, but when it comes time to actually pull it off, you're going to have to figure out a lot of the secret sauce again
This is simply not true. There is no secret in this sauce any more. Sure, you would need to relearn how to actually do some things, but the recipes are all there, well documented. Not quite youtube tutorials but we have videos.
This is not a hypothetical. We tested this[1] and it matches my expectations (I studied physics).
Esoteric materials, very precise optics, or spare parts to f22, things that are made in one or two places, we may lose that capacity. But fundamental inventions like flight, electricity, radio, fertilization are gonna stay with us as long as there's some version of us around.
A "credible design" is not a functional nuclear weapon. See again the link to the paper I posted. Any country that tries to create a nuclear weapon takes the same amount of time (~5 years) to figure it out, and no amount of designs or specs or written down information speeds it up. Only embedding actual people who have developed their tacit knowledge will do so.
But it sounds like we've both made up our minds, and you believe in the immortality of information, and I can see as evident that knowledge has been lost time and time again. We only have to wait awhile to see how it actually turns out.
I don't know, most of the things mentioned in the article seem like beginner mistakes that even I, as a casual reader of outdoors and prepper sites, already know about.
The reality is probably that in the event of a serious global catastrope, the seriously-prepared people will be fine, the sort-of-prepared people will be one step ahead of 99% of the population, and everyone else will be totally helpless.
The problem is now you're dealing with the law of large numbers. As an individual your plans are mostly meaningless when the catastrophe happens and you're caught on the 405 unable to escape.
Having a bunker as an individual means nothing if 20 people happen to get together and rise up against you.
This is why off the grid doesn't work. When the grid collapses everyone that you're not really good friends with is now your enemy. To survive you need to have/make new social grids of shared defense.
Preppers forget that society preps, too, just not necessarily at the individual level. We have warehouses full of extra stock etc, and carefully-managed supply chains, and emergency services. This is all prepping.
I think preppers should pour their energy in to helping society prepare, and not just turn their back on the very reason they exist.
p.s. I don't consider taking sensible precautions like having a well-stocked medicine cabinet, fuel in the car, and some food in the freezer "prepping".
Only we don't have warehouses full of extra stock and carefully managed supply chains. We have just-in-time supply models and spreadsheet warriors who have efficiencied surge capacity to death.
Not OP, but this seems like a weird gotcha. It did exist to me and I didn't go hungry. Certain luxury items became hard to get for a while, but necessities were never a problem.
As other have said, the vast majority of necessities we unaffected by the pandemic. I don't know anyone who couldn't get their medicine, food, etc. We even had toilet roll the entire time!
Yes, industrial-technological civilization is only possible due to cooperation of human beings at a very large scale. If that cooperation breaks down, everything goes back to pre-industrial technology, at best - and even that required a great deal of cooperation, as any examination of pre-industrial agriculture-centric society demonstrates. The provision of wood for buildings and ships, fabrics for clothing and sails, simple metal implements as weapons and farming tools, etc all required social cooperation and division of labor, which in turned required legal systems to prevent internecine conflicts from constantly breaking out. If that in turn fails, we're back to tribal hunter-gatherer societies, an unlikely option without a collapse in human population to the 10,000 B.C. levels.
This is fairly obvious to anyone who hasn't been completely indoctrinated into the myth of individual success based on hard work - a myth largely promoted to justify the consolidation of wealth and resources into the hands of a small ruling oligarch class in the modern world, see for example Margaret Thatcher's line 'there is no such thing as society' and so on.
That said, it's possible that modern technological developments might be able to create the kind of technology that could allow people to survive quite happily with minimal external inputs of raw materials, via extensive recycling of finished goods back into raw materials, use of incident energy (sunlight and wind), but the problem would be creation of the technological tools and maintenance of those tools, which would almost certainly require high-tech factories operating at scale. If those factories could somehow be miniaturized and also be highly adaptable (still in the realm of science fiction, no backyard chip foundries at present) then concepts like a self-sustaining Martian habitat could become more plausible.
This is ridiculous for a lot of reasons. I'll try to just point out the top one or two in the interest of brevity.
1. Predicting the long-term future is a bizarre and fruitless game. One might even say idiotic. If you're a prepper, and I'm not, prepare to live for a month or three. I do. Whatever the heck happens, within 90 days there will be some new normal. You're not trying to live forever. You're just trying to outlive temporary chaos. At that point, you're going to have to reinvent some kind of life. Who knows what that will be? Not me. Not this guy either.
2. He mentions wi-fi a lot. Gotta have that internet, gotta have that wi-fi, gotta have that bluetooth. I kinda doubt it. Can you go a day without internet? How about power? Just turn all of your stuff off. Most folks should be able to learn how to live like normal humans have for eons. There are various hobbies and occupations where you spend a lot of time without power or plumbing: scouts, infantry, etc. These people know what it's like. There are enough of them that the species itself will do just fine no matter what sort of apocalypse you can dream up.
It seems the problem with this essay, like so many pieces of media I consume daily, is the desire for _certainty_. Here's problem A. Here's exactly what it means, what causes it, and so on. And you have to do B to fix it. (Or, in this case, there is no B)
Disasters are chaotic and uncertain. Assuming climate disasters, moreso. But that both means that things are going to be tougher _and_ you can't have-wave your way around predicting how it all will turn out. Are many people who think themselves preppers disillusioned about their actual skills and their ability to adapt? Absolutely! But that's a one sentence essay. What's the fun in writing and commenting about that?
Apologies to the author. I believe there is a good one sentence thesis in there somewhere. But this sucked. I wish you better in the future.
This is a terrible take. It sounds like the author is projecting their inadequacies.
There are countless examples of people living off the grid, even for their entire lives.
I’ve lived off the grid. It’s hard, you’re always exhausted you’re constantly having to work to get food and fire. And if you’re in the wilderness, you have to do all that while trying not to injure yourself because help won’t come. This means “going around” obstacles instead of trying to negotiate them. Often, “going around” means additional miles, which means additional calories, which means additional work.
Perhaps they should have made a stronger point about the futility of millions of people doing it:
- First, millions of people wouldn’t want to do it. They want comfort. They want media and social media and consumerism.
- Resources are more scarce, because people must produce them.
- People are soft, used to the comforts that civilization provides them.
- People are untrained and often terrified of nature, that very thing they are an apart of.
Edit: it seems prudent to point out that normal people get their kicks by just going camping. If you are considering going to live in the woods, try starting with short, two-day camping trips and gradually increase the days so that you can take notes and improve your skills and equipment.
You can live some time without anyone else, but eventually you will need to get some help from someone, unless you want to use stone axes and split stone knifes for the rest of your life (which is possible, don't get me wrong).
But if we are talking about post iron age tech, you eventually gonna need to join a production chain of some sort, you can't just find bog iron, smelt it and hammer into an axe by yourself, while also dealing with other topics. You eventually need a community, hence a grid
I disagree. If you have the intelligence and desire, you can easily gain the required skills, likely in the matter of a year if you work hard, to go it alone indefinitely.
I think a lot of people shit on self-sufficiency due to their own inadequacies.
It will not be fun. It will not be easy. But it’s doable. No, you will not be using metal tools or having solar power.
Funny thing about your “you can’t just find…” comment though: when I went to live in the woods, I went deep, miles from any highway and much farther to any town. And I always found signs of civilization in the middle of nowhere especially tons of metal scrap and ancient iron and usable plastic bottles.
There is enough debris from civilization all over the planet for scavenging. It makes things a lot easier but you can get by without them.
I even found an intact toilet once, in an area far away from even logging roads. My best guess is somebody with an aircraft may have wanted to play a daft joke?
The other strange thing were these random staircases in the woods in the middle of nowhere…
PS: If anyone reading this is thinking of leaving civilization, I suggest you start with short trips beginning with a couple days and then gradually working them up to longer periods. This will:
1. Allow you to see if it’s really for you or if just doing more camping will suffice.
2. Will show you your skill and equipment discrepancies and allow you to correct them before the next trip in a less life-threatening manner.
My first trip was an entire month and it was rough.
Getting iron from the ground and transforming into something useful is definitely not something you can do alone.
But you are onto something, scrapping things from the outskirts of society might be something you would be able to do, albeit unless we are talking about total societal collapse this would still put you on the production chain, on the far end of it, as a scrapper
Right. But again, you don’t need iron tools to survive. It just makes thing much easier.
You can certainly live primitively in nature without the scraps of civilization. Again, it isn’t fun and it will be much harder.
Remember, total societal collapse is going to result in most, and perhaps the mass majority of humans, dying off. If not from the collapse, then from the realities of shifting into primitive living unprepared (including but not limited to: finding enough calories, disease, famine, etc).
If you have kids, like me, you and your family will probably be dead. I figure I will be. But my threat models are more concerned with pandemics, natural disasters, and loss of power/water/gas/law, so I focus on those. And yeah, all of those threats have occurred at this point (I am in a rural area) :-/
Counter-citation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o we could argue about how useful the output is but this is a clear demonstration that one can, in fact, do it alone.
I also follow Primitive Technology, but in my opinion it only proves that it needs more people or time than that. The channel is experimenting with smelting iron ore for some years now and still doesn't have a good recipe for doing it at scale.
Also note that he is only producing cast iron at the moment, which is not particularly useful for impact tools (like axes, pickaxes or weapons). Getting the iron sufficiently hot for smithing is very hard to do, and require a lot of infrastructure non existent on nature.
Some scenarios are outside of a person's control. A large well armed group lay siege and take your stuff. No rain for 7 years. A simple scrape or bad water, one season with crop failures. These all will kill, regardless of skill.
Personally I would equate this to one of the most comforting aspects to believing in God, that it's not just some meaningless random luck of the draw but instead there was agency somewhere. War stories are often similar, the new recruits think that they are special and their skill and strength will keep them alive. They then learn it is dumb luck who lives and dies, just luck whether that bullet, shrapnel, or artillery shell misses you or not
Intelligence is not enough, you need crazy luck too.
One day you have a medical emergency and poof, you're gone, possibly going through a lot of pain, because of a condition that would have been recoverable.
Never went through any emergency myself and largely going through life without any drug but looking around me, I consider myself crazy lucky.
That's what I would be afraid the most about living off grid and the first reason I think it can't last long for many (most?). What are your thoughts on this?
I'm kind of surprised about how many people seem to believe that societal collapse = go back to 'stone age' overnight.
Yeah sure, if an area turns into a disaster zone, many conveniences of modern life (water supply, power grid, supermarkets, gas stations, internet) may become unavailable for X amount of time.
But all the materials & gear that modern society produced, doesn't just disappear. Houses would still be standing, the hand tools in your toolbox would still be there & do the same they did 20y ago, the groceries in your pantry are still there & your clothes would still be hanging in the closet. Your smartphone keeps working as long as you have any way to charge it.
That 'installed base' of modern stuff can go a long way in dealing with challenges as they come. Especially if (for example through hiking / camping trips) you have learned to get by with limited gear. Eg. a swiss pocket knive serves many purposes & lasts for decades.
It's just that many people are NOT prepared for modern conveniences falling away for extended time. One example - ask 'random' people: "If tap water goes out, how long until you run out of drinking water? And what you do if tap water wouldn't come back at all?". And be amazed at the answers.
I mean, that's #1 survival material after breathable air. And neither difficult or expensive to get a grip on.
What's that saying again? "When supplies break down, a modern city is just 3 days away from large scale riots & looting".
If anything, it's people being unprepared or panicing that'll get them killed. Not so much whatever disaster that struck them.
I don’t want to sound disparaging but I think a lot of the criticisms and naysaying comes from people who are naive.
They are used to living within environments with all the modern conveniences. They can’t imagine anything different, when in fact your average farmer and his family have stuff like outhouses, manual wells, self-made tools and MacGyver fixes and hacks. While they’re not “truly” off grid, they’re effectively partially off grid and would totally do fine.
As a white collar knowledge worker I try to soak in their blue collar skills and wisdom whenever I can. And in turn try to evolve my white collar skills into something that would be useful to them (eg being competent with a variety of radios and other stuff) if the SHTF.
Conversely, I live 20 minutes outside of town. I work in town, but just on the edge of town, so I'll go months without having to go into town.
It’s weird and neat when I go into “downtown” and I’m overwhelmed with the noise and activity and new modernities (the latest being these new electric scooters people rent and ride around and then just leave wherever. Before that was Uber. I knew these existed but it was weird to see them in person. Though I’ve still never used Uber myself.)
I think you're missing the point. Did you head out somewhere completely naked without a single item on your person? Because if not, you were aided by the grid. Hell, even the shelter, clothing, calories, etc... that got you to the place and time that you decided to head out came from the grid.
I disagree. Just because you were aided by the grid doesn't mean you are aided by the grid. You can shed all those things in a short amount of time, if you have the skill, and then you are truly living off the grid.
This has been my thought as well, but I gotta say... I do know of a place where the owner put in absolutely millions into an eco lodge and while a "prepper cabin" wasn't his goal, it really is a great example of how one could live in a degree of comfort off grid. Probably their biggest weakness is they rely a lot on their diesel generator. But, they do have some solar, they have a good greenhouse, access to hunting, a private airfield, access to a river for both fishing and water, in an area with mild(ish) winters... so guess I'm saying that if you've got absolutely wheelbarrows full of cash, it can be done... but that's not the case with the vast majority of prepper types I've seen.
But, they do have some solar, they have a good greenhouse, access to hunting, a private airfield, access to a river for both fishing and water, in an area with mild(ish) winters...
Sounds great, I'll go round up the boys and it'll be ours by sundown. I think a lot of the "it can be done" commenters didn't read to the end: it can be done when you're the only one doing it. Not so much when 8 billion people are doing it. See also: roving gangs from any Fallout game.
'Prepping' is a great way to deal with temporary disruptions. I think the author has a really good point that the idea of living off grid during a climate disaster is copium. 'Living off the land' requires that the land is productive. That's not a given in an age where droughts, wildfires, and heat waves are striking more often.
More often, yes, but not continuously in any one area. The planet is a big place and while I don't doubt a lot more of our resources will need to go into dealing with the costs of increased natural disasters including reduced capacity to produce food, it's hard to see this affecting everywhere all at the same time. More likely is that entire areas become gradually unable to support a modern economy and comfortable lifestyle forcing mass relocations (some of which may well be to areas that are currently "underpopulated" due to currently inhospitable climates or even reserved wilderness parks etc.).
This is the thing. If you are using "equipment" then you are only off the grid temporarily. Sooner or later all that stuff you bought at REI is going to fail. Then what?
There are countless example of individuals doing it, because the rest of society is in the business of not caring what they are up to.
This paradigm completely fails when if those countless millions are forced without the grid. Once this happens those that will survive are not the ones that survive off the grid, but those that marshal human resources and create a new grid.
Obviously people can live in this way if pressed, but what kind of life is it? Humans are social creatures, and we strive for more than mere survival.
If our current society somehow "collapses," we will immediately form new societies that will work to pick up the pieces, and there will be strength in numbers.
> If you are considering going to live in the woods, try starting with short, two-day camping trips
And not the "camping" that involves pulling an air-conditioned trailer to a paved campsite with power and water, a fire ring, and a shower and toilet 50 yards away, and a convenience store with ice and beer at the camp entrance.
Real camping is not that fun, unless you're a kid in the boy scouts. At least for me. It's hot and sweaty and dirty and uncomfortable.
I'm not sure how many people have truly lived off the grid for the past 150 years. It probably numbers in the low thousands across the entire planet.
As mentioned in the article, American homesteaders were settling into so-called wilderness for $0 but which had been cleared of the people already living there. Few homesteaders lived more than a day's ride away from a military fort.
Even "mountain men" who rejected colonizer society went into the wilds fully equipped with its technology, and would frequently cycle out for supplies.
Furthermore, a lot of the land they had occupied was already partially cultivated and developed by indigenous tribes. And those indigenous tribes were trading with the colonists - and they had to, because their traditional ways of life were no longer possible, or they had been pushed off the lands where they used to live.
Uncontacted indigenous tribes are probably the last ones to truly live "off the grid". But, maybe not. They also live in a network of shared resources. They rely heavily on a small society of a hundred or so people.
The number of single families and individuals who have truly "lived off the grid"? Without significant support from larger groups, including common defense, trading, scavenging, and theft? For their whole lives? And prospered? I would guess there has never been anybody who accomplished that, from the beginning of time.
Sure, you can redefine "off the grid" to mean dozens of things, but doesn't it have a somewhat accepted definition of "not currently connected to the major utility and supply networks"?
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.
Haha. Yes, this is it. Our neighbor has chickens and we do a swap for vegetables and eggs. We will likely get chickens in the future, but like all things there is nuance. Our neighbor in particular lost 4 or his 6 hens a couple years ago to bald eagles. Turns out chickens don't do well in numbers less than 4 (maybe someone can clarify this, as I'm ot sure), so they eventually got sick or stressed and died.
But yeah, to the GP point, chickens are actually pretty good hunters.
> He didn't realize his electric can opener wasn't going to work until after the power had gone out.
> He was helpless.
Sounds a bit just so? In my arguably not prepared home just in my sight line I see 4 different ways to improvise implements to open a can if I need to. Not counting the two manual can openers I have for just that task.
Can openers were invented way after cans were invented. People just used chisels.
If the lack of electricity makes you helpless you were helpless even with electricity.
if you like to read fiction related to this topic, i can recommend the Parable or Earthseed series by Octavia E. Butler, in particular the second book 'Parable of the Talents'
it describes a world where the national governments have lost control and people are fighting for resources.
it's a rather dystopian view, but it points out that in addition to living off the grid, which is difficult enough you will have to face others who want what you have.
only law and order and a strong community can protect you from that.
I have a personal story that seems to dovetail with this article.
Back in the days of the pre-Y2K "crisis" hype, I lived in Colorado and was young and more impressionable, I started developing a prepper mentality. While I was pretty sure that we'd get through that, it seemed wise to plan for the future.
So, I fell into a group of like-minded people, and joined in conversations about what would be needed to survive in a post-collapse environment. We honed our hunting skills, pre-stocked camping backpacks, and formulated plans to flee into the mountains in case things went south. We also started looking into what it would take to buy a piece of property and build out a bunker, stock it, and prepare for whatever was to come.
My enthusiasm for this individual prepper mentality diminished quite rapidly due to a single conversation. I was in a "seminar" where we were all discussing the advantages/disadvantages of prebuilt bunkers and how to disguise them on the property. During a break, when I asked one of the "consultants" what his plan was. He took me aside, looked around so that nobody would hear him and said something along the lines of: "Kid, don't waste your time with this hiding in a bunker nonsense. Me and my kids and grandkids live up in the mountains and know where a lot of these preppers have their stashes. If things go south, we're just going use our bulldozers and diggers to dig them out and take what they've stored away for us. They won't be able to outlast a group of us."
I looked at him like he was Judas, but he then said. "Don't think I'm the only one in this business who's planning to do this, we'll gladly take their money and build whatever bunker they want, but at the end of the day, if things go to hell, we'll use whatever means we have to survive, and so if that means cracking open these stashes - so be it".
Then he said "the key to survival is being part of a community you can rely on. Ideally, this is your family as they're much less likely to betray you, but a good like-minded church group could also work".
I was a bit stunned by this, but it crystalized in my mind then, that the individual "prepper" was eventually doomed to fail at some point and it was pretty useless to prepare for it.
So, yes, I now agree that the best approach to "prepare" is to work to strengthen your community.
I'm putting all my chips on the Mormons in the US to make it through for exactly this reason. Also because they keep a year of shelf stable food around.
Yep, as an individual you have to sleep. As an individual you get sick. As an individual you have massive gaps in knowledge and capability.
Any prepper that is an individual and thinks they have it made is just an egotistical disaster in the making.
A few people working together can take any prepper out simply by being patient. If the person is in a bunker then you just poison the bunker. Otherwise you just wait till they come out and pick them off one by one.
it's a false debate, it doesn't matter to be off the grid, what matter is minimizing our impact
For example, with my lifestyle without a car, a fridge, A/C, hot water, heating, TV, €10/mo electricity, without most things people have, my footprint is 5% of the average person. If more people would go in this direction, it would solve all problems
I always saw planning for a social collapse as a way to not actually resolve issues because you feel helpless.
"people gonna attack us? IM PREPARED!" you are not. You know what's better than prepping? Fighting tooth and nail to make sure the grid is rock solid and free of corruption. And every day is a battle, because there's always a schemer who will try to get in and hoard for himself. If preppers got depressed from thinking how things are in collapse, and how they need to improve things, as a society, in order to improve things for themselves, they'd actually maybe act.
I see preppers as poor "throw money at it" rich folks. Rich folks don't care if the education system isn't working, they can find a private school which costs $100k a month to give their child the best education possible. They can get a bunker professionally built so if anything happens their thick doors and automated guns will take care of any people trying to get in. They can hire a chef and have the best food possible in an ideal diet to keep them happy, sated, and healthy all their lives while most of us have to suffer from over-sugared foods and affordable food being incredibly poor in nutrients
Preppers are similar, they don't want to solve societal problems, they want to feel like _THEY_ are insulated from societal problems because they are "off the grid". But they are not. No living up in the mountain is gonna protect you from a bad harvest, or from a crop disease, or from a fucking splinter. I love something someone said recently "if you're in a zombie apocalypse, you won't get to have the cool hair, the cool bat, and go smash zombie brains. You'll likely die from diarrhea pretty early on."
If society actually collapses, a lone libertarian in a bunker with truckloads of fresh water and food supplies is not going to survive. A warlord with as few as 10 guys with guns roving the hills will be able to just kill the preppers and take whatever they need. They're not going to care that you have the deed to your land and you even built a fence around it to show everyone you own it.
It also feeds into this idea that you can prepare for the worst, but the human condition when pushed to its limits does not abide by rules.
Everyone loves to think about how they'll handle attackers, but never spend much time thinking about the lack of sleep and how that'll severely impact them. Never how much isolation will destroy so much of their mental state.
Popular media influence of lone wolves surviving and other such content can really prevent people from being aware of the realities of such collapse I suppose!
People watch too many zombie movies where the protagonist is this lone, handsome, rugged individualist with a gun that has infinite bullets, and every patch of humanity they run into are these nice, civilized survivor camps full of their church friends. Everyone thinks when society collapses, they're gonna be that lone badass. Newsflash: You're not going to be that badass. If you can shoot straight, you'll be forced to become a soldier-slave in some warlord's roving army. If you can't, you'll either be killed or become a sex-slave for that roving army. Either way, 99.9% of the non-murdered population is going to become a slave of some sort if the shit really hits the fan.
The one serious prepper I know has a legally-owned belt-fed machine gun - among many other arsenal items - guarding the entrance to his "bug out room." Good luck to the warlord :)
The warlords will do just fine .. after a year or two or three your buddy with his rapid-pop gun will either play nice, die alone, or get killed when least expected.
See: Heavily armed Japanese soldiers on Pacific islands post WWII.
"Societal collapse" if that is what we're talking about, isn't just for christmas .. it will persist for some years.
It's a funny old thread in any case - I'm a >60 year old Australian who grew up in the Kimberley region in a minority amoungst people who truly lived off the grid and had done so for tens of thousands of years.
The people that raised me were born in the 1920s and 1930s and many had survived the collapse of European society in South East Asia and Japanese internment, some having formed long range insurrgency groups to spy on | terrorise Japanese soldiers and coordinate long range bombing of oil extraction points and depots through SE Asia (all a bit before I was born, obviously).
I'm related to people that charged on horse back belt fed machine guns across four miles armed with bayonets.
They 'won'[1]
Where I am now my neighbour shoots ULR at 24 inch targets 5,000 yards distant [2]
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadYeah, you can't do that all by yourself; that's for politicians and movie stars and business tycoons.
There are preppers and "self sufficiency" fans who are not seeking to "defect from the social contract"; apparently that's a difficult distinction to make for people taking a quick survey of the field.
They're the ones whose advice includes lots of "know your neighbors" and "coordinate with your neighborhood".
Humans are not meant to live alone. Even a small group could divide the labor and survive orders of magnitudes longer than a single individual. The most important survival gear is family and community.
What's unrelated? Many vegans claim that veganism is the natural human diet. That humans originally were vegan but became meat eaters. I've come across crazy vegans here who spout that nonsense.
> You then doubled down with an even pettier edit. It's not rocket science mate.
My guess is only silly vegans would take truth as a petty insult.
Also, I really don't care about the downvotes. I know why I was downvoted by silly vegans. My edit was a lure more than anything. So I can get a big laugh at their expense.
One of my observations, not sure if an artifact of editing or accurate, is how everyone progressively talks about missing their families more and more right before they decide to tap out.
The winner from last season(?) mostly seemed to win by keeping relentlessly positive, whatever happened on a given day, thinking of his family fondly, and keeping his mind engaged with hobby crafts (i.e. making a fancier X for his shelter).
I will say I enjoyed the early episode of one of the seasons on Vancouver Island where a cop tapped out within a day or two because there were bears. He even said (I'm paraphrasing) that he's not used to not being able to shoot them or call for help on a radio.
Our lives are going to get worse. Many people will die. If we form sustainable local communities, and build political coalitions to lessen the damage going forward, fewer of us will die, and our lives will get "less worse".
It's not over until it's over.
Build community not bunkers
Only one has the ability to last and be sustainable
The article mentions it, and it calls "community" a grid. I mean, what do we think a "grid" is? A collective effort to more efficiently bring $GOOD_STUFF to...you knew it was coming...a community of people.
I live near the Amish, they are going to make it. Yes life will be harder for them, but they are prepared for a breakdown in civilization.
As others have pointed out, it may be more difficult for a single individual to make it, but a large family or small community has a decent shot of survival.
Amish are testing their resilience daily.
Their predisposition for non-violence may change when they encounter roving gangs of wasteland bandits (from New Jersey) venturing about but that's not guaranteed.
They aim for it, certainly. They're quite likely to have good relations with their neighbors who are less restrained or forgiving, and who value the company of the Amish and other neighbors.
Like, there are a whole lot of reasons the article listed for why this won’t work in the future. You can’t just negate them because it works now.
It’s not just a breakdown in civilization - it’s a dramatically changed and broken planet in this scenario. The Amish will starve just as fast as anyone else when crops fail or it doesn’t rain for years on end.
It's nice to see an article bring up the shit-management problem.
Too many folks forget about how much they take toilet paper and plumbing for granted.
(I have made peace with the likely possibility of not making it to 50 or having a "normal" death. I was suicidal for so many years that it just feels like an old companion.)
If you look for hints about their motivations, it often strikes me as a way for people to feel like they have some sense of control over their future in a world they are disillusioned with. They sleep a little better at night thinking that they are going to get the last laugh while the boss that embarrassed them three years ago starves somewhere. The whole thing then morphs from “I’d better be prepared on the off chance something happens” to “I hope I get to show all of them before I die.”
I was/am a massive covid skeptic. None of the data made sense to me, from February into the summer of 2020. Im also unvaccinated for covid now.
But when lockdowns were starting... My family bought tons of supplies. Amounts you'd call insane or who knows what.
Do you know why I bought a lot of toilet paper and food and salt and flour??
In case I was wrong about covid.
If covid turned out to be as bad as the media was talking about (videos of Chinese people shaking in the streets, newspapers in Italy full of obituaries, morgues full and digging mass dirt graves on islands), I wasnt about to go back out into ebolla-ville and buy paper to wipe my ass.
Everyone presented it like hoarders were stupid to think supply lines in America would break down. That wasn't the point.
If covid was actually deadly and easy to transmit, I wouldn't want to go into the streets to restock items even if they were technically in the stores.
And the unwritten point being, if it turned out to be not so bad, your worst case is that you have a bunch of toilet paper that doesn't have an expiration date (or food you were going to eat anyway, or salt and flour that keeps for a long time, et al.). COVID skeptic or not, it seemed to be the smart hedge.
Call it anti-social if you want, but don't call people preparing for health preservation stupid.
But the thing is that I am truly worried to my core about global warming and I have been for more than a decade at this point. This year has brought anomalies that are terrifying and I think the majority of people at least now feel that something is going wrong. I don't want to see collapse - I like my showers and air conditioning as much as anyone. But the way things are just looks more and more precarious to me.
The fun realization for me has been that we're in a no-win scenario now. Even if climate change (which has been re-defined) is overly-stated, the policies that are being and will continue to be enacted as a response to it, guarantee immense suffering for billions and a general decline in quality of life.
The good news is that you can mitigate for much of the consequences by simply not being in the West, ideally in a commodity rich country.
That's interesting, my impression has been entirely the opposite, that Global South is going to suffer the worst of the consequences; as most parts of the West can afford to mitigate the effects with large investments in infrastructure and for western countries these consequences are outweighed by secondary-order effects i.e. migration and conflicts due to the more affected places.
And I promise you many people including most serious chefs would say there is a giant quality of life improvement from using gas stoves.
The problem is living 'off grid' is not new. Monasteries have been doing it for a while. Boomers have been doing it for a while. The article drives home a sense of hopelessness about the whole affair.
If a war ever broke out, I'd much prefer to be living in the countryside like a ww2 british mom in a roald dahl novel, than sitting next to the local recruitment office and thirsty government official making "no, sir" a very difficult proposition indeed.
I know ww2 references are basically irrelevant in this day and age, but given the articles bleak outlook, it seems that the Hope of living offgrid in world war 2 and the infinite religious commitment of a Monastery, though difficult, is somehow more realistic and a tonal 'step up' from an American blogger in 2023.
I don't know how that happened, but here we are.
To the contrary, monasteries were very often at the nexus of trade, serving as the middle-men between peasants who produced goods and markets in larger cities [1][2]. Monasteries were on every grid available in their day - road, communication, etc. They were even connected to social grids to recruit new monks.
1. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1301/trade-in-medieval-...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_yQ0VGuQDo&list=PL5opbjxUR5...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplain
No? Suburbs are "off grid" now? What? lol
Ironically though, every cabin in the woods / prepper camp that I've seen as a real estate agent, wouldn't even last someone through a winter. Still way too many reliances on the modern world. Oh you've got a giant water tank and a well, but the pump (or your generator) runs on gas? Yeah good luck with that. Ok you've got a year's supply of freeze-dried meals, but no greenhouse, no setup for animals, no access to hunting, so... how are you going to produce more food? So you've got woodpile, but no more trees on your property and your only source of heat is a wood stove, so...
It's good to be prepared - earthquakes, tornadoes, and certainly fires are going to continue to be a thing. But I feel a kind of sadness for a lot of these folks who have survivalist fantasies that are a manifestation of their fears.
To be honest, I have fantasies -- but they are fantasies of a simpler life without all the craziness of the world. Or rather, if I had to spend all my time getting food and staying alive for the next few days, I wouldn't have a lot of mental energy to worry about all the ways that things could go really badly that I don't have any control over.
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.
And that was without trying to push it. Realistically, we could have extended that by months - limited only by food - by camping near a water source.
Our lifestyle at the time wasn't at all "prepper" driven, but I think it's another category worth recognizing here.
Many full-time RVers have similarly, surprisingly-long off-grid capaciy at all times.
We did meet a few 'real' preppers along the way, though. The kind who have a reinforced "bug out room" deep in their basement, with positive pressure air ventilation, shelves lined with MREs, many crates of water, and an substantial arsenal. Interesting dude, but the prepper thing wasn't my speed.
The irony for a lot of the prepper community is that the most efficient "off grid" social structure is concept that they strongly oppose, the commune. A small community working together for a common good in a shared space.
I have a feeling that the opposition of preppers to the commune is a rather US-American thing. In other countries I rather sense that some kind of small commune is at least accepted as a necessary evil among preppers to increase the chance of success/survival.
This makes no sense. Why would people that want to survive these end-of-the-world scenarios be opposed to the one thing that makes survival more likely?
I'm not doubting you, but it makes no sense to me.
For example: let's say you bought into Matt Simmons' peak oil hypothesis in 2008. The data is there. Hubbert's peak is a real phenomenon and mathematically, it will eventually happen. So you moved off-grid, spun up a sustainable, regenerative ranching effort, and started rolling over long-dated NYMEX crude contracts, losing your savings slowly for a decade and a half, while tight oil technology expired your options worthless, every single month.
Some people might say ok, I was wrong. Shit. Time to get back to the real world.
But many more of them will convince themselves no, it's just the timing, I was just a little early. See the Bakken and Eagle Ford production is already peaking, and the Permian Basin will peak in just a couple more years. THEN I'll be right. I have to be right. July 2025 will be my swan song. I'm going to go watch The Big Short again.
Humans are gonna human. And I suspect you're going to see a LOT more of the left-leaning, tech-bro type of this prepper emerging due to climate change concerns than you will of the traditional Bible-beating Soviet-EMP style of prepper in the coming decade.
while i’m sure we’ll see an uptick, i don’t think we’ll see anything like we did with the previous batch of paranoid types.
the modern left is much more about “we need to rely on and help each other” rather than the “im gonna become a survivalist and die alone in the woods.”
and honestly, anyone who thinks going off alone is somehow the intelligent move is fooling themselves and obviously hasn’t thought it through. we know this. we have thousands of years of evidence of this. when we come together we thrive. when we go off in the woods to show how “strong-boot-straps” we are, we die of an infected toe nail or something equally as stupid. that’s why every survivalist disaster “expert” recommends to prepare for disaster with your neighbors in your town to help each other and distribute the load. it’s not rocket surgery.
again, i’m sure we’ll see a slight uptick in every type, but nothing like we did in the past, i think we learned too much from watching their mistakes. we’ve seen too many shows and videos of people with even strong survival skills be absolutely miserable off on in isolation.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I want to have a zero carbon footprint now, not in 50 years. This is just not possible if I have to buy food at the grocery store, take fossil fuel powered transport or just generally participate in the economy of a system which still strives for infinite growth.
Meanwhile, when living in a self sufficient community, it becomes absolutely possible to reach that goal, or even be carbon negative.
Of course collapse is a very real possibility. But collapse is often asynchronous, occurring at different times in different places. In first world countries, I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't even happen within my lifetime, or at all In that case, will I feel bad that I decided to disengage early from a destructive society and live by my own beliefs? I don't believe so.
On the other, we* are not headed for any widespread climate disaster. Yeah, fires, waves of migration, etc, sure. None of that will be worse than things we have deliberately caused ourselves (like the collapse of Libya and its aftermath). It won't even come close to pointless slaughters of first and second world war after which our civilization flourished to new heights.
* I mean the first world we.
Humans moved away from there and now depend on other land. It was 'easy' back then because the other land was empty. But uh, we've ran out of that empty land. As we burn up more land with climate disasters, over farming, and land destruction via building and run off we aren't getting new land back. These are not short term problems like wars. These are problems that last at geologic time scales.
The fall of ancient civilizations is always a great story but I think we have fundamentally changed when we attained systematic knowledge. There will be no great collapse with massive loss of capacity because we put our understanding of the world and our tech into models and then wrote it all down millions of times.
Basically, we know how to build a nuclear reactor, an internal combustion engine, and a computer, we will never forget it, and therefore can always run an industrial civilization.
Primarily, this idea that we've written it all down so we'll never forget it, is not true. Advanced technology requires industrial infrastructure and gobs of tacit knowledge that absolutely can be unlearned at a societal level. It would be quite easy for us to forget how to build a nuclear weapon (much less a nuclear reactor) or a microprocessor. Sure you can learn the conceptual framework and think you know how to do it, but when it comes time to actually pull it off, you're going to have to figure out a lot of the secret sauce again--and that process looks like redevelopment, not just filling in some gaps.
And as that development process will require the coordination of millions of people to set up and maintain the supply chain of materials and logistics, it won't be possible in an unstable society that doesn't have the natural endowment of cheap energy that we've had for the past 100 years.
For one paper that explores this, see "Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons" (1995): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/230699
This is simply not true. There is no secret in this sauce any more. Sure, you would need to relearn how to actually do some things, but the recipes are all there, well documented. Not quite youtube tutorials but we have videos.
This is not a hypothetical. We tested this[1] and it matches my expectations (I studied physics).
Esoteric materials, very precise optics, or spare parts to f22, things that are made in one or two places, we may lose that capacity. But fundamental inventions like flight, electricity, radio, fertilization are gonna stay with us as long as there's some version of us around.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment
But it sounds like we've both made up our minds, and you believe in the immortality of information, and I can see as evident that knowledge has been lost time and time again. We only have to wait awhile to see how it actually turns out.
The reality is probably that in the event of a serious global catastrope, the seriously-prepared people will be fine, the sort-of-prepared people will be one step ahead of 99% of the population, and everyone else will be totally helpless.
If they have an island they happen to be at.
The problem is now you're dealing with the law of large numbers. As an individual your plans are mostly meaningless when the catastrophe happens and you're caught on the 405 unable to escape.
Having a bunker as an individual means nothing if 20 people happen to get together and rise up against you.
This is why off the grid doesn't work. When the grid collapses everyone that you're not really good friends with is now your enemy. To survive you need to have/make new social grids of shared defense.
I think preppers should pour their energy in to helping society prepare, and not just turn their back on the very reason they exist.
p.s. I don't consider taking sensible precautions like having a well-stocked medicine cabinet, fuel in the car, and some food in the freezer "prepping".
Did the Covid pandemic not exist to you?
As long as the important things are taken care of...
This is fairly obvious to anyone who hasn't been completely indoctrinated into the myth of individual success based on hard work - a myth largely promoted to justify the consolidation of wealth and resources into the hands of a small ruling oligarch class in the modern world, see for example Margaret Thatcher's line 'there is no such thing as society' and so on.
That said, it's possible that modern technological developments might be able to create the kind of technology that could allow people to survive quite happily with minimal external inputs of raw materials, via extensive recycling of finished goods back into raw materials, use of incident energy (sunlight and wind), but the problem would be creation of the technological tools and maintenance of those tools, which would almost certainly require high-tech factories operating at scale. If those factories could somehow be miniaturized and also be highly adaptable (still in the realm of science fiction, no backyard chip foundries at present) then concepts like a self-sustaining Martian habitat could become more plausible.
1. Predicting the long-term future is a bizarre and fruitless game. One might even say idiotic. If you're a prepper, and I'm not, prepare to live for a month or three. I do. Whatever the heck happens, within 90 days there will be some new normal. You're not trying to live forever. You're just trying to outlive temporary chaos. At that point, you're going to have to reinvent some kind of life. Who knows what that will be? Not me. Not this guy either.
2. He mentions wi-fi a lot. Gotta have that internet, gotta have that wi-fi, gotta have that bluetooth. I kinda doubt it. Can you go a day without internet? How about power? Just turn all of your stuff off. Most folks should be able to learn how to live like normal humans have for eons. There are various hobbies and occupations where you spend a lot of time without power or plumbing: scouts, infantry, etc. These people know what it's like. There are enough of them that the species itself will do just fine no matter what sort of apocalypse you can dream up.
It seems the problem with this essay, like so many pieces of media I consume daily, is the desire for _certainty_. Here's problem A. Here's exactly what it means, what causes it, and so on. And you have to do B to fix it. (Or, in this case, there is no B)
Disasters are chaotic and uncertain. Assuming climate disasters, moreso. But that both means that things are going to be tougher _and_ you can't have-wave your way around predicting how it all will turn out. Are many people who think themselves preppers disillusioned about their actual skills and their ability to adapt? Absolutely! But that's a one sentence essay. What's the fun in writing and commenting about that?
Apologies to the author. I believe there is a good one sentence thesis in there somewhere. But this sucked. I wish you better in the future.
There are countless examples of people living off the grid, even for their entire lives.
I’ve lived off the grid. It’s hard, you’re always exhausted you’re constantly having to work to get food and fire. And if you’re in the wilderness, you have to do all that while trying not to injure yourself because help won’t come. This means “going around” obstacles instead of trying to negotiate them. Often, “going around” means additional miles, which means additional calories, which means additional work.
Perhaps they should have made a stronger point about the futility of millions of people doing it:
- First, millions of people wouldn’t want to do it. They want comfort. They want media and social media and consumerism.
- Resources are more scarce, because people must produce them.
- People are soft, used to the comforts that civilization provides them.
- People are untrained and often terrified of nature, that very thing they are an apart of.
Edit: it seems prudent to point out that normal people get their kicks by just going camping. If you are considering going to live in the woods, try starting with short, two-day camping trips and gradually increase the days so that you can take notes and improve your skills and equipment.
But if we are talking about post iron age tech, you eventually gonna need to join a production chain of some sort, you can't just find bog iron, smelt it and hammer into an axe by yourself, while also dealing with other topics. You eventually need a community, hence a grid
I think a lot of people shit on self-sufficiency due to their own inadequacies.
It will not be fun. It will not be easy. But it’s doable. No, you will not be using metal tools or having solar power.
Funny thing about your “you can’t just find…” comment though: when I went to live in the woods, I went deep, miles from any highway and much farther to any town. And I always found signs of civilization in the middle of nowhere especially tons of metal scrap and ancient iron and usable plastic bottles.
There is enough debris from civilization all over the planet for scavenging. It makes things a lot easier but you can get by without them.
I even found an intact toilet once, in an area far away from even logging roads. My best guess is somebody with an aircraft may have wanted to play a daft joke?
The other strange thing were these random staircases in the woods in the middle of nowhere…
PS: If anyone reading this is thinking of leaving civilization, I suggest you start with short trips beginning with a couple days and then gradually working them up to longer periods. This will:
1. Allow you to see if it’s really for you or if just doing more camping will suffice.
2. Will show you your skill and equipment discrepancies and allow you to correct them before the next trip in a less life-threatening manner.
My first trip was an entire month and it was rough.
But you are onto something, scrapping things from the outskirts of society might be something you would be able to do, albeit unless we are talking about total societal collapse this would still put you on the production chain, on the far end of it, as a scrapper
You can certainly live primitively in nature without the scraps of civilization. Again, it isn’t fun and it will be much harder.
Remember, total societal collapse is going to result in most, and perhaps the mass majority of humans, dying off. If not from the collapse, then from the realities of shifting into primitive living unprepared (including but not limited to: finding enough calories, disease, famine, etc).
If you have kids, like me, you and your family will probably be dead. I figure I will be. But my threat models are more concerned with pandemics, natural disasters, and loss of power/water/gas/law, so I focus on those. And yeah, all of those threats have occurred at this point (I am in a rural area) :-/
Counter-citation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o we could argue about how useful the output is but this is a clear demonstration that one can, in fact, do it alone.
Also note that he is only producing cast iron at the moment, which is not particularly useful for impact tools (like axes, pickaxes or weapons). Getting the iron sufficiently hot for smithing is very hard to do, and require a lot of infrastructure non existent on nature.
But indeed I did find a toilet and several balls (tennis, baseball, etc) miles from any road. Presumably tossed from aircraft for $reasons.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3kd90k/im_a_search...
Personally I would equate this to one of the most comforting aspects to believing in God, that it's not just some meaningless random luck of the draw but instead there was agency somewhere. War stories are often similar, the new recruits think that they are special and their skill and strength will keep them alive. They then learn it is dumb luck who lives and dies, just luck whether that bullet, shrapnel, or artillery shell misses you or not
One day you have a medical emergency and poof, you're gone, possibly going through a lot of pain, because of a condition that would have been recoverable.
Never went through any emergency myself and largely going through life without any drug but looking around me, I consider myself crazy lucky.
That's what I would be afraid the most about living off grid and the first reason I think it can't last long for many (most?). What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah sure, if an area turns into a disaster zone, many conveniences of modern life (water supply, power grid, supermarkets, gas stations, internet) may become unavailable for X amount of time.
But all the materials & gear that modern society produced, doesn't just disappear. Houses would still be standing, the hand tools in your toolbox would still be there & do the same they did 20y ago, the groceries in your pantry are still there & your clothes would still be hanging in the closet. Your smartphone keeps working as long as you have any way to charge it.
That 'installed base' of modern stuff can go a long way in dealing with challenges as they come. Especially if (for example through hiking / camping trips) you have learned to get by with limited gear. Eg. a swiss pocket knive serves many purposes & lasts for decades.
It's just that many people are NOT prepared for modern conveniences falling away for extended time. One example - ask 'random' people: "If tap water goes out, how long until you run out of drinking water? And what you do if tap water wouldn't come back at all?". And be amazed at the answers.
I mean, that's #1 survival material after breathable air. And neither difficult or expensive to get a grip on.
What's that saying again? "When supplies break down, a modern city is just 3 days away from large scale riots & looting".
If anything, it's people being unprepared or panicing that'll get them killed. Not so much whatever disaster that struck them.
They are used to living within environments with all the modern conveniences. They can’t imagine anything different, when in fact your average farmer and his family have stuff like outhouses, manual wells, self-made tools and MacGyver fixes and hacks. While they’re not “truly” off grid, they’re effectively partially off grid and would totally do fine.
As a white collar knowledge worker I try to soak in their blue collar skills and wisdom whenever I can. And in turn try to evolve my white collar skills into something that would be useful to them (eg being competent with a variety of radios and other stuff) if the SHTF.
Conversely, I live 20 minutes outside of town. I work in town, but just on the edge of town, so I'll go months without having to go into town.
It’s weird and neat when I go into “downtown” and I’m overwhelmed with the noise and activity and new modernities (the latest being these new electric scooters people rent and ride around and then just leave wherever. Before that was Uber. I knew these existed but it was weird to see them in person. Though I’ve still never used Uber myself.)
In my experience, they are just as all over the place as any other group.
No one is truly living off the grid.
This has been my thought as well, but I gotta say... I do know of a place where the owner put in absolutely millions into an eco lodge and while a "prepper cabin" wasn't his goal, it really is a great example of how one could live in a degree of comfort off grid. Probably their biggest weakness is they rely a lot on their diesel generator. But, they do have some solar, they have a good greenhouse, access to hunting, a private airfield, access to a river for both fishing and water, in an area with mild(ish) winters... so guess I'm saying that if you've got absolutely wheelbarrows full of cash, it can be done... but that's not the case with the vast majority of prepper types I've seen.
Sounds great, I'll go round up the boys and it'll be ours by sundown. I think a lot of the "it can be done" commenters didn't read to the end: it can be done when you're the only one doing it. Not so much when 8 billion people are doing it. See also: roving gangs from any Fallout game.
This is the thing. If you are using "equipment" then you are only off the grid temporarily. Sooner or later all that stuff you bought at REI is going to fail. Then what?
There are countless example of individuals doing it, because the rest of society is in the business of not caring what they are up to.
This paradigm completely fails when if those countless millions are forced without the grid. Once this happens those that will survive are not the ones that survive off the grid, but those that marshal human resources and create a new grid.
Obviously people can live in this way if pressed, but what kind of life is it? Humans are social creatures, and we strive for more than mere survival.
If our current society somehow "collapses," we will immediately form new societies that will work to pick up the pieces, and there will be strength in numbers.
It is fundamental to our nature.
And not the "camping" that involves pulling an air-conditioned trailer to a paved campsite with power and water, a fire ring, and a shower and toilet 50 yards away, and a convenience store with ice and beer at the camp entrance.
Real camping is not that fun, unless you're a kid in the boy scouts. At least for me. It's hot and sweaty and dirty and uncomfortable.
As mentioned in the article, American homesteaders were settling into so-called wilderness for $0 but which had been cleared of the people already living there. Few homesteaders lived more than a day's ride away from a military fort.
Even "mountain men" who rejected colonizer society went into the wilds fully equipped with its technology, and would frequently cycle out for supplies.
Furthermore, a lot of the land they had occupied was already partially cultivated and developed by indigenous tribes. And those indigenous tribes were trading with the colonists - and they had to, because their traditional ways of life were no longer possible, or they had been pushed off the lands where they used to live.
Uncontacted indigenous tribes are probably the last ones to truly live "off the grid". But, maybe not. They also live in a network of shared resources. They rely heavily on a small society of a hundred or so people.
The number of single families and individuals who have truly "lived off the grid"? Without significant support from larger groups, including common defense, trading, scavenging, and theft? For their whole lives? And prospered? I would guess there has never been anybody who accomplished that, from the beginning of time.
Do you have enough chickens to eat the bugs faster than they eat your crops?
Do you have enough other food not to have to eat all the chickens?
Do you have enough materials to build pens to keep the predators from eating all your chickens?
But yeah, to the GP point, chickens are actually pretty good hunters.
> He was helpless.
Sounds a bit just so? In my arguably not prepared home just in my sight line I see 4 different ways to improvise implements to open a can if I need to. Not counting the two manual can openers I have for just that task.
Can openers were invented way after cans were invented. People just used chisels.
If the lack of electricity makes you helpless you were helpless even with electricity.
Wait... what kind of "prepper" is that ?
it describes a world where the national governments have lost control and people are fighting for resources.
it's a rather dystopian view, but it points out that in addition to living off the grid, which is difficult enough you will have to face others who want what you have.
only law and order and a strong community can protect you from that.
Back in the days of the pre-Y2K "crisis" hype, I lived in Colorado and was young and more impressionable, I started developing a prepper mentality. While I was pretty sure that we'd get through that, it seemed wise to plan for the future.
So, I fell into a group of like-minded people, and joined in conversations about what would be needed to survive in a post-collapse environment. We honed our hunting skills, pre-stocked camping backpacks, and formulated plans to flee into the mountains in case things went south. We also started looking into what it would take to buy a piece of property and build out a bunker, stock it, and prepare for whatever was to come.
My enthusiasm for this individual prepper mentality diminished quite rapidly due to a single conversation. I was in a "seminar" where we were all discussing the advantages/disadvantages of prebuilt bunkers and how to disguise them on the property. During a break, when I asked one of the "consultants" what his plan was. He took me aside, looked around so that nobody would hear him and said something along the lines of: "Kid, don't waste your time with this hiding in a bunker nonsense. Me and my kids and grandkids live up in the mountains and know where a lot of these preppers have their stashes. If things go south, we're just going use our bulldozers and diggers to dig them out and take what they've stored away for us. They won't be able to outlast a group of us."
I looked at him like he was Judas, but he then said. "Don't think I'm the only one in this business who's planning to do this, we'll gladly take their money and build whatever bunker they want, but at the end of the day, if things go to hell, we'll use whatever means we have to survive, and so if that means cracking open these stashes - so be it".
Then he said "the key to survival is being part of a community you can rely on. Ideally, this is your family as they're much less likely to betray you, but a good like-minded church group could also work".
I was a bit stunned by this, but it crystalized in my mind then, that the individual "prepper" was eventually doomed to fail at some point and it was pretty useless to prepare for it.
So, yes, I now agree that the best approach to "prepare" is to work to strengthen your community.
Any prepper that is an individual and thinks they have it made is just an egotistical disaster in the making.
A few people working together can take any prepper out simply by being patient. If the person is in a bunker then you just poison the bunker. Otherwise you just wait till they come out and pick them off one by one.
For example, with my lifestyle without a car, a fridge, A/C, hot water, heating, TV, €10/mo electricity, without most things people have, my footprint is 5% of the average person. If more people would go in this direction, it would solve all problems
"people gonna attack us? IM PREPARED!" you are not. You know what's better than prepping? Fighting tooth and nail to make sure the grid is rock solid and free of corruption. And every day is a battle, because there's always a schemer who will try to get in and hoard for himself. If preppers got depressed from thinking how things are in collapse, and how they need to improve things, as a society, in order to improve things for themselves, they'd actually maybe act.
I see preppers as poor "throw money at it" rich folks. Rich folks don't care if the education system isn't working, they can find a private school which costs $100k a month to give their child the best education possible. They can get a bunker professionally built so if anything happens their thick doors and automated guns will take care of any people trying to get in. They can hire a chef and have the best food possible in an ideal diet to keep them happy, sated, and healthy all their lives while most of us have to suffer from over-sugared foods and affordable food being incredibly poor in nutrients
Preppers are similar, they don't want to solve societal problems, they want to feel like _THEY_ are insulated from societal problems because they are "off the grid". But they are not. No living up in the mountain is gonna protect you from a bad harvest, or from a crop disease, or from a fucking splinter. I love something someone said recently "if you're in a zombie apocalypse, you won't get to have the cool hair, the cool bat, and go smash zombie brains. You'll likely die from diarrhea pretty early on."
Everyone loves to think about how they'll handle attackers, but never spend much time thinking about the lack of sleep and how that'll severely impact them. Never how much isolation will destroy so much of their mental state.
Popular media influence of lone wolves surviving and other such content can really prevent people from being aware of the realities of such collapse I suppose!
See: Heavily armed Japanese soldiers on Pacific islands post WWII.
It's a funny old thread in any case - I'm a >60 year old Australian who grew up in the Kimberley region in a minority amoungst people who truly lived off the grid and had done so for tens of thousands of years.
The people that raised me were born in the 1920s and 1930s and many had survived the collapse of European society in South East Asia and Japanese internment, some having formed long range insurrgency groups to spy on | terrorise Japanese soldiers and coordinate long range bombing of oil extraction points and depots through SE Asia (all a bit before I was born, obviously).
I'm related to people that charged on horse back belt fed machine guns across four miles armed with bayonets.
They 'won'[1]
Where I am now my neighbour shoots ULR at 24 inch targets 5,000 yards distant [2]
US preppers are pretty funny.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Beersheba_(1917)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE
It seems more likely to me that they have a realistic awareness of their level of influence over society, which is to say effectively none.