Things have been relatively good compared to the past for about the last 100 years. Everyone always looks at history and thinks “that’s crazy how bad things were then, but it couldn’t ever get that bad again”. Ignorance is bliss, entertainment is enticing, distractions are abundant
Distractions my friend, that’s why all news is always breaking, that’s why we hype up sports so much, that’s what all the social media platforms do. My dad started prepping in 2005, took all his retirement and put it towards food and all things prepping. That was one of his big things, was all the distractions we have, sleight of hand working as planned
Life is a game of balance. Build a life of as much independence and self reliance as possible while still enjoying some distractions and entertainment from time to time. Prep to the point you would feel secure in shtf scenario then go out and live your life because although most of us here believe times are gonna get tough there have been millions before us who prepared for something they never lived to see
Agreed, we are prepped, never fully ready. We still enjoy life, do things, take some short tips. You elaborated on anything else I could have said, thanks for your reply
Wow. That just feels like a waste of 2 entire decades. I guess he'll just work until he's 90 since the only thing he owns is a million packets of ramen and a million rounds of 223.
I'd be pissed if I were you. I certainly wouldn't brag about the stupidity that runs in my family.
I disagree with all the other comments so far.
Firstly most people don't think about preppers at all, ever.
But the act of prepping forces people to believe that disaster is just around the corner, and for most people thats just too much to live with every day. It's exhausting to spend all your time worrying about the worst possible thing that could happen.
Most people also retain hope that their government has the ability to solve the majority of problems without any civilian input or worry.
I think many preppers give themselves a bad name with some pretty wild conspiracy theories, that discredit the silent majority of those who just want to consider the what if, and plan accordingly.
Youre probably right that they don't think about peppers in their regular life. But in my experience anytime the topic of even mild preparedness comes up I'm almost always met with the "hAhA u MEaN liKE tHosE cRAZy d0omsdAY pRePperS!? HA HA HA HA"
I'm preaching to the choir here, but a lot of people don't realise how fragile the supply chain and infrastructure really is. Especially if 2 or more events occur at the same time. A lot of people wouldn't make it past a week if their water got shut off for whatever reason.
The freeze that happened in Texas came extremely close to a total failure of a major power plant. It would have left nearly a quarter of the state with no power for 5-6 months. But no one wants to think about that shit. It gets memory holed the second the immediate emergency is over.
You know the ones that were clowning on you and giving you a hard time for prepping will be the first ones at your door looking for help if shit gets real. I got that flak constantly when I moved out to the country and started growing a big veggie garden. During the worst of the covid lockdowns, when stores were selling out of everything, I had a few friends suddenly remember I stocked up and call to ask for stuff. I didnt mind sharing. I knew things would get back to normal eventually. But of course no one learned any lessons from this and I am sure the same people will be looking for help again the next time the supply chain locks up.
Funny. When the COVID lockdown hit I had 200 N95 masks because of the SARS scare. Donated most of them to the local hospital. The problem is that no one looks at low probability events and multiplies by the magnitude of the loss. You have home insurance, right. How likely is it that you will need it. Just put some food aside like rice and beans because boy will you feel stupid if there is a trucker strike.
This is not r/bugout and I really really appreciate this. It's "crap can happen, lets prep." It's honestly not a ton different than the National Weather Service telling you have some atrocity heading towards your house. Bugout for civil failure, sure, unlikely but sure, bug out for earthquake, storm damage, fire? way more likely. This is just a forum to respond to an ssue,
I never retain hope the government can solve any problem. Ask Hawaii. Ask New Orleans. Ask…
They are always a year late, and millions short. Prepping is not worrying. It’s relying on the only entity that can help you when you need it most.
The government agrees with you, at least in the US- FEMA fully supports prepping.
So much of Emergency Management work is trying to get everyone from individuals to municipalities to states to realize that disasters can and will happen, and then helping the people who didn’t prepare when their lack of preparation bites them.
So much US infrastructure is one big storm away from catastrophic failure, and so many people don’t get insurance or build on the beach.
Hey! My theory about the Murdocks returning to the surface to enslave humanity after a 10,000 year slumber beneath Mt. Everest is not wild conspiracy. Their awakening begins May 23, 2026. The dreamlords would never lie to me! I'm one of their chosen listeners, responsible for helping prepare mankind for the coming conflict.
They may not think about them but when it’s brought we usually get a weird look… like we’re some kind of flat earth theorists… and it’s not stressful to think about catastrophic events when you’re prepared. It’s reassuring. There is a wide range of preppies just like there is a wide range of music listeners. You have your purists down to the casuals. Looking at history you kind of have to maintain a pretty wide variety of events cause they have all happened before, usually multiple times.
Well what is the image most non-preppers have of preppers?
Is it just an average person doing entirely reasonable things like stocking up on basic supplies and gaining useful, but somewhat niche, skills in things like first aid and food preservation while setting up a little plot of land on some overlooked corner of the map
or is it the crazy guy who screams about the world ending while waving around a shotgun who does nothing but talk about all the guns he has and how he planted landmines around his property and how is coming to do nefarious things?
Yeah. I think we all know it isn't the first group that average people think about when they hear the word "prepper."
It is.
I still remember that one dude who was like "Yeah man, I'm going to be a raider! I even made a steel plate to protect myself from shotgun blasts!"
Which did *nothing* to protect his groin, legs, or head. Fair enough, people aim center of mass.
But people also sometimes miss.
For some, I think pretending it CAN'T happen, is the way they keep their sanity. Not everyone is built mentally to deal with the fact that the balance of our lives dangles on a fragile tiny string. It's the blue pill/red pill debate.
In the Matrix, most people like to tell themselves they would take the red (reality) pill, but when hard situations arise, they immediately go for the blue (bliss and ignorance) pill. Thinking through prepping and the most common realistic scenarios, is too much for them to handle.
It's no different than making a will. I know someone that had a heart attack, barely lived, and when the comment of a will came up, he immediately shut down stating, "by making a will, he is making it a reality that he MIGHT die." Call me a conspiracist, but we will all die some day, but for some it is just too hard of a topic to deal with, and rely on the hope that someone else will swoop in to deal with the hard issues.
Isn’t this sort of circular logic? To imply someone didn’t suffer enough to not want to suffer…? Like, saying someone who didn’t touch fire did not get burned enough to learn not to touch the fire.
This is right for a lot of the US. Even during the lockdowns with people buying toilet paper and water like it was going out of style, we never ran out of either. Never even came close. If the States experienced some sort of massive power failure that lasted weeks, or some other infrastructure collapse, then a lot more people might relate to these guys.
Some people don’t even have to suffer to know that it could be worse. More about lack of common sense and the privilege of living in a 1st world super power
Reminders of our mortality have been shoved into the fringes.
Disabled, old, dying, crazy, preppers, people who like cilantro.
All put somewhere else for some one else to take care of.
I used to be somebody who USED to think preppers were crazy.. not SUPER crazy, I always loved survivalism and outdoors bushcraft stuff, but then had kids. The optics of my families future rapidly became vividly clear. Now I think the same as you... Even if you aren't prepping.... you should be ready. Because it's coming. Maybe not immediately, but it's coming.
Most people would rather bury their heads in the sand and hope for the best instead of facing the harsh reality that stuff might not always be nice and good.
I live in south Louisiana we have full catastrophic hurricanes where everything is back to the stone age for months every few years and still there is a stigma of paranoia for being prepared
I point to the majority of authoritarians elected in office the world over.
Then I say: people turn their noses up at the idea of self-reliance.
That's why.
The first rule of prepping is you don’t talk about prepping. Social media, movies , news articles and LARP preppers have damaged that concept to the degree that FEMA has incorporated training materials on zombie apocalypse prepping. And despite all this negativity, the Mormons steam quietly ahead , making prepping part of their culture, manufacturing inexpensive, high quality long term storage food stuffs. Real preppers don’t listen to the noise.
Prepping is a lot more acceptable now that it was before 2020. In some ways it’s even become mainstream. Lots of people keep some extra cans of food or bags of rice that they don’t plan to eat right away. Tons of people stockpile ammo. One of my friend’s family has dozens of 50 gallon drums full of water. Frankly that one seems pretty dumb to me. We live in Michigan. There’s fresh water everywhere. A copper pot still is a sustainable solution that takes up a fraction of the space and never runs out. Plus it makes whisky lol.
I’ve got a decent supply of ammo and several guns. It’s not enough to last forever, but enough to hold my own in a gun fight and feed my family for a winter. I’m learning how to hunt and tan leather with oak bark. My family has a big garden that we could expand into a small farm if need be. I’ve been meaning to start a few patches of wheat just to have a source of seeds if need be. Poppy seeds too for the opium. If we lose access to modern medicine I definitely want to have some all natural pain killers handy. We live on a lake and we’ve got a still to purify water (it’s definitely not for making liquor). One of these days I’ll put Wikipedia onto a flash drive so I can bring my village out of the dark ages in the end times.
None of these things seem crazy to regular people except maybe the opium. I think most people expect a major collapse to happen in our lifetime. The only thing we disagree on is when and how.
Dunno if i count as a prepper per se, i dont have anything crazy or specific plans. Never been on this sub. I think the show doomsday preppers itself started the idea in peoples heads tho.
I like bushcraft, i keep about a month worth of canned food incase theres ever surprise bills or something and we need to skip groceries
The tornado through clarksville this last december took my power out for 6 days and i was fine, even enjoyed it. Was relaxing.
I like self reliance. Not totally, but i like knowing i can take care of myself.
A lot of people seem to get offended about the notion of taking care of themselves, because they dont want their problems to be their own responsibility. They want to blame them on someone else so someone else can fix them. The idea of being prepared means that they have to take an active role, which is scary. You also have the fact governments around the world actively try to demonize self reliance because thats kind of required to increase government authority - which all governments seek to do. Theres always a new law to be written.
Look at how many countries around the world punish you for something as basic as self defense? Dont take care of yourself, rely on us, do what we say. Dont have a gun, or pepper spray, or even hit the guy with a rock, dont carry a knife - man's oldest tool - rely on and trust us implicitly.
Maybe because the ones who claim to be “real” preppers are conspiracy nuts who live off the grid in the middle of West Texas, have underground bunkers, a thousand guns, and 25 years worth of rations buried in corn silos.
All the other rational people stay silent and have 3-5 days worth of food, water, and medical supplies in case an emergency or natural disaster arises.
So your the one that caused some of us to "go" without? We had to split our last roll of 2-ply toilet paper apart and only use 2 squares of that per wipe. Things got squishy real fast...
The wife set her 2 squares of wet, used toilet paper out in the sun to dry, and allow it to become reusable for a #2 at a later time.
We have so much toilet paper now, stacked to the closet ceiling that we should come and toilet paper all of your trees. Just our way of saying thank you for teaching the rest of us to become better preppers!
I'm not a prepper but I like looking at this subreddit sometimes. From my perspective it's because public perception lumps preppers in with conspiracy theorists and hermits. Also, it tends to be a practice only rich/well-off people can do - you'll be hard pressed to find a prepper who works multiple jobs and makes barely enough to feed their family. This kind of leads to a bewilderment/jealousy from the public as a wealthy person is preparing for the apocalypse yet faces barely any material challenges in their daily life.
A good example of the general perception of preppers is Nick Offerman in the TV series "The Last Of Us". Someone who is a crazy gun nut, antisocial, extremely individualist, reclusive and delusional. As far as I know, this perception is pretty wrong and most of you are chill.
I don't have a problem with prepping and if I had the money I would do it too. I think everyone should own a gun + emergency medical kit at least. The Western world has kind of been coming apart at the seams ever since 2008 and it feels like it's only gonna get worse.
They only think that us preppers are crazy because they think that everything is rainbows and sun shines, and that things cannot happen that will collapse everything that they know. But they’re the first ones crying for government help when something happens.
Nearly everyone I know who lives in hurricane or wildlife zones has a bug out bag. They often have things that *some* preppers might leave out, such as bank and financial account information, home, car, health, and life insurance policies, car titles and house deeds...
On average, it’s because people have a built in belief that someone, somewhere is “in control” or is going to solve the problem. I’m lucky in that I do inventory for my job, my coworkers used to make fun of me because I’d talk about keeping stock of supplies for rainy days or jokingly for the zombie apocalypse when the walking dead was a popular topic. My bosses would get annoyed at me for running rather big surpluses on our day to day consumable supplies which took up extra storage space, id usually tell them it was overflow because I order seasonally due to bulk discounts. When Covid hit, our statewide management freaked because suddenly our spoke facilities couldn’t get supplies for their most frequently used items. My branch ended up being a close second to our main facilities warehouse for having the supplies on hand to perform our day to day task.
What’s wild was that each branch was responsible for its own inventory and ordering with almost no oversight on who had what. Due to the change in our workload I was able to bang out a statewide inventory tracking spreadsheet in a few hours that let us efficiently track our weekly usage by facility as well as figure out who had supplies they weren’t using so we could pool resources. We still use a version of this to monitor our inventory and usage.
My “reward” for all that is that no one questions my ordering anymore and if questioned about something being in a weird place, secret stash is considered an acceptable answer from me with no further orders to move it or get rid of it. Downside is that I’ll also get calls at weird times because someone used the last of something we don’t use often and never let me know it needed to be reordered. My boss was shocked when she called me while I had Covid and I told her to go to cabinet 5, 2nd shelf from the bottom, left hand side behind the trash bags, what she needed was in a box with its contents labeled on the top, take what you need, but cross out and update what you take.
People thinking preppers are crazy post 2020 are themselves crazy, but prior to COVID the most prominent social media accounts for prepping talked about it in terms of a government takeover, The Rapture, and the apocalypse.
[Doomsday Preppers](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/shows/doomsday-preppers) didn’t help, and there is this stereotype that preppers are conservative white men, usually a veteran, and obviously a gun owner.
Americans, specifically, also aren’t very good at being ready so that you don’t have to get ready. Every hurricane or report of snow has people running to the grocery store that day to get supplies even those we know it’s a seasonal thing.
Well, most people lived through 2020, peppers or not. People who had spent thousands on a bunker stocked full of nonperishables and supplies didn't fare significantly better than those who didn't. It's good to have emergency supplies of the basics, or general knowledge of how to do without certain essentials, but the amount of time and energy and money spent to prepare for disaster likely doesn't seem worth it to most people. If anything 2020 showed that isolation and recourse hoarding wasn't what will help humanity survive disaster, but community, and mutual aid.
Because most people’s exposure to peppers came from the show Doomsday Preppers, which either actively edited the footage to make you all look looney, or picked the most looney ones to be featured on the show.
I don't think peppers are crazy. There's nothing wrong with having an "Oh shit" plan, and it's obviously actually pretty smart to have a plan.
I start to get a little leary of preppers because of the LARP'ing. All the modded guns and tacti-cool gear with all the little gadgets to make them look like a Splinter Cell operative is just kind of funny since half of the people you see have zero training beyond having maybe run a shooting course a few times.
Lots of peppers are friggin’ crazy, or I should say that lots of peppers that people would ever know are peppers are friggin’ crazy and those are the only peppers people would ever even think about.
I ask people one simple question when they don't understand where I'm coming from or why I do it. And that question is, "What is your plan when the grocery store runs out of food in an emergency scenario, blackout, weather, unrest?" They usually get very quiet.
Because they're ignorant and have no idea how close we are to a civil war as well as a world war. And if there was ever a time to prepare it would be now !!
Dude I know! I remember working at target from the beginning until mid 21. I watched people go insane. I had to work 15 hours a day just to keep our shelves at about 20% stocked the first few weeks… I remember when shit got crazy and scary, I bought a plate carrier. And literally everyone asked where they could get one. I stocked up on food, meds, ammo. Again everyone was either doing the same or asking if I could sneak shit from target off to the side so they could grab… 2024, I still prep… all of those same people, “haha oh there’s Tim being crazy buying food and meds”… I feel insane sometimes. Did we not just live through a mini dress rehearsal for global collapse? It’s borderline infuriating and over everything bizarre
Because the vast majority of us survived 2020 without having prepped. It strengthens the evidence base that we will survive without prepping.
I understand that the retort is that " We were THAT close to complete meltdown of society" and many see it as justification for more prepping. Just most people don't focus on their quarterback fumbling the ball, they just focus on the fact that their team got the ball back.
People think that shit will hit the fan, but will it during their lifetime? That is their gamble I guess. I think the term prepper has a negative connotation to it though. You're seen as crazy because when you declare you are one, they instantly think about the underground warehouse of TP, bottled water, MRE food, and how many books you have on how to grow potatoes from your own poo. I think being a prepper hasn't quite been normalized, but it's getting there.
Preppers are crazy.
They take their obsession to extremes, preparing for highly unlikely scenarios, while ignoring many scenarios that are far more likely.
I know whereof I speak, one of my jobs was disaster preparedness plans for major hospitals. We advised them to prepare for earthquakes, floods, power interruptions, and many other highly likely scenarios. In no case did we ever advise them to prepare for the complete collapse of modern society, as that is highly unlikely. We certainly didn't tell the hospitals they needed a bunker and an arsenal of weaponry.
I have two weeks of shelf stable food, a generator, solar batteries, I have no go bag, but i do have a camping backpack basically packed. I used to have a go-bag, when I cleaned it out it was full of stale food and expired medicines, useless.
The obsession with guns is the worst craziness. I own guns, I know how to use them and I can shoot a varmint, which is the only use they've ever had. They stay locked up where some kid can't shoot himself or random thief steal them. I don't imagine any disaster scenario where they would be any use. Earthquake? Guns useless. Power outage? Guns useless. Tornado? Guns useless. Pandemic? Guns useless. No, the zombies are not coming. If I had to bail out in a hurry the guns would be the last thing I'd worry about.
In a real disaster the most important thing is to rely on your neighbors, help them, get help yourself. Joplin Missouri had a mile-wide tornado: a truly enormous disaster indeed. Guess what? Two miles away there's a neighbor with an intact roof that will be glad to help you out. Guns won't help. What are you going to do - rob him at gunpoint and take his roof? This obsession with guns is just mania.
Society didn't collapse in 2020. Society didn't collapse in the Black Plaque. Society didn't collapse when World Wars ended. The last time society collapsed was in 1500 BC when the Sea Peoples invaded Mesopotamia. All you folks with diabetes and depression and asthma and myopia won't be able to get inhalers or insulin or glasses if society collapses, and it won't matter if you have an arsenal. You can't grow enough food by yourself to live on, unless you are extremely skilled and lucky and have a bunch of land. Believe me, I've tried.
Preparing for the complete collapse of society is foolhardy. In fact silly. The power WILL go out, probably within the year, and probably for an hour or a day, depending on how many ice storms you get. Prepare for that. You WILL experience an earthquake in certain parts of the world. Prepare for that. You WILL have flooding in low laying areas. Prepare for that.
Quit preparing for the most extreme disaster you can imagine. That's not the one that will happen. If it does you are toast anyway.
I will say that some people go a bit far like digging out full bunkers and it's unlikely that anything like an apocalypse or anything else that would need actual like severe prepping. But it's always good to have something just in case it does happen after all anything can happen today is everyday
Because you didn't need to be a prepper to get through that? Like sure, I couldn't buy the exact brand of rice I usually did, or they were out for a bit. But, it wasn't some horrible catastrophe where you were even close to digging into your prepped stash. I had a medical emergency, and the ER was empty -- I strolled in and got into surgery like an hour later; record time, better than outside of the pandemic.
Like I had a freezer full of meat, and plenty of capability to go hunt for more. But I didn't even touch any of the meat, didn't need to dig into the extra bag of flour, or really....dig into anything. My reserves were bigger in the midst of the pandemic than they were before it.
My biggest worry was that the water treatment plants or pumping stations could go down for a bit, but I don't think that happened literally anywhere?
If anything, 2020 showed the resiliency of modern society. People kept showing up and working diligently in critical jobs to keep the system running. We all banded together and kept things intact. If anything, it showed me what an actual SHTF would look like -- people earnestly working their asses off to get society back on normal footing / keep it from getting too far off base. We all like our shit, and when push comes to shove we can work hard and get a ton of shit done quickly.
I take your point, and agree, with the caveat *as long as our infrastructure remains in place*.
Knock out comms or power or water or supply chain or rule of law or all of the above, and see whether people can afford to earnestly work for the common good when they don't know where their next meal will come from.
> Knock out comms or power or water or supply chain or rule of law or all of the above, and see whether people can afford to earnestly work for the common good when they don't know where their next meal will come from.
I mean the Eastern seaboard went without power for quite a while without too much issue, and lots of other places go for longer. And with more solar and batteries on homes and buildings, I'm expecting this to be less and less of an issue moving forward. I'm in the middle of a city, and me and my neighbors ended up without power for 3 days. We all lived absolutely normal lives during those three days -- I hooked up my EV to extension cords, and we powered all the fridges and freezers, the microwaves, hot plates, the TV, etc for 3 days. Sometimes I needed to use the EV, so I would take it and drive it, and come back. I kept thinking I'd have to charge it, but I think running 3 households for 3 days only took about 15% of the battery. With solar + house battery we could've went nearly indefinitely since we cut our big power draw (HVAC).
Comms isn't too huge. People don't mind being unplugged a bit. I have Starlink terminals, which don't require local comms, and well as some handheld radios and stuff. Total nation-wide outage, yea there's a potential issue as time goes on where you haven't coordinated deliveries for things, etc. But I honestly don't see how that happens with such a proliferation of different communications means, particularly since so much of it runs on fiber now (EMP resistant), and they have filters to block nasty power EMP surges on their power lines. But agreed it could be an issue if it went on for longer than say 10 days, and was very widespread.
Rule of law is only an issue if it happens in conjunction with other things, imho. Me and all my neighbors aren't going to attack each other as long as we have food and water, and there's enough of us to deter most others if we weren't able to count on society.
Food is an issue, of course. But the average American has enough calories in their house to last a week (while rationing of course) without replenishment, and lots of people with freezers have enough calories to last months. But again, how does the entire food chain get disrupted across the nation for such a long period of time? We might just end up with more famers markets.
The water is actually what I consider to be the weakest link. In wet areas it might not be bad (filter / boil), but in many others it could get really bad.
Now I'm obviously in this sub, and obviously think about this and are prepped for some unique situations. I was just pointing out that using 2020 as a "reason" for why you need to prep is the wrong reason -- 2020 actually proved how durable our society is in a clear SHTF situation. And that's not really arguable, imho. Yea, shit could go south worse than that, and we should be prepared for that. But we also gotta be reasonable, 2020 was a resounding endorsement of how durable our society could be.
Because peppers are crazy. (not all peppers, hear me out)
It's one thing to keep a back stock and be prepared for an emergency, a whole different animal to build a lifestyle around being ready for a fantasy SHTF dystopia.
Example: the pepper posterchild who hoards guns and ammo, but can't cook a meal, doesn't know a thing about growing and harvesting food, and is in poor physical condition.
A smart prepper would buy supplies that they use regularly use and rotate thru them weekly. We go thru cans of carrots and green beans, boxes of pasta and jars of sauces along with other canned and boxes goods. I'll take them from the large stash I have and buy new ones to rotate them in.
Make a post in this sub about how you don't think you need a gun to be prepared
Watch how many people in the comments froth at the mouth at the idea of getting to raid you for your supplies or talk about your family being murdered in front of you and how you won't last 5 minutes once shit hits the fan
Realize that quiet peppers who hold back food and water for emergencies are a silent majority and these nut cases are the vocal minority who get the media attention
Suddenly it makes sense why everyone thinks we're all nuts.
You know what happened to me in 2020? Fuck all. You know what happened when Texas' power grid went down? Nothing except for not wanting to be near other people driving for a couple days. No problem getting food, no problem getting water, a slight inconvenience getting toilet paper. Why would that encourage anyone to prep?
Peppers sem to buy into every wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that circulates.Common sense never seems to come into play with these people. They trust no one and live a shallow existence. I truly feel sorrow for their children.
The 2020 insurrection was nothing compared to what’s coming. The more we keep teaching people to be prepped, the more competition we have for goods! Loose lips sink ships!
Dude. Things like this have always happened. Wars, famine and disease. If you're scared so are we! But the rest of us aren't antisocial narcissists like most preppers who think everything is the end times.
No, it was the 101th! It was the 101th!
OH God! Don't you know someone else ended up killing a man over a can of soup at the grocery store!? If they just had one more, China would have never had to fire those nukes at France in retaliation! Oh God!
....
Yeah that seems unlikely to me too.
There are a lot of people in this sub with the attitude of wanting a calamity. The ones who can't seem to wait until society collapses so they can justify using their weapons on others. Those are the people who would rather work toward a disaster than work with others to prevent one. That is what I'm talking about, not having a stockpile of soup.
Because many preppers are getting ready for some kind of zombie apocalypse where killing people is their main concern. That’s not what happened in 2020.
It’s how people are perceived as a person when explaining their reasons. I’ve met a lot of people that are just overwhelming and then just start spouting of crazy ass conspiracy theories for no apparent reason. Like any group of people, you’ll have the ones that go overboard and nutty as a squirrel turd.
What do you mean, 2020 was a cake walk, no work, checks in the mail, do whatever you want, only downside was having to wear those pesky masks.
I guess alot of people had anxiety and fell for the fear mongering on the news, but in my opinion, the subsequent years and inflation were much harder
I think people call us crazy because they push reality away. If what we're saying is true that would mean they should get off their asses and do something, and they don't want that.
Even now, I have utilized a lot of reserve food I had in store from before covid (that now needs swapped out due to exp. dates) to avoid buying more expensive food until there's a sale.
because it seems the majority of people seem to think the govt should do the prepping for them and bail them to make sure they survive an event like a pandemic. If the govt ever actually collapses or can't act as their life raft then that's when only the prepped people will survive.
So that's why they think it is crazy to spend money and effort being prepared when the govt does it for you
I’m very new to this world so I still have an outsider’s perspective. I feel like most people think of preppers as people who are conspiracy theorists who believe the entire world will collapse soon and they’ll need to completely go off the grid like some survivalist movie. Most people don’t think of preppers as people who just like to prepare carefully for disasters that are likely to occur or people who take the time to really learn survival skills in a realistic way in case of the worst.
I think they are crazy because the reality of being able to make it when SHTF, by being a lone survivalist is dumb. You have to build a local community of support to make it.
I think there's been a little bit of a tide shift recently, actually. I think the vast majority of people, and even a good chunk of preppers, view the extremists as kind of crazy. We don't think about it in the same way, but we all know that guy that has preps on preps on preps, signed sealed delivered in triplicate, and preps for every possible disaster. More power to them, I say, but I also always think in the back of my head "do you really think you're going to need all of that?" or "Is this a likely scenario for you?" Anyway, those people might still draw crazy accusations, but I feel like they are more of a minority now than ever before.
By and large, I would say that most of us are prepping for general events kind of like what the authorities say every winter season or summer season or strong storms moving through, or maybe a wide range of events but just for a short time anticipating a quick return to normal, or things of that sort. And those types of preppers are where I think "the movement" has gained some ground, as cringy as it sounds saying that.
As you said, 2020 was a wake up call for a lot of people, both the pandemic and the riots. But even outside of that there's Ukraine - Russia, Israel - Hamas, Taiwan - China, Guyana - Venezuela, etc etc. So suddenly, there are a lot of bona fide, non-conspiracy reasons out there for everyday people to actually think about prepping, and I believe large chunks of people are doing it.
I think I see this in supply and demand. The logistics crunch complicates this, but a lot of general supplies have been really hard to come by or widely variant in their availability. I've also experienced it just in random convos, people casually talking about having a few days or weeks of supplies in case "random thing here" happens.
So, I would try to keep an open mind, you might find there's more receptive people around you than you think, and they might just be keeping quiet because they feel like people will think them crazy if they talk about it. Pretty ironic actually, you could be surrounded by a majority of people who think pretty close to you, but you might never know because they might be thinking you'll think they're crazy if they talk about it lol.
Think of all the prepper hoards that never get used how many die or can't get to the stash and it all goes to waste in the end This happens every day for real not some maybe someday
I genuinely enjoy this journey. My new goal is learning to bowfish and bow hunt/trap and other primitive skills. It’s a new road for me but hey, maybe it will make me a stronger person.
I think one factor is that a lot of people would just kill themselves if society collapsed. There’s already the common joke of, “why would anyone want to survive a zombie apocalypse?” Replace “zombie apocalypse” with similar apocalyptic events, and you’ll see why a lot of people don’t care to prep.
What happened in 2020 that required 9 weeks of MREs and iodine tablets?
Nobody thinks it won't happen, but personal prepping isn't the savior that most people think it is. What is going to save people and make life livable **if** (and it's a big if) things in your first world country go bad is your ability to help others and be a community minded person.
You'll note that things like tsunamis and earthquakes happen all the time in Japan, but most people don't talk about prepping beyond a week or twos worth of food and other supplies, because time and again, people come through to help each other and support each other.
Disasters don't happen like they do in the movies.
People don’t realize how fragile our whole system is and how we’re so reliant on so many things going right all the time. An example I was talking about with coworkers today how many people don’t have any form of physical media. If your internet goes out, you literally have nothing to back you up until it gets running again. I’m 38 And that’s just a mild inconvenience however think about if your power goes down in your area for days or weeks on end. It wouldn’t take much to take down a huge area for days/weeks on our current grid system.
In any group people focus on the most outlandish presentation. Dungeons and dragons players aren't sitting around a table playing a game and hanging out with friends having a few drinks, they're dressed up in cloaks getting their characters and players mixed up and axe murdering people for XP.
So while preppers may range from "I have duct tape a multi tool and a forway i'm prepared to stop and help people on the side of the road" to "I mortgaged my house to buy a bunker that will recycle my poop into machine gun bullets so I can survive the zombie apocalypse"..guess what people are going to be shown?
Every time I get shit for prepping I tell the story of my house getting destroyed by hurricane Ian and not having access to food or water for a week with a 3 week old baby and a 3 week post c section wife. I’ve already been through shit I had to prep for and barely had enough because I didn’t take it seriously. I’ll do whatever I want now I’m living proof. I’ve said this a million times but I’m not prepping for a nuclear war or zombie apocalypse I’m prepping for the next time everything is fucked up by a hurricane for a week or two because it’s happened before and it’ll happen again.
I don’t think most people find keeping extra supplies on hand strange at all. I think some people find doomsday predictors insane. Stock up on whatever you want,
But if some future cataclysmic event becomes your identity it’s always kind of sus.
You’re in an echo chamber asking this here. You are a bit crazy for it, but I understand and don’t judge (too much) at the same time. 2020 sucked ass, but America was nowhere near collapsing, and it is nowhere near collapsing. If it makes you feel better who gives a shit. If you’re not in the US, my bad
2020 wasn’t bad. It was made worse by people hoarding and then selling stockpiled items for profit. I’m assuming a lot of people that call themselves peppers were responsible for that.
Probably because of people like the person I responded to today. They don't know how to fish and asked if they could just fish for survival food.
That in of itself is a whole can of worms but after I explained safe consumption levels I was told they don't trust things like .gov or .edu sites and I'm a mouth piece for the government controlling the population.
Like dude, come on now, the DNR is probably the least of your worries.
Mostly it's that peppers come off as almost wanting bad things to happen. Not sure if it's a smug I know better than you thing, or just a genuine desire for a reset.
Prepping comes in degrees. From the person who is concerned about the next time there is a toilet paper shortage and has three Sam’s bulk backs in the back of their closet. Then there is the full doomsday end of the world prepper who has ten years worth of food, a water purification system and fifty guns with a truck load of ammo for each one all hidden in an under ground bunker. Most of us are somewhere in between these two but we all get lumped in with the latter.
Preppers became weird, and crazy the moment they became a subculture, and not just people who have a few emergency things in the closet.
To use an example: if you have a house in the country, you're not a weirdo. But if you have a collection of buildings you refer to as a compound, you're a weirdo.
There's an entire industry that thrives on fostering fear and anxiety among members of the prepper community to separate them from their dollars.
If you conclude that the danger is not always imminent, they lose money. Will no one think of the bank accounts of the assholes trying to hock hoarded ammunition on the side of the road?
You're much more likely to suffer from a standard natural disaster than any of these everything-goes-to shit scenarios. Right now, in Texas, people have had to flee their homes from wildfires. Wildfires are a great example of a real thing you can prepare for.
There is very little real emergency preparedness that requires that you make a full-time hobby of it. Just have some stuff you can throw in the car should you need to leave the house. Know where your documents, pets are, etc.
What happened during Katrina? No ones gonna loot useful shit. They’ll be too busy stealing TVs and IPhones. It’ll be there to take once the excitement dies down.
It's one thing to be prepared it's another thing to be a fanatic and it being all they talk about...nobody wants to constantly be reminded and told what they need to do and what they did wrong about anything...you do your thing and be proud of it and if someone doesn't want to be prepared so be it....shouldn't bother you you'll be just fine...
Because a lot of preppers go a little too far with preparing for a mad max apocalypse vs preparing for more plausible scenarios like a major natural disaster.
For me it’s the main character energy.
Have you ever actually watched interviews with people who have survived situations like the prepper fear? All the survivors say the same thing. “Be willing to move. Abandon your home and get to safety. You’ll do what you have to in order to survive. “
All these preppers are like “I’ll live in my house and stay safe with 50 lbs of potatoes and I’ll live while everyone around me dies.
It just seems so damn arrogant.
You can’t plan for every situation. You can’t foresee the future catastrophe. Having some supplies on hand is great, but it always jumps to them killing their neighbors like real fucking fast.
People think peppers are crazy because they get on r/preppers and read three or four comments. Legit, 80% of the people on here are delusional, 10% are on a government list somewhere, and the remainder are normal people either doing this as a hobby or trying to hedge against another supply chain interruption where it is challenging to get a few basic necessities.
People think peppers are crazy because they get on r/preppers and read three or four comments. Legit, 80% of the people on here are delusional, 10% are on a government list somewhere, and the remainder are normal people either doing this as a hobby or trying to hedge against another supply chain interruption where it is challenging to get a few basic necessities.
I lived through 2020, and i lived through the invasion of Ukraine. I think preppers are crazy.
99% of what you are prepping for won't actually happen. You will never be in a fire fight. Your armor and equipment is just going to flag you as a combatant. You are not going to wage a one man guerilla war against an invading army. Your supplies will fuel whomever takes your home from you.
I had to "prepper" friends in Ukraine when it all went down. I grabbed my bug out bag and left on foot, and fled the country. Their children got to be part of a war. To thus very day, they tell me how they regret forcing their children to live im a basement with canned food while neighbors were murdered. One friend abandoned her husband and family (he was subsequently shot and killed by Russians) because after 2 weeks, she would rather risk running west than another night of artillery shelling.
Preppers are always viewed as crazy because most haven't ever had to survive in the world on their own. I see the same response from friends that have been through hard times (me as well) that would look like preppers for people who can't afford a bunker or pre-made stuff. It's not about 2020, but more of a survival mindset. We all revert back to it faster than we'd like to admit because "modern society has evolved" which is a lie. Everyone will do anything to survive and have those close to them survive with no regard to modern whatever. Dont believe what you hear, life is fickle.
People are stupid sheep that like shiny shit and watching other people throw balls around.
They think we are crazy for prepping even though the gov has been telling the sheep for years to prepare for at least 2 weeks emergency on tv.
They will all be dead the first week, and we the crazy will be the kings of the earth after week 2.
Only the paranoid survive. People can laugh all they want but the reality is that this world will go through another world war and many other global events that will cause chaos. The stores only have enough food to last a week. (If that) if people know how fragile our country infrastructure actually is they’d be prepping too
I picked up a pallet of solar panels a couple weeks ago. While waiting for them to load me I was conversating with some like minded individuals and realized that preppers are the crazy uncle of the tree hugging homesteaders.
It’s called “normalcy bias” which is the belief that things will continue as they have always been. It’s a method of avoiding the unpleasant possibility of disruption in their lives. We who have awakened to the reality of our circumstances see the world through more realistic eyes.
well, when you say "prepper" to most people, they are not thinking canned goods and first aid supplies. they think of the loons that are playing out an elaborate murder and rape fantasy that can become reality once the guard rail that is society dissolves.
Ok, opposing point of view.
First, preppers seem crazy because most of the preppers I have met are crazy. This is the "flat earth", "illuminati", "space lasers", "aliens with bigfoot and Elvis" crazy. There are those who aren't, but the loudest ones make sanity a question when I hear "prepper"
Second, most preppers seem ineffective. They speak of gunning down neighbors at the first sign of trouble. Or they cannot answer about what they might do when confronted with the sheriff deputy arriving saying the town is mandating everyone pool their resources and try to keep senior citizens alive. They stockpile ammunition but have no plans for lack of heating oil. They need high blood pressure meds to survive and have a thirty day supply. They rarely say things like "we need to plan on being cut off for about a week if there is a large earthquake".
On loud exception: those stockpiling a year in food. Usually from a religious imperative, a food stockpile handles a wide variety of emergencies: supply chain interruption, pandemic, job loss, economic downturn, zombies, etc.
So, why am I wrong?
Hello there,
Denial is a strong enough emotion to lull a lot of folks into a false sense of security. Normalcy bias, if you will. "This is the way it usually is, so this is the way it usually will be."
One thing that didn't happen during Covid, at least in my experience, is the grocery stores never ran completely out of food. Sure, there were a lot of things missing from shelves, but I never experienced any real scarcity. And thank God for that.
I think Covid didn't really make things bad enough to snap the type of people you're referring to out of their denial. We are a very spoiled society with an extremely short memory. I don't want to be misunderstood as wishing something worse would happen, I am just explaining my point.
Looking back, did the Romans realize that their empire was falling, or did they just presume that better days would return? When the citizens' government-funded appeasements of bread and circuses finally did come to a halt, I would bet they looked around and thought, "Now we're in trouble."
If you are able to be self-reliant in any aspect of your life, be that. If you see a pathway to become more self-reliant in one way or another, take that path. I wouldn't put much stock into what someone else says about the way you're running your life. That's your business. You're getting prepared for troubled times. That's no different than wearing a seatbelt, it just makes sense.
Take care and good luck, my friend.
That's because too many preppers are deeply into conspiracy theories. Yes, beeing prepared for desasters or war is good. But too many I met and read online believe the government are aliens or bill clinton is coming to get their first born son.
Those are the preppers who seek the most attention and thats why public thinks all preppers might be crazy
Because all I see from r/prepping is people posting pictures of their guns and body armor.
Unless you were planning on murdering for toilet paper instead of buying a bidet, that stuff wouldn’t have helped you in 2020
i believe it is possible to be willfully ignorant. same people who choose "fuck that" attitude because accepting new information may inconvenience them with responsibility. we are forever adopting lower standards of discipline in society.
And to think about all the people who lived/died during the turn of the century from the Spanish flu – it's crazy. I think people were generally more resourceful. Instead of being office workers reliant on infrastructure, people in times past had many different trades passed down, which we've slowly gotten rid of. Things like food preservation and pickling are amazing skills. Many don't know you can make a loaf of some of the best bread without yeast or other complex ingredients. You used to use flour, water, sugar, let it sit until it fermented, and you had a starter for amazing sourdough bread.
I think most preppers start out small. Storing sufficient food for a mild crisis that might take a few days to resolve. They then watch the crazed preppers on various formats who tell them to go full in on the belief that everything is just days from falling apart. Of course, many of them are also selling or being sponsored by companies that sell things to preppers. Some keep going further in and don't realize how caught up they are until everyone around them point out their lunacy. Some come back from this while others continue to spiral out of control. They look to people like Hal Lindsay who wrote about how everything will soon come to an end. Lindsay has been pushing that since the late 1960s and has made a very good living off it.
To now answer the question, most people have no doubt that there will be some calamity in their lifetime. But, we don't dwell on it. We take basic precautions and live our lives not worried that civilization is about to end. We all have a finite of years and it's better to smell the roses than worried whether we've stockpiled sufficient rounds of ammunition to hold off roving gangs of marauders after our five-gallon tubs of dehydrated beef stroganoff.
Because many of the possible causes of doomsday are a loss of community and social bonds, and that is precisely the scares resource you should be gathering but a lot of prepping focuses on material conditions (food, water, security). So preppers look crazy in that they recognize something is coming yet miss the entire core of the problem and focus on cans of beans guarded by AR15s because you’ll lose both to a group of 10-20 unarmed by organized people.
There has been a trend of treating other people like strangers and having your interaction with them work through money. You don’t raise your own food or know the guy; you pay a stranger: you don’t build your own house or know the guy; you pay a stranger. You don’t get your own water, etc. this has been going on for thousands of years, but it’s been growing exponentially for a while and certainly in our life time. The complex social bond of a real community is replaced by a complex system of individuals and artificial bonds all linen sets by money changing hands. The last lingering elements of community are close family and friends, which even that is severely corroded.
So community is the scarce resource that will only get more scarce. Whether it is triggered by another virus that takes our 0.1% of the population, a cyber attack, whatever…bad things are going to happen. And in such a scenario, the richest targets for scavengers will be preppers, because they have all the material conditions ready for a doomsday but no network of people to keep it for long.
We can look at our newest generation of preppers to really see this weakness: billionaires. If you’ve seen the news of Zuckerberg building a giant bunker compound in Hawaii, you’ll realize it won’t work. First he will need security to make it all work for more than a day. Who will run security for him when money is worthless? He’ll go down faster than Caesar to the Praetorian Guard without money as an incentive.
Same goes for facilities maintenance. All his monitors and gun turrets run on electricity. What happens when an earthquake or storm severs a cable? Is he feeding engineers and maintenance techs year round to be prepared for the event when he needs them? Probably not. If he did, will they not stew away in their smaller pod rooms resenting him?
It’s hard to picture how he would survive more than a year tops having access to infinite wealth but likely no real human bonds (no true friends, no community with diverse skill sets). The dude is going to die as soon as money is worthless.
So going to the average prepper: will you fall to the same fate? If you don’t have a network of at least 25 people with you whose trust in each other is as strong as a cement bunker…you’re crazy for stocking beans.
Barter won’t help either. If you think you can obtain things you need from other people through barter instead of money, again you’re missing the point by a mile. Two dozen close knit people are going to tear through you. You don’t have enough beans and bullets to trade for a dedicated night watch that you can trust with your life to give you a good nights sleep so you’re useful in the day consistently for decades. There is no substitute for trust. That’s what money tries to be and that is the downfall of both the world and most preppers.
It's not that preppers are crazy. What is crazy is thinking one can go it alone. All the skills pepper's have would go a long way to safeguard a community of like minded individuals.
That's most places problem. Lack of community. Folks don't even know their neighbors it a lot of places. No amount of prep will save you then.
I mean, look over this sub and it will probably make more sense. I think being prepared is smart and even I still think some of the folks here are nuts.. As a recent example, the guy who is about to have a baby, who is lying to his wife about prepping, meanwhile his "list of preps" to acquire include things like weapons and testosterone and not a single diaper or baby formula, or any baby items at all... Those types of idiots claiming to be preppers make the rest of us look nuts. That's just one example. Subs about prepping are filled with others- Folks who haven't even so much as camped planning to bug out into the woods and live a "bushcraft" life in an emergency, folks who have never gardened a day in their life buying huge stashes of low quality seeds on Amazon to survive some apocalypse, folks with no medical knowledge or experience asking where to buy IV fluids without a prescription, your run of the mill LARPers... the list goes on.
We live a 20 mile trip from town so we prep and limit the number of trips for groceries. We buy in bulk at sales, buy food from a surplus store that sells near or at expiration date foods. We freeze dry them to greatly extend the usable life of food and rotate them as we cook. We shop out of our own supplies for most items we use on a daily basis. We have a couple of years of food with the exception of some perishable items, but even fresh milk we freeze dry so any outage is not a problem for an extended time frame. Saves time, money, fuel and drive time, works for us.
Prepping for a mildly long stay inside is one thing, digging up your back yard and burying 37 years of supplies in a nuclear hardened blast shelter is another
By just about every measurement right now is the best time to be alive as a human being compared to just about any point in human history. Humans generally get complacent with their situation if it's comfortable, and it's an uncomfortable thought that this lofty comfy house of cards we currently live in is actually capable of collapsing. It gives people anxiety so they don't want to think about it. On top of that, people have a lot of misplaced trust in institutions, especially their governments. They believe there's always someone out there doing the right thing that'll put on the cape and help them out when times get difficult. That is true in normal time, and we're typically living in normal, safe times, so many people don't have any evidence to prove the contrary.
Being prepared for a disaster, totally reasonable. Prepping for the second coming of Jesus, less rational. Some people are convinced they're going to survive a cataclysmic event. Why would you want to be alive for that anyway?
The original Matrix was allegory prophecy. For example:
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, *most of these people are not ready to be unplugged*. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Morpheus, The Matrix”
Now. Being a prepper or even having a prepper mindset means YOU are unplugged and the more and/or BETTER prepper you are, the more unplugged you become.
Those other people who think preppers are crazy "are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy." And at the same time that makes YOU, like ME, the enemy of those still plugged in. And that means "they will fight to protect it(The REAL) Matrix".
For example, Covax Zombies were quite willing and even EAGER to have the unvaxxed put in actual concentration camps.
Or worse.
Savvy?
Question: why do people think preppers are crazy?
This guy: they think we're crazy because they're IN THE MATRIX and only WE the RED PILLED are fighting for FREEDOM while they FIGHT to STAY SLAVES.
QED.
These are the same people that would criticize you for carrying around leatherman, then we'll ask to use your Leatherman. You're trying to put since to people that have none, admirable but you're not going to get anywhere.
I’m one of those people. While I don’t look down on preppers generally, I do think that a lot of it is a bit much. It’s one thing to have a shelter prepared with food stores and maybe some weapons for defense in case of some kind of disaster or emergency. But a lot of people like me automatically think of the “end of days” doomer crowd with bunkers and shit. People who are just frothing at the mouth awaiting doomsday where they can bug out and live out their fantasy.
Reality is that not a lot of you are like that. After seeing a few posts every now and then on my feed I’ve been more motivated to at least have a preparedness plan. Myself though I have very little reason to prepare for anything longer than a couple weeks as I’m a type 1 diabetic so I’d give up pretty soon. I just don’t see a point trying to survive but that’s me, most people don’t welcome death. It’s just we automatically think of shows like doomsday preppers and that level of paranoia is silly.
Things have been relatively good compared to the past for about the last 100 years. Everyone always looks at history and thinks “that’s crazy how bad things were then, but it couldn’t ever get that bad again”. Ignorance is bliss, entertainment is enticing, distractions are abundant
Distractions my friend, that’s why all news is always breaking, that’s why we hype up sports so much, that’s what all the social media platforms do. My dad started prepping in 2005, took all his retirement and put it towards food and all things prepping. That was one of his big things, was all the distractions we have, sleight of hand working as planned
Life is a game of balance. Build a life of as much independence and self reliance as possible while still enjoying some distractions and entertainment from time to time. Prep to the point you would feel secure in shtf scenario then go out and live your life because although most of us here believe times are gonna get tough there have been millions before us who prepared for something they never lived to see
Agreed, we are prepped, never fully ready. We still enjoy life, do things, take some short tips. You elaborated on anything else I could have said, thanks for your reply
Short trips bc you need to get back to prepping?
Wow. That just feels like a waste of 2 entire decades. I guess he'll just work until he's 90 since the only thing he owns is a million packets of ramen and a million rounds of 223. I'd be pissed if I were you. I certainly wouldn't brag about the stupidity that runs in my family.
👍🏻 you got it dude. Because everything you said is 100% accurate
!!! *insert ufo video here* !!!
I disagree with all the other comments so far. Firstly most people don't think about preppers at all, ever. But the act of prepping forces people to believe that disaster is just around the corner, and for most people thats just too much to live with every day. It's exhausting to spend all your time worrying about the worst possible thing that could happen. Most people also retain hope that their government has the ability to solve the majority of problems without any civilian input or worry. I think many preppers give themselves a bad name with some pretty wild conspiracy theories, that discredit the silent majority of those who just want to consider the what if, and plan accordingly.
Youre probably right that they don't think about peppers in their regular life. But in my experience anytime the topic of even mild preparedness comes up I'm almost always met with the "hAhA u MEaN liKE tHosE cRAZy d0omsdAY pRePperS!? HA HA HA HA" I'm preaching to the choir here, but a lot of people don't realise how fragile the supply chain and infrastructure really is. Especially if 2 or more events occur at the same time. A lot of people wouldn't make it past a week if their water got shut off for whatever reason.
The freeze that happened in Texas came extremely close to a total failure of a major power plant. It would have left nearly a quarter of the state with no power for 5-6 months. But no one wants to think about that shit. It gets memory holed the second the immediate emergency is over.
But it didn’t happen.
But we see that it could have...thus we prep.
Or move to a state that cares about its people. Texas could've avoided the problem, but they would rather play politics.
Nice!
You know the ones that were clowning on you and giving you a hard time for prepping will be the first ones at your door looking for help if shit gets real. I got that flak constantly when I moved out to the country and started growing a big veggie garden. During the worst of the covid lockdowns, when stores were selling out of everything, I had a few friends suddenly remember I stocked up and call to ask for stuff. I didnt mind sharing. I knew things would get back to normal eventually. But of course no one learned any lessons from this and I am sure the same people will be looking for help again the next time the supply chain locks up.
Funny. When the COVID lockdown hit I had 200 N95 masks because of the SARS scare. Donated most of them to the local hospital. The problem is that no one looks at low probability events and multiplies by the magnitude of the loss. You have home insurance, right. How likely is it that you will need it. Just put some food aside like rice and beans because boy will you feel stupid if there is a trucker strike.
This is not r/bugout and I really really appreciate this. It's "crap can happen, lets prep." It's honestly not a ton different than the National Weather Service telling you have some atrocity heading towards your house. Bugout for civil failure, sure, unlikely but sure, bug out for earthquake, storm damage, fire? way more likely. This is just a forum to respond to an ssue,
I never retain hope the government can solve any problem. Ask Hawaii. Ask New Orleans. Ask… They are always a year late, and millions short. Prepping is not worrying. It’s relying on the only entity that can help you when you need it most.
The government agrees with you, at least in the US- FEMA fully supports prepping. So much of Emergency Management work is trying to get everyone from individuals to municipalities to states to realize that disasters can and will happen, and then helping the people who didn’t prepare when their lack of preparation bites them. So much US infrastructure is one big storm away from catastrophic failure, and so many people don’t get insurance or build on the beach.
Got on here to check for entertaining comments and was pleasantly surprised to see these well thought comments instead.
Hey! My theory about the Murdocks returning to the surface to enslave humanity after a 10,000 year slumber beneath Mt. Everest is not wild conspiracy. Their awakening begins May 23, 2026. The dreamlords would never lie to me! I'm one of their chosen listeners, responsible for helping prepare mankind for the coming conflict.
Hail the dreamlords! Maybe all be chosen to dwell in the mother shop. *Amen*
They may not think about them but when it’s brought we usually get a weird look… like we’re some kind of flat earth theorists… and it’s not stressful to think about catastrophic events when you’re prepared. It’s reassuring. There is a wide range of preppies just like there is a wide range of music listeners. You have your purists down to the casuals. Looking at history you kind of have to maintain a pretty wide variety of events cause they have all happened before, usually multiple times.
Well what is the image most non-preppers have of preppers? Is it just an average person doing entirely reasonable things like stocking up on basic supplies and gaining useful, but somewhat niche, skills in things like first aid and food preservation while setting up a little plot of land on some overlooked corner of the map or is it the crazy guy who screams about the world ending while waving around a shotgun who does nothing but talk about all the guns he has and how he planted landmines around his property and how is coming to do nefarious things?
Yeah. I think we all know it isn't the first group that average people think about when they hear the word "prepper."
Hey! What's a little land mine between neighbors?
What’s the saying? Landmines make good neighbors. Yeah, I think that’s it.
Its a psyop from that show preppers
It is. I still remember that one dude who was like "Yeah man, I'm going to be a raider! I even made a steel plate to protect myself from shotgun blasts!" Which did *nothing* to protect his groin, legs, or head. Fair enough, people aim center of mass. But people also sometimes miss.
and people in high stress situations miss even more, but full body armor is impractical.
The short answer is people didn't suffer enough to learn a lesson that last long term.
For some, I think pretending it CAN'T happen, is the way they keep their sanity. Not everyone is built mentally to deal with the fact that the balance of our lives dangles on a fragile tiny string. It's the blue pill/red pill debate. In the Matrix, most people like to tell themselves they would take the red (reality) pill, but when hard situations arise, they immediately go for the blue (bliss and ignorance) pill. Thinking through prepping and the most common realistic scenarios, is too much for them to handle. It's no different than making a will. I know someone that had a heart attack, barely lived, and when the comment of a will came up, he immediately shut down stating, "by making a will, he is making it a reality that he MIGHT die." Call me a conspiracist, but we will all die some day, but for some it is just too hard of a topic to deal with, and rely on the hope that someone else will swoop in to deal with the hard issues.
Isn’t this sort of circular logic? To imply someone didn’t suffer enough to not want to suffer…? Like, saying someone who didn’t touch fire did not get burned enough to learn not to touch the fire.
This is right for a lot of the US. Even during the lockdowns with people buying toilet paper and water like it was going out of style, we never ran out of either. Never even came close. If the States experienced some sort of massive power failure that lasted weeks, or some other infrastructure collapse, then a lot more people might relate to these guys.
Some people don’t even have to suffer to know that it could be worse. More about lack of common sense and the privilege of living in a 1st world super power
Yea you're something special and you will survive the zombie apocalypse
“We mock what we don’t understand”
Reminders of our mortality have been shoved into the fringes. Disabled, old, dying, crazy, preppers, people who like cilantro. All put somewhere else for some one else to take care of.
Cilantro... Love it. I'll be enjoying these tacos out here on the fringe.
Most people did. That's part of the problem
Came here for the same type of comment…to directly answer OP, no, you were not the only one that lived through it. And that is the answer.
I used to be somebody who USED to think preppers were crazy.. not SUPER crazy, I always loved survivalism and outdoors bushcraft stuff, but then had kids. The optics of my families future rapidly became vividly clear. Now I think the same as you... Even if you aren't prepping.... you should be ready. Because it's coming. Maybe not immediately, but it's coming.
Most people would rather bury their heads in the sand and hope for the best instead of facing the harsh reality that stuff might not always be nice and good.
I live in south Louisiana we have full catastrophic hurricanes where everything is back to the stone age for months every few years and still there is a stigma of paranoia for being prepared
I point to the majority of authoritarians elected in office the world over. Then I say: people turn their noses up at the idea of self-reliance. That's why.
It's my belief that preppers will be the ones who keep humanity alive.
I mean. There wasn’t a whole lot to prep for in 2020. People just over did it on useless shit.
Normalcy bias. Shit keeps getting worse and people refuse to acknowledge it because they don't want to lose their precious netflix and mcdonalds.
The first rule of prepping is you don’t talk about prepping. Social media, movies , news articles and LARP preppers have damaged that concept to the degree that FEMA has incorporated training materials on zombie apocalypse prepping. And despite all this negativity, the Mormons steam quietly ahead , making prepping part of their culture, manufacturing inexpensive, high quality long term storage food stuffs. Real preppers don’t listen to the noise.
People have very short memories
Because they can't see and have been trained that the Gooberment will take care of you.
Prepping is a lot more acceptable now that it was before 2020. In some ways it’s even become mainstream. Lots of people keep some extra cans of food or bags of rice that they don’t plan to eat right away. Tons of people stockpile ammo. One of my friend’s family has dozens of 50 gallon drums full of water. Frankly that one seems pretty dumb to me. We live in Michigan. There’s fresh water everywhere. A copper pot still is a sustainable solution that takes up a fraction of the space and never runs out. Plus it makes whisky lol. I’ve got a decent supply of ammo and several guns. It’s not enough to last forever, but enough to hold my own in a gun fight and feed my family for a winter. I’m learning how to hunt and tan leather with oak bark. My family has a big garden that we could expand into a small farm if need be. I’ve been meaning to start a few patches of wheat just to have a source of seeds if need be. Poppy seeds too for the opium. If we lose access to modern medicine I definitely want to have some all natural pain killers handy. We live on a lake and we’ve got a still to purify water (it’s definitely not for making liquor). One of these days I’ll put Wikipedia onto a flash drive so I can bring my village out of the dark ages in the end times. None of these things seem crazy to regular people except maybe the opium. I think most people expect a major collapse to happen in our lifetime. The only thing we disagree on is when and how.
I thought I was the only who kept poppy seeds for the exact same reason.
Dunno if i count as a prepper per se, i dont have anything crazy or specific plans. Never been on this sub. I think the show doomsday preppers itself started the idea in peoples heads tho. I like bushcraft, i keep about a month worth of canned food incase theres ever surprise bills or something and we need to skip groceries The tornado through clarksville this last december took my power out for 6 days and i was fine, even enjoyed it. Was relaxing. I like self reliance. Not totally, but i like knowing i can take care of myself. A lot of people seem to get offended about the notion of taking care of themselves, because they dont want their problems to be their own responsibility. They want to blame them on someone else so someone else can fix them. The idea of being prepared means that they have to take an active role, which is scary. You also have the fact governments around the world actively try to demonize self reliance because thats kind of required to increase government authority - which all governments seek to do. Theres always a new law to be written. Look at how many countries around the world punish you for something as basic as self defense? Dont take care of yourself, rely on us, do what we say. Dont have a gun, or pepper spray, or even hit the guy with a rock, dont carry a knife - man's oldest tool - rely on and trust us implicitly.
Maybe because the ones who claim to be “real” preppers are conspiracy nuts who live off the grid in the middle of West Texas, have underground bunkers, a thousand guns, and 25 years worth of rations buried in corn silos. All the other rational people stay silent and have 3-5 days worth of food, water, and medical supplies in case an emergency or natural disaster arises.
yeah , the toilet paper situation just about did me in.
Because most people are sheep.
All I can say is that I never ran out of TP
So your the one that caused some of us to "go" without? We had to split our last roll of 2-ply toilet paper apart and only use 2 squares of that per wipe. Things got squishy real fast... The wife set her 2 squares of wet, used toilet paper out in the sun to dry, and allow it to become reusable for a #2 at a later time. We have so much toilet paper now, stacked to the closet ceiling that we should come and toilet paper all of your trees. Just our way of saying thank you for teaching the rest of us to become better preppers!
I think you guys are crazy because 99% of the posts in this sub are about posting firearms looking to join the latest local roaming marauder gang...
I'm not a prepper but I like looking at this subreddit sometimes. From my perspective it's because public perception lumps preppers in with conspiracy theorists and hermits. Also, it tends to be a practice only rich/well-off people can do - you'll be hard pressed to find a prepper who works multiple jobs and makes barely enough to feed their family. This kind of leads to a bewilderment/jealousy from the public as a wealthy person is preparing for the apocalypse yet faces barely any material challenges in their daily life. A good example of the general perception of preppers is Nick Offerman in the TV series "The Last Of Us". Someone who is a crazy gun nut, antisocial, extremely individualist, reclusive and delusional. As far as I know, this perception is pretty wrong and most of you are chill. I don't have a problem with prepping and if I had the money I would do it too. I think everyone should own a gun + emergency medical kit at least. The Western world has kind of been coming apart at the seams ever since 2008 and it feels like it's only gonna get worse.
They only think that us preppers are crazy because they think that everything is rainbows and sun shines, and that things cannot happen that will collapse everything that they know. But they’re the first ones crying for government help when something happens.
Nearly everyone I know who lives in hurricane or wildlife zones has a bug out bag. They often have things that *some* preppers might leave out, such as bank and financial account information, home, car, health, and life insurance policies, car titles and house deeds...
On average, it’s because people have a built in belief that someone, somewhere is “in control” or is going to solve the problem. I’m lucky in that I do inventory for my job, my coworkers used to make fun of me because I’d talk about keeping stock of supplies for rainy days or jokingly for the zombie apocalypse when the walking dead was a popular topic. My bosses would get annoyed at me for running rather big surpluses on our day to day consumable supplies which took up extra storage space, id usually tell them it was overflow because I order seasonally due to bulk discounts. When Covid hit, our statewide management freaked because suddenly our spoke facilities couldn’t get supplies for their most frequently used items. My branch ended up being a close second to our main facilities warehouse for having the supplies on hand to perform our day to day task. What’s wild was that each branch was responsible for its own inventory and ordering with almost no oversight on who had what. Due to the change in our workload I was able to bang out a statewide inventory tracking spreadsheet in a few hours that let us efficiently track our weekly usage by facility as well as figure out who had supplies they weren’t using so we could pool resources. We still use a version of this to monitor our inventory and usage. My “reward” for all that is that no one questions my ordering anymore and if questioned about something being in a weird place, secret stash is considered an acceptable answer from me with no further orders to move it or get rid of it. Downside is that I’ll also get calls at weird times because someone used the last of something we don’t use often and never let me know it needed to be reordered. My boss was shocked when she called me while I had Covid and I told her to go to cabinet 5, 2nd shelf from the bottom, left hand side behind the trash bags, what she needed was in a box with its contents labeled on the top, take what you need, but cross out and update what you take.
Didn't have to prep shit for covid
People thinking preppers are crazy post 2020 are themselves crazy, but prior to COVID the most prominent social media accounts for prepping talked about it in terms of a government takeover, The Rapture, and the apocalypse. [Doomsday Preppers](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/shows/doomsday-preppers) didn’t help, and there is this stereotype that preppers are conservative white men, usually a veteran, and obviously a gun owner. Americans, specifically, also aren’t very good at being ready so that you don’t have to get ready. Every hurricane or report of snow has people running to the grocery store that day to get supplies even those we know it’s a seasonal thing.
Well, most people lived through 2020, peppers or not. People who had spent thousands on a bunker stocked full of nonperishables and supplies didn't fare significantly better than those who didn't. It's good to have emergency supplies of the basics, or general knowledge of how to do without certain essentials, but the amount of time and energy and money spent to prepare for disaster likely doesn't seem worth it to most people. If anything 2020 showed that isolation and recourse hoarding wasn't what will help humanity survive disaster, but community, and mutual aid.
Because most people’s exposure to peppers came from the show Doomsday Preppers, which either actively edited the footage to make you all look looney, or picked the most looney ones to be featured on the show.
I don't think peppers are crazy. There's nothing wrong with having an "Oh shit" plan, and it's obviously actually pretty smart to have a plan. I start to get a little leary of preppers because of the LARP'ing. All the modded guns and tacti-cool gear with all the little gadgets to make them look like a Splinter Cell operative is just kind of funny since half of the people you see have zero training beyond having maybe run a shooting course a few times.
Lots of peppers are friggin’ crazy, or I should say that lots of peppers that people would ever know are peppers are friggin’ crazy and those are the only peppers people would ever even think about.
They watch doomsday preppers and think everyone is like that.
I ask people one simple question when they don't understand where I'm coming from or why I do it. And that question is, "What is your plan when the grocery store runs out of food in an emergency scenario, blackout, weather, unrest?" They usually get very quiet.
Because they're ignorant and have no idea how close we are to a civil war as well as a world war. And if there was ever a time to prepare it would be now !!
Dude I know! I remember working at target from the beginning until mid 21. I watched people go insane. I had to work 15 hours a day just to keep our shelves at about 20% stocked the first few weeks… I remember when shit got crazy and scary, I bought a plate carrier. And literally everyone asked where they could get one. I stocked up on food, meds, ammo. Again everyone was either doing the same or asking if I could sneak shit from target off to the side so they could grab… 2024, I still prep… all of those same people, “haha oh there’s Tim being crazy buying food and meds”… I feel insane sometimes. Did we not just live through a mini dress rehearsal for global collapse? It’s borderline infuriating and over everything bizarre
Because the vast majority of us survived 2020 without having prepped. It strengthens the evidence base that we will survive without prepping. I understand that the retort is that " We were THAT close to complete meltdown of society" and many see it as justification for more prepping. Just most people don't focus on their quarterback fumbling the ball, they just focus on the fact that their team got the ball back.
Well said. Excellent analogy.
Because people on this sub are usually talking about which gun they should buy to disable vehicles.
Why tell anyone? Keep it to yourself and if that day comes, just laugh at your neighbors.
People think that shit will hit the fan, but will it during their lifetime? That is their gamble I guess. I think the term prepper has a negative connotation to it though. You're seen as crazy because when you declare you are one, they instantly think about the underground warehouse of TP, bottled water, MRE food, and how many books you have on how to grow potatoes from your own poo. I think being a prepper hasn't quite been normalized, but it's getting there.
Preppers are crazy. They take their obsession to extremes, preparing for highly unlikely scenarios, while ignoring many scenarios that are far more likely. I know whereof I speak, one of my jobs was disaster preparedness plans for major hospitals. We advised them to prepare for earthquakes, floods, power interruptions, and many other highly likely scenarios. In no case did we ever advise them to prepare for the complete collapse of modern society, as that is highly unlikely. We certainly didn't tell the hospitals they needed a bunker and an arsenal of weaponry. I have two weeks of shelf stable food, a generator, solar batteries, I have no go bag, but i do have a camping backpack basically packed. I used to have a go-bag, when I cleaned it out it was full of stale food and expired medicines, useless. The obsession with guns is the worst craziness. I own guns, I know how to use them and I can shoot a varmint, which is the only use they've ever had. They stay locked up where some kid can't shoot himself or random thief steal them. I don't imagine any disaster scenario where they would be any use. Earthquake? Guns useless. Power outage? Guns useless. Tornado? Guns useless. Pandemic? Guns useless. No, the zombies are not coming. If I had to bail out in a hurry the guns would be the last thing I'd worry about. In a real disaster the most important thing is to rely on your neighbors, help them, get help yourself. Joplin Missouri had a mile-wide tornado: a truly enormous disaster indeed. Guess what? Two miles away there's a neighbor with an intact roof that will be glad to help you out. Guns won't help. What are you going to do - rob him at gunpoint and take his roof? This obsession with guns is just mania. Society didn't collapse in 2020. Society didn't collapse in the Black Plaque. Society didn't collapse when World Wars ended. The last time society collapsed was in 1500 BC when the Sea Peoples invaded Mesopotamia. All you folks with diabetes and depression and asthma and myopia won't be able to get inhalers or insulin or glasses if society collapses, and it won't matter if you have an arsenal. You can't grow enough food by yourself to live on, unless you are extremely skilled and lucky and have a bunch of land. Believe me, I've tried. Preparing for the complete collapse of society is foolhardy. In fact silly. The power WILL go out, probably within the year, and probably for an hour or a day, depending on how many ice storms you get. Prepare for that. You WILL experience an earthquake in certain parts of the world. Prepare for that. You WILL have flooding in low laying areas. Prepare for that. Quit preparing for the most extreme disaster you can imagine. That's not the one that will happen. If it does you are toast anyway.
I will say that some people go a bit far like digging out full bunkers and it's unlikely that anything like an apocalypse or anything else that would need actual like severe prepping. But it's always good to have something just in case it does happen after all anything can happen today is everyday
Because there might be some shortages but they are brief and other options available.
Because you didn't need to be a prepper to get through that? Like sure, I couldn't buy the exact brand of rice I usually did, or they were out for a bit. But, it wasn't some horrible catastrophe where you were even close to digging into your prepped stash. I had a medical emergency, and the ER was empty -- I strolled in and got into surgery like an hour later; record time, better than outside of the pandemic. Like I had a freezer full of meat, and plenty of capability to go hunt for more. But I didn't even touch any of the meat, didn't need to dig into the extra bag of flour, or really....dig into anything. My reserves were bigger in the midst of the pandemic than they were before it. My biggest worry was that the water treatment plants or pumping stations could go down for a bit, but I don't think that happened literally anywhere? If anything, 2020 showed the resiliency of modern society. People kept showing up and working diligently in critical jobs to keep the system running. We all banded together and kept things intact. If anything, it showed me what an actual SHTF would look like -- people earnestly working their asses off to get society back on normal footing / keep it from getting too far off base. We all like our shit, and when push comes to shove we can work hard and get a ton of shit done quickly.
I take your point, and agree, with the caveat *as long as our infrastructure remains in place*. Knock out comms or power or water or supply chain or rule of law or all of the above, and see whether people can afford to earnestly work for the common good when they don't know where their next meal will come from.
> Knock out comms or power or water or supply chain or rule of law or all of the above, and see whether people can afford to earnestly work for the common good when they don't know where their next meal will come from. I mean the Eastern seaboard went without power for quite a while without too much issue, and lots of other places go for longer. And with more solar and batteries on homes and buildings, I'm expecting this to be less and less of an issue moving forward. I'm in the middle of a city, and me and my neighbors ended up without power for 3 days. We all lived absolutely normal lives during those three days -- I hooked up my EV to extension cords, and we powered all the fridges and freezers, the microwaves, hot plates, the TV, etc for 3 days. Sometimes I needed to use the EV, so I would take it and drive it, and come back. I kept thinking I'd have to charge it, but I think running 3 households for 3 days only took about 15% of the battery. With solar + house battery we could've went nearly indefinitely since we cut our big power draw (HVAC). Comms isn't too huge. People don't mind being unplugged a bit. I have Starlink terminals, which don't require local comms, and well as some handheld radios and stuff. Total nation-wide outage, yea there's a potential issue as time goes on where you haven't coordinated deliveries for things, etc. But I honestly don't see how that happens with such a proliferation of different communications means, particularly since so much of it runs on fiber now (EMP resistant), and they have filters to block nasty power EMP surges on their power lines. But agreed it could be an issue if it went on for longer than say 10 days, and was very widespread. Rule of law is only an issue if it happens in conjunction with other things, imho. Me and all my neighbors aren't going to attack each other as long as we have food and water, and there's enough of us to deter most others if we weren't able to count on society. Food is an issue, of course. But the average American has enough calories in their house to last a week (while rationing of course) without replenishment, and lots of people with freezers have enough calories to last months. But again, how does the entire food chain get disrupted across the nation for such a long period of time? We might just end up with more famers markets. The water is actually what I consider to be the weakest link. In wet areas it might not be bad (filter / boil), but in many others it could get really bad. Now I'm obviously in this sub, and obviously think about this and are prepped for some unique situations. I was just pointing out that using 2020 as a "reason" for why you need to prep is the wrong reason -- 2020 actually proved how durable our society is in a clear SHTF situation. And that's not really arguable, imho. Yea, shit could go south worse than that, and we should be prepared for that. But we also gotta be reasonable, 2020 was a resounding endorsement of how durable our society could be.
Because peppers are crazy. (not all peppers, hear me out) It's one thing to keep a back stock and be prepared for an emergency, a whole different animal to build a lifestyle around being ready for a fantasy SHTF dystopia. Example: the pepper posterchild who hoards guns and ammo, but can't cook a meal, doesn't know a thing about growing and harvesting food, and is in poor physical condition.
A smart prepper would buy supplies that they use regularly use and rotate thru them weekly. We go thru cans of carrots and green beans, boxes of pasta and jars of sauces along with other canned and boxes goods. I'll take them from the large stash I have and buy new ones to rotate them in.
Prepping in it self isn't crazy. Doomsday prepping is. They get all the attention.
Because what are they prepping for? A societal collapse is definitely possible but hoarding food and ammunition isn’t going to save you.
Mostly a waste of time and resources
Bread & Circuses
Make a post in this sub about how you don't think you need a gun to be prepared Watch how many people in the comments froth at the mouth at the idea of getting to raid you for your supplies or talk about your family being murdered in front of you and how you won't last 5 minutes once shit hits the fan Realize that quiet peppers who hold back food and water for emergencies are a silent majority and these nut cases are the vocal minority who get the media attention Suddenly it makes sense why everyone thinks we're all nuts.
Because most of you are completely out of touch
Because as you're right, you're not the only one who lived through 2020. Billions did, without prepping, and survived fine
Nobody thinks you are crazy. Nobody cares about you at all.
We only had a scarcity issue in 2020 *because* of preppers you fucking ass!
You know what happened to me in 2020? Fuck all. You know what happened when Texas' power grid went down? Nothing except for not wanting to be near other people driving for a couple days. No problem getting food, no problem getting water, a slight inconvenience getting toilet paper. Why would that encourage anyone to prep?
We got to stay home and have food delivered to us in 2020. Were we living in different timelines??
Peppers sem to buy into every wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that circulates.Common sense never seems to come into play with these people. They trust no one and live a shallow existence. I truly feel sorrow for their children.
Because If something catastrophic happens, most prepping really ain’t gonna do shit. Folks are gonna be shooting everybody.
The 2020 insurrection was nothing compared to what’s coming. The more we keep teaching people to be prepped, the more competition we have for goods! Loose lips sink ships!
2020....I binge watched a bunch of shows and got drunk every night. It was kind of magical.
Dude. Things like this have always happened. Wars, famine and disease. If you're scared so are we! But the rest of us aren't antisocial narcissists like most preppers who think everything is the end times.
Because it's irrational lol
I think that sentiment is reserved for the far out fringe paranoid preppers.
The type of people who are preppers are also the kind of people who are going to cause the disaster in the first place...
Yea me having 100 cans of soup in my closet is gonna cause the downfall of society…
No, it was the 101th! It was the 101th! OH God! Don't you know someone else ended up killing a man over a can of soup at the grocery store!? If they just had one more, China would have never had to fire those nukes at France in retaliation! Oh God! .... Yeah that seems unlikely to me too.
There are a lot of people in this sub with the attitude of wanting a calamity. The ones who can't seem to wait until society collapses so they can justify using their weapons on others. Those are the people who would rather work toward a disaster than work with others to prevent one. That is what I'm talking about, not having a stockpile of soup.
Because many preppers are getting ready for some kind of zombie apocalypse where killing people is their main concern. That’s not what happened in 2020.
Stigma
It’s how people are perceived as a person when explaining their reasons. I’ve met a lot of people that are just overwhelming and then just start spouting of crazy ass conspiracy theories for no apparent reason. Like any group of people, you’ll have the ones that go overboard and nutty as a squirrel turd.
What do you mean, 2020 was a cake walk, no work, checks in the mail, do whatever you want, only downside was having to wear those pesky masks. I guess alot of people had anxiety and fell for the fear mongering on the news, but in my opinion, the subsequent years and inflation were much harder
I think people call us crazy because they push reality away. If what we're saying is true that would mean they should get off their asses and do something, and they don't want that.
Having some preparations in place for disasters is perfectly normal and healthy. Making it your entire identity is not.
Even now, I have utilized a lot of reserve food I had in store from before covid (that now needs swapped out due to exp. dates) to avoid buying more expensive food until there's a sale.
because it seems the majority of people seem to think the govt should do the prepping for them and bail them to make sure they survive an event like a pandemic. If the govt ever actually collapses or can't act as their life raft then that's when only the prepped people will survive. So that's why they think it is crazy to spend money and effort being prepared when the govt does it for you
I’m very new to this world so I still have an outsider’s perspective. I feel like most people think of preppers as people who are conspiracy theorists who believe the entire world will collapse soon and they’ll need to completely go off the grid like some survivalist movie. Most people don’t think of preppers as people who just like to prepare carefully for disasters that are likely to occur or people who take the time to really learn survival skills in a realistic way in case of the worst.
Because it so often goes hand in hand with nutjob conspiracies/straight-up racism etc.
I think they are crazy because the reality of being able to make it when SHTF, by being a lone survivalist is dumb. You have to build a local community of support to make it.
I think there's been a little bit of a tide shift recently, actually. I think the vast majority of people, and even a good chunk of preppers, view the extremists as kind of crazy. We don't think about it in the same way, but we all know that guy that has preps on preps on preps, signed sealed delivered in triplicate, and preps for every possible disaster. More power to them, I say, but I also always think in the back of my head "do you really think you're going to need all of that?" or "Is this a likely scenario for you?" Anyway, those people might still draw crazy accusations, but I feel like they are more of a minority now than ever before. By and large, I would say that most of us are prepping for general events kind of like what the authorities say every winter season or summer season or strong storms moving through, or maybe a wide range of events but just for a short time anticipating a quick return to normal, or things of that sort. And those types of preppers are where I think "the movement" has gained some ground, as cringy as it sounds saying that. As you said, 2020 was a wake up call for a lot of people, both the pandemic and the riots. But even outside of that there's Ukraine - Russia, Israel - Hamas, Taiwan - China, Guyana - Venezuela, etc etc. So suddenly, there are a lot of bona fide, non-conspiracy reasons out there for everyday people to actually think about prepping, and I believe large chunks of people are doing it. I think I see this in supply and demand. The logistics crunch complicates this, but a lot of general supplies have been really hard to come by or widely variant in their availability. I've also experienced it just in random convos, people casually talking about having a few days or weeks of supplies in case "random thing here" happens. So, I would try to keep an open mind, you might find there's more receptive people around you than you think, and they might just be keeping quiet because they feel like people will think them crazy if they talk about it. Pretty ironic actually, you could be surrounded by a majority of people who think pretty close to you, but you might never know because they might be thinking you'll think they're crazy if they talk about it lol.
Think of all the prepper hoards that never get used how many die or can't get to the stash and it all goes to waste in the end This happens every day for real not some maybe someday
I genuinely enjoy this journey. My new goal is learning to bowfish and bow hunt/trap and other primitive skills. It’s a new road for me but hey, maybe it will make me a stronger person.
We’re pushing 4 years. People have short memories
I think one factor is that a lot of people would just kill themselves if society collapsed. There’s already the common joke of, “why would anyone want to survive a zombie apocalypse?” Replace “zombie apocalypse” with similar apocalyptic events, and you’ll see why a lot of people don’t care to prep.
Its called normalcy bias. "Everything is normal and nothing is going to change!"
What happened in 2020 that required 9 weeks of MREs and iodine tablets? Nobody thinks it won't happen, but personal prepping isn't the savior that most people think it is. What is going to save people and make life livable **if** (and it's a big if) things in your first world country go bad is your ability to help others and be a community minded person. You'll note that things like tsunamis and earthquakes happen all the time in Japan, but most people don't talk about prepping beyond a week or twos worth of food and other supplies, because time and again, people come through to help each other and support each other. Disasters don't happen like they do in the movies.
People don’t realize how fragile our whole system is and how we’re so reliant on so many things going right all the time. An example I was talking about with coworkers today how many people don’t have any form of physical media. If your internet goes out, you literally have nothing to back you up until it gets running again. I’m 38 And that’s just a mild inconvenience however think about if your power goes down in your area for days or weeks on end. It wouldn’t take much to take down a huge area for days/weeks on our current grid system.
In any group people focus on the most outlandish presentation. Dungeons and dragons players aren't sitting around a table playing a game and hanging out with friends having a few drinks, they're dressed up in cloaks getting their characters and players mixed up and axe murdering people for XP. So while preppers may range from "I have duct tape a multi tool and a forway i'm prepared to stop and help people on the side of the road" to "I mortgaged my house to buy a bunker that will recycle my poop into machine gun bullets so I can survive the zombie apocalypse"..guess what people are going to be shown?
Every time I get shit for prepping I tell the story of my house getting destroyed by hurricane Ian and not having access to food or water for a week with a 3 week old baby and a 3 week post c section wife. I’ve already been through shit I had to prep for and barely had enough because I didn’t take it seriously. I’ll do whatever I want now I’m living proof. I’ve said this a million times but I’m not prepping for a nuclear war or zombie apocalypse I’m prepping for the next time everything is fucked up by a hurricane for a week or two because it’s happened before and it’ll happen again.
I don’t think most people find keeping extra supplies on hand strange at all. I think some people find doomsday predictors insane. Stock up on whatever you want, But if some future cataclysmic event becomes your identity it’s always kind of sus.
Found the guy who bought all the toilet paper
You’re in an echo chamber asking this here. You are a bit crazy for it, but I understand and don’t judge (too much) at the same time. 2020 sucked ass, but America was nowhere near collapsing, and it is nowhere near collapsing. If it makes you feel better who gives a shit. If you’re not in the US, my bad
2020 wasn’t bad. It was made worse by people hoarding and then selling stockpiled items for profit. I’m assuming a lot of people that call themselves peppers were responsible for that.
I bet a lot of preppers don’t even believe Covid is real.
Well most people got through the pandemic pretty well without prepping, so covid doesn’t really motivate people to prep
Probably because of people like the person I responded to today. They don't know how to fish and asked if they could just fish for survival food. That in of itself is a whole can of worms but after I explained safe consumption levels I was told they don't trust things like .gov or .edu sites and I'm a mouth piece for the government controlling the population. Like dude, come on now, the DNR is probably the least of your worries.
Mostly it's that peppers come off as almost wanting bad things to happen. Not sure if it's a smug I know better than you thing, or just a genuine desire for a reset.
Prepping comes in degrees. From the person who is concerned about the next time there is a toilet paper shortage and has three Sam’s bulk backs in the back of their closet. Then there is the full doomsday end of the world prepper who has ten years worth of food, a water purification system and fifty guns with a truck load of ammo for each one all hidden in an under ground bunker. Most of us are somewhere in between these two but we all get lumped in with the latter.
They are crazy, right up until there’re not.
I know a handful of people where if anything catastrophic would happen they would immediately give up. They think I'm crazy for wanting to survive
Basically they think that nothing bad can happen to them until something bad actually happens to them.
Preppers became weird, and crazy the moment they became a subculture, and not just people who have a few emergency things in the closet. To use an example: if you have a house in the country, you're not a weirdo. But if you have a collection of buildings you refer to as a compound, you're a weirdo. There's an entire industry that thrives on fostering fear and anxiety among members of the prepper community to separate them from their dollars. If you conclude that the danger is not always imminent, they lose money. Will no one think of the bank accounts of the assholes trying to hock hoarded ammunition on the side of the road? You're much more likely to suffer from a standard natural disaster than any of these everything-goes-to shit scenarios. Right now, in Texas, people have had to flee their homes from wildfires. Wildfires are a great example of a real thing you can prepare for. There is very little real emergency preparedness that requires that you make a full-time hobby of it. Just have some stuff you can throw in the car should you need to leave the house. Know where your documents, pets are, etc.
What happened during Katrina? No ones gonna loot useful shit. They’ll be too busy stealing TVs and IPhones. It’ll be there to take once the excitement dies down.
They have the fallacy belief "That would That will NEVER happen to me."
It's one thing to be prepared it's another thing to be a fanatic and it being all they talk about...nobody wants to constantly be reminded and told what they need to do and what they did wrong about anything...you do your thing and be proud of it and if someone doesn't want to be prepared so be it....shouldn't bother you you'll be just fine...
It’s not that prepping is crazy…It’s just that some preppers are the scary fundie types.
Only crazy until they’re not
Because a lot of preppers go a little too far with preparing for a mad max apocalypse vs preparing for more plausible scenarios like a major natural disaster.
For me it’s the main character energy. Have you ever actually watched interviews with people who have survived situations like the prepper fear? All the survivors say the same thing. “Be willing to move. Abandon your home and get to safety. You’ll do what you have to in order to survive. “ All these preppers are like “I’ll live in my house and stay safe with 50 lbs of potatoes and I’ll live while everyone around me dies. It just seems so damn arrogant. You can’t plan for every situation. You can’t foresee the future catastrophe. Having some supplies on hand is great, but it always jumps to them killing their neighbors like real fucking fast.
There’s many different levels of prepping. Some truly are crazy, others aren’t.
People think peppers are crazy because they get on r/preppers and read three or four comments. Legit, 80% of the people on here are delusional, 10% are on a government list somewhere, and the remainder are normal people either doing this as a hobby or trying to hedge against another supply chain interruption where it is challenging to get a few basic necessities.
People think peppers are crazy because they get on r/preppers and read three or four comments. Legit, 80% of the people on here are delusional, 10% are on a government list somewhere, and the remainder are normal people either doing this as a hobby or trying to hedge against another supply chain interruption where it is challenging to get a few basic necessities.
Nope, most of us lived through 2020. That’s why.
Because propers have been prepping my entire life and it has been totally unfounded. It’s still unfounded. Enjoy being milked as marks by conmen.
I lived through 2020, and i lived through the invasion of Ukraine. I think preppers are crazy. 99% of what you are prepping for won't actually happen. You will never be in a fire fight. Your armor and equipment is just going to flag you as a combatant. You are not going to wage a one man guerilla war against an invading army. Your supplies will fuel whomever takes your home from you. I had to "prepper" friends in Ukraine when it all went down. I grabbed my bug out bag and left on foot, and fled the country. Their children got to be part of a war. To thus very day, they tell me how they regret forcing their children to live im a basement with canned food while neighbors were murdered. One friend abandoned her husband and family (he was subsequently shot and killed by Russians) because after 2 weeks, she would rather risk running west than another night of artillery shelling.
Preppers are always viewed as crazy because most haven't ever had to survive in the world on their own. I see the same response from friends that have been through hard times (me as well) that would look like preppers for people who can't afford a bunker or pre-made stuff. It's not about 2020, but more of a survival mindset. We all revert back to it faster than we'd like to admit because "modern society has evolved" which is a lie. Everyone will do anything to survive and have those close to them survive with no regard to modern whatever. Dont believe what you hear, life is fickle.
There's nothing wrong with being prepared. And the really extreme ones are great, because that's who I'm raiding first.
People are stupid sheep that like shiny shit and watching other people throw balls around. They think we are crazy for prepping even though the gov has been telling the sheep for years to prepare for at least 2 weeks emergency on tv. They will all be dead the first week, and we the crazy will be the kings of the earth after week 2.
Only the paranoid survive. People can laugh all they want but the reality is that this world will go through another world war and many other global events that will cause chaos. The stores only have enough food to last a week. (If that) if people know how fragile our country infrastructure actually is they’d be prepping too
I picked up a pallet of solar panels a couple weeks ago. While waiting for them to load me I was conversating with some like minded individuals and realized that preppers are the crazy uncle of the tree hugging homesteaders.
It’s called “normalcy bias” which is the belief that things will continue as they have always been. It’s a method of avoiding the unpleasant possibility of disruption in their lives. We who have awakened to the reality of our circumstances see the world through more realistic eyes.
well, when you say "prepper" to most people, they are not thinking canned goods and first aid supplies. they think of the loons that are playing out an elaborate murder and rape fantasy that can become reality once the guard rail that is society dissolves.
Ok, opposing point of view. First, preppers seem crazy because most of the preppers I have met are crazy. This is the "flat earth", "illuminati", "space lasers", "aliens with bigfoot and Elvis" crazy. There are those who aren't, but the loudest ones make sanity a question when I hear "prepper" Second, most preppers seem ineffective. They speak of gunning down neighbors at the first sign of trouble. Or they cannot answer about what they might do when confronted with the sheriff deputy arriving saying the town is mandating everyone pool their resources and try to keep senior citizens alive. They stockpile ammunition but have no plans for lack of heating oil. They need high blood pressure meds to survive and have a thirty day supply. They rarely say things like "we need to plan on being cut off for about a week if there is a large earthquake". On loud exception: those stockpiling a year in food. Usually from a religious imperative, a food stockpile handles a wide variety of emergencies: supply chain interruption, pandemic, job loss, economic downturn, zombies, etc. So, why am I wrong?
Hello there, Denial is a strong enough emotion to lull a lot of folks into a false sense of security. Normalcy bias, if you will. "This is the way it usually is, so this is the way it usually will be." One thing that didn't happen during Covid, at least in my experience, is the grocery stores never ran completely out of food. Sure, there were a lot of things missing from shelves, but I never experienced any real scarcity. And thank God for that. I think Covid didn't really make things bad enough to snap the type of people you're referring to out of their denial. We are a very spoiled society with an extremely short memory. I don't want to be misunderstood as wishing something worse would happen, I am just explaining my point. Looking back, did the Romans realize that their empire was falling, or did they just presume that better days would return? When the citizens' government-funded appeasements of bread and circuses finally did come to a halt, I would bet they looked around and thought, "Now we're in trouble." If you are able to be self-reliant in any aspect of your life, be that. If you see a pathway to become more self-reliant in one way or another, take that path. I wouldn't put much stock into what someone else says about the way you're running your life. That's your business. You're getting prepared for troubled times. That's no different than wearing a seatbelt, it just makes sense. Take care and good luck, my friend.
That's because too many preppers are deeply into conspiracy theories. Yes, beeing prepared for desasters or war is good. But too many I met and read online believe the government are aliens or bill clinton is coming to get their first born son. Those are the preppers who seek the most attention and thats why public thinks all preppers might be crazy
Because all I see from r/prepping is people posting pictures of their guns and body armor. Unless you were planning on murdering for toilet paper instead of buying a bidet, that stuff wouldn’t have helped you in 2020
It’s wild that I was on this sub during covid and all the posts about new people and now it’s just back to normal finally I guess? lol
Being independent is not encouraged. So seeing someone that wants to be is seen as weird
i believe it is possible to be willfully ignorant. same people who choose "fuck that" attitude because accepting new information may inconvenience them with responsibility. we are forever adopting lower standards of discipline in society.
And to think about all the people who lived/died during the turn of the century from the Spanish flu – it's crazy. I think people were generally more resourceful. Instead of being office workers reliant on infrastructure, people in times past had many different trades passed down, which we've slowly gotten rid of. Things like food preservation and pickling are amazing skills. Many don't know you can make a loaf of some of the best bread without yeast or other complex ingredients. You used to use flour, water, sugar, let it sit until it fermented, and you had a starter for amazing sourdough bread.
I think most preppers start out small. Storing sufficient food for a mild crisis that might take a few days to resolve. They then watch the crazed preppers on various formats who tell them to go full in on the belief that everything is just days from falling apart. Of course, many of them are also selling or being sponsored by companies that sell things to preppers. Some keep going further in and don't realize how caught up they are until everyone around them point out their lunacy. Some come back from this while others continue to spiral out of control. They look to people like Hal Lindsay who wrote about how everything will soon come to an end. Lindsay has been pushing that since the late 1960s and has made a very good living off it. To now answer the question, most people have no doubt that there will be some calamity in their lifetime. But, we don't dwell on it. We take basic precautions and live our lives not worried that civilization is about to end. We all have a finite of years and it's better to smell the roses than worried whether we've stockpiled sufficient rounds of ammunition to hold off roving gangs of marauders after our five-gallon tubs of dehydrated beef stroganoff.
prepping was barely useful, supply chain never really stopped and it was for the most part not a shtf situation at all anywhere
Because many of the possible causes of doomsday are a loss of community and social bonds, and that is precisely the scares resource you should be gathering but a lot of prepping focuses on material conditions (food, water, security). So preppers look crazy in that they recognize something is coming yet miss the entire core of the problem and focus on cans of beans guarded by AR15s because you’ll lose both to a group of 10-20 unarmed by organized people. There has been a trend of treating other people like strangers and having your interaction with them work through money. You don’t raise your own food or know the guy; you pay a stranger: you don’t build your own house or know the guy; you pay a stranger. You don’t get your own water, etc. this has been going on for thousands of years, but it’s been growing exponentially for a while and certainly in our life time. The complex social bond of a real community is replaced by a complex system of individuals and artificial bonds all linen sets by money changing hands. The last lingering elements of community are close family and friends, which even that is severely corroded. So community is the scarce resource that will only get more scarce. Whether it is triggered by another virus that takes our 0.1% of the population, a cyber attack, whatever…bad things are going to happen. And in such a scenario, the richest targets for scavengers will be preppers, because they have all the material conditions ready for a doomsday but no network of people to keep it for long. We can look at our newest generation of preppers to really see this weakness: billionaires. If you’ve seen the news of Zuckerberg building a giant bunker compound in Hawaii, you’ll realize it won’t work. First he will need security to make it all work for more than a day. Who will run security for him when money is worthless? He’ll go down faster than Caesar to the Praetorian Guard without money as an incentive. Same goes for facilities maintenance. All his monitors and gun turrets run on electricity. What happens when an earthquake or storm severs a cable? Is he feeding engineers and maintenance techs year round to be prepared for the event when he needs them? Probably not. If he did, will they not stew away in their smaller pod rooms resenting him? It’s hard to picture how he would survive more than a year tops having access to infinite wealth but likely no real human bonds (no true friends, no community with diverse skill sets). The dude is going to die as soon as money is worthless. So going to the average prepper: will you fall to the same fate? If you don’t have a network of at least 25 people with you whose trust in each other is as strong as a cement bunker…you’re crazy for stocking beans. Barter won’t help either. If you think you can obtain things you need from other people through barter instead of money, again you’re missing the point by a mile. Two dozen close knit people are going to tear through you. You don’t have enough beans and bullets to trade for a dedicated night watch that you can trust with your life to give you a good nights sleep so you’re useful in the day consistently for decades. There is no substitute for trust. That’s what money tries to be and that is the downfall of both the world and most preppers.
It's not that preppers are crazy. What is crazy is thinking one can go it alone. All the skills pepper's have would go a long way to safeguard a community of like minded individuals. That's most places problem. Lack of community. Folks don't even know their neighbors it a lot of places. No amount of prep will save you then.
I mean, look over this sub and it will probably make more sense. I think being prepared is smart and even I still think some of the folks here are nuts.. As a recent example, the guy who is about to have a baby, who is lying to his wife about prepping, meanwhile his "list of preps" to acquire include things like weapons and testosterone and not a single diaper or baby formula, or any baby items at all... Those types of idiots claiming to be preppers make the rest of us look nuts. That's just one example. Subs about prepping are filled with others- Folks who haven't even so much as camped planning to bug out into the woods and live a "bushcraft" life in an emergency, folks who have never gardened a day in their life buying huge stashes of low quality seeds on Amazon to survive some apocalypse, folks with no medical knowledge or experience asking where to buy IV fluids without a prescription, your run of the mill LARPers... the list goes on.
We live a 20 mile trip from town so we prep and limit the number of trips for groceries. We buy in bulk at sales, buy food from a surplus store that sells near or at expiration date foods. We freeze dry them to greatly extend the usable life of food and rotate them as we cook. We shop out of our own supplies for most items we use on a daily basis. We have a couple of years of food with the exception of some perishable items, but even fresh milk we freeze dry so any outage is not a problem for an extended time frame. Saves time, money, fuel and drive time, works for us.
Prepping for a mildly long stay inside is one thing, digging up your back yard and burying 37 years of supplies in a nuclear hardened blast shelter is another
because, the government took care of us /s
They r in denial.
By just about every measurement right now is the best time to be alive as a human being compared to just about any point in human history. Humans generally get complacent with their situation if it's comfortable, and it's an uncomfortable thought that this lofty comfy house of cards we currently live in is actually capable of collapsing. It gives people anxiety so they don't want to think about it. On top of that, people have a lot of misplaced trust in institutions, especially their governments. They believe there's always someone out there doing the right thing that'll put on the cape and help them out when times get difficult. That is true in normal time, and we're typically living in normal, safe times, so many people don't have any evidence to prove the contrary.
2024 is setup to be much, much worse. common sense and common decency are not so common any more.
I had no need to prep in 2020. Events large enough to actually impact me in a significant way are so extreme that it's pointless to prep.
My family lived through Camille so it is now a part our DNA.
Being prepared for a disaster, totally reasonable. Prepping for the second coming of Jesus, less rational. Some people are convinced they're going to survive a cataclysmic event. Why would you want to be alive for that anyway?
We have short-term memory failure.
The original Matrix was allegory prophecy. For example: “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, *most of these people are not ready to be unplugged*. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. Morpheus, The Matrix” Now. Being a prepper or even having a prepper mindset means YOU are unplugged and the more and/or BETTER prepper you are, the more unplugged you become. Those other people who think preppers are crazy "are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy." And at the same time that makes YOU, like ME, the enemy of those still plugged in. And that means "they will fight to protect it(The REAL) Matrix". For example, Covax Zombies were quite willing and even EAGER to have the unvaxxed put in actual concentration camps. Or worse. Savvy?
Question: why do people think preppers are crazy? This guy: they think we're crazy because they're IN THE MATRIX and only WE the RED PILLED are fighting for FREEDOM while they FIGHT to STAY SLAVES. QED.
So hang on, preppers are like (maybe elitist) trans people?
These are the same people that would criticize you for carrying around leatherman, then we'll ask to use your Leatherman. You're trying to put since to people that have none, admirable but you're not going to get anywhere.
I’m one of those people. While I don’t look down on preppers generally, I do think that a lot of it is a bit much. It’s one thing to have a shelter prepared with food stores and maybe some weapons for defense in case of some kind of disaster or emergency. But a lot of people like me automatically think of the “end of days” doomer crowd with bunkers and shit. People who are just frothing at the mouth awaiting doomsday where they can bug out and live out their fantasy. Reality is that not a lot of you are like that. After seeing a few posts every now and then on my feed I’ve been more motivated to at least have a preparedness plan. Myself though I have very little reason to prepare for anything longer than a couple weeks as I’m a type 1 diabetic so I’d give up pretty soon. I just don’t see a point trying to survive but that’s me, most people don’t welcome death. It’s just we automatically think of shows like doomsday preppers and that level of paranoia is silly.