this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Prepping gets a bad rap from the crazy people building bunkers and zombie traps that people saw on reality tv.
I look at what my grandparents had. They had a nice garden and canned quite a bit of what they grew. They had tools and enough stuff on hand to do basic maintenance and repairs on roofs, plumbing and cars. They sewed quilts and baked their own bread regularly. They had enough cash saved to make sudden purchases for anything else. They had a shotgun for emergencies.
That doesn't sound crazy or paranoid, but resilient. I know most people can't do all of that but it would be nice to get closer to the mindset that governments and companies are nice but may not always be able or willing to help you.
The way I look at it is, the easiest 10% of the prep might get you most of the benefits.
A few weeks worth of water, a few days worth of tinned food, that kind of thing.
I understand the mindset, but civilization hinges on working together. Being resilient enough to survive on your own is rarely going to involve growing some significant portion of your own calories for an urban population. Being handy will certainly help in general, and having a method to repel bad actors are useful in a complete collapse, but relying on gasoline powered vehicles doesn't make sense if you think society is going to fail.
That's the thing, they didn't think society was going to fail, even though they'd been through the depression, a world war, the oil crisis, blizzards etc and it never came to that. They weren't the only ones either, they were essentially in a suburb and they knew their neighbors well
What I'm saying is, either civilization is going to fail or it isn't. If it is, urban centers are going to collapse and a lot of people are going to die and most gasoline cars will be useless in a couple years. If it isn't, utilizing the frameworks of civilization to handle disasters will be as effective as anything else we can do, hence no need for extreme resilience (growing you own food, canning, making your own clothing) or rugged individualism.