Cruising around the internet today, I got to thinking about the various survivalists I’ve known and met. In gaming, you have ‘casuals’ who are players who don’t take the game seriously. They play for fun, maybe with a few friends, but they don’t schedule hours-long ‘raids’, spend endless hours testing strategies, or basically immerse themselves up to their eyebrows in the game. On the other side, you have the hardcore gamers for whom the game is practically a second-job. They min/max, research game mechanics, learn exploits, and even buy (with real money) better gear to enable them to pwn noobs.
Most of the survivalists I’ve met are somewhere between ‘casuals’ and ‘hardcore’. I have met some who felt preparedness was a lifestyle – every vehicle was a potential BOV, they never left home without their gear, and if you carefully analyzed their clothing from head to toe it was all ‘tactical’ or ‘operator’ brands.
But, I’ve also met some whose entire depth of preparedness didnt amount to much more than what FEMA recommends in their pamphlets. And..I’ve met some who are so far down the preparedness rabbit hole you’d only meet them when they make their bi-annual trip to CostCo.
I vacillate between ‘lifestyle’ and ‘hobby’. I suppose now that I’ve gotten most of the grunt work out of the way I could ease up off the gas a bit..and I think thats what I’ve done. I’ve got most of the things I think I’ll need (you can never have all the things you want), so at this point I’m mostly in a ‘maintenance mode’…making sure things are topped off, stuff is rotated, and even making plans for a future that doesn’t involve eating out of pouches while manning roadblocks to deter looters.
But, as we all know, it’s complacency that we have to worry about. It’s the day we leave the pistol at home, the day we don’t pack the rain gear, the time we don’t check the batteries in the flashlight, the day we don’t listen to the news…..that’s when we wind up stumbling into A Bad Situation.
It seems like every year something comes up that gets the crowds shouting that this is the year it happens. In my time as a survivalist I have gone through the heyday of the militia movement (which broadly coincides with the Clinton years), Y2k, Bird Flu, Peak Oil, 2012, and a host of other supposed apocalypses. Still here. In fact, other than running the generator a time or two, there hasn’t been anything that’s sent me into the Vast Prep Warehouse. Is that a bad thing? Hell no…I’ll die a happy survivalist if when I pass away I never needed any of the things I have. I want a life where the electricity is always on, the water is always hot, the fridge is always full, and the streets are quiet and peaceful. I have all this stuff because I know that those times aren’t guaranteed and it can happen like that <snaps fingers>.
But…I have slacked off a bit and need to start being more…mindful…of how things are. Like anything else you do day after day after day, you eventually start letting your guard down and thats when you get caught off-guard. Complacency, man…it’ll screw you over every chance it gets.
C-Zero
Yeah I get you all the way on the complacency thing. I also like the way things are, pizza places I love, bowhunting trips with my guys, going on vacations with the wife, etc. but look at it like life insurance of course. Prepping is a good thing,ncause if the SHTF, you and you’d fam is set, or at least a lot more set than most. Better to have and not need, than to ….
Guilty as charged, at times. I need to be better at rotating certain items. Need to invest more time in shooting certain platforms. Need to learn to enjoy a sunset for more than 5 seconds.
It’s a constant struggle. Watching the news has always motivated me to keep charging. It’s easy to see that at some point, perhaps not so far in the future, everything I’ve done up here on the mountain will come into play.
But as I grow older, just maintaining the current retreat is hard enough, and improving on my situation becomes more difficult.
What happened to the blog? 🙁
I had to shut it down awhile because I was a bit overwhelmed with a number of things here at home. But life is pretty much back to normal now, or better, in some ways.
Glad to hear it was nothing more. You had good stuff. We’ll look for it to make a comeback sometime.
The few crappy situations I’ve found myself in has told me one thing. It is the mental part of realizing things are headed in a bad direction sooner than most people would helped immensely. The gear and supplies are great to have, but my limited experience is that being able to dodge the brunt of the storm is most important. Forget to rotate your food? No biggie. Let normalcy bias creep in? Now that is a problem.
Funny you should mention. I have a post on normalcy bias queued for Monday.
roger that. got most of the “buying” done but been putting off the “doing” part. at first figured there would be time post-shtf for the doing but have come to realize the error there. just can’t get motivated to get started though. kinda burned out and trying to enjoy life a little more b4 it changes forever. and kinda beginning to wonder if i want to survive what’s coming.
I’m probably in the same place that you describe. Lots of gear, not as much training yet as I’d like but a lot more than most. Still no concrete survival bunker on a remote property, may never have that.
I’ve had some smaller sudden problems and even emergencies that have made me appreciate the various prepper training, though. When things go wrong, it’s almost always when it decides to go wrong and you have to respond with what you have on you, or at most in the car, and there’s no time to go look it up.
The giant poisonous snake that showed up in my yard while I was changing the oil. Sudden like in a couple of hours serious illness of a family member requiring hospitalization and immediate time off of work and changes to family lifestyle. Wildfire that got out of hand and threatened our neighborhood out of the blue one afternoon. Never mind the escaped violent felon with police helicopters and dogs chasing him through our neighborhood one evening (pro tip- don’t go outside all armed up when that happens).
Prepper training that includes drills or walking through what to do is a good thing to have that can help you from getting too complacent, and it helps keep that proper IF THIS THEN (I do) THAT mindset you need to deal with an emergency when it crops up. I think of it like Boy Scouts only for adults.