Intellectually, I know with utter certainty that I’m fine. I have money, gold, food, ammo, fuel, redundant income streams, a paid-for house, no debt, reasonable health, marketable skills, and a pretty good mindset. And yet everytime I go to a gas station, CostCo, WinCo, or Murdoch’s I feel like “must buy all the things!!11!!11!”. My brain knows that I’m going to be fun, but my gut keeps feeling like I’m wildly vulnerable.
And, I have learned from experience*, that when its a choice between guts vs. grey matter…. trust your gut.
But, wow, with the media barrage of potential WW3.1, inflation, and a host of other things…well, it can make even the most prepared person start to second-guess their level of preparedness.
The obvious answer from the crowd is “Well, stop watching the news.” Uhm..no. Thats like saying ‘if youre worried all the time about getting hit by a train, stop looking down the tracks to see if a train is coming.’
On the other hand…I f was Joe Average, with less than $500 in the bank , a car payment, a student loan payment, a mortgage, and a family…well, I’d be pretty anxious these days.
So, whats a survivalist to do when , despite the evidence in front of them, they still feel vulnerable and unprepared against the uncertain future? Well, I find sitting down and reviewing the numbers on the spreadsheets to be a bit calming. When you have hard numbers in front of you that say “Yeah, you’ve got enough food for XXX days”, “You have enough money to cover you for X months of unemployment”, “you have enough stored fuel to keep you going for X months”, and that sort of thing…. that takes a lot of the anxiety away.
I have every intention of enjoying my life and not living a life of 24/7 doom-n-gloom. But, when things reach the levels that they have as of late it is pretty hard to not have your head on a swivel all the time.
* = As Mark Twain said, Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.
We can’t be fully prepared for anything because that Murphy character will always raise his ugly head. That being said, we can do the best we can to minimize our risk.
Follow your gut has repeatedly proven to be the best approach to life. Our subconscious is often much smarter than our conscious mind. Normalcy bias can be deadly.
I quit watching the news when I quit watching TV, 30+ years ago. I get my news online, where I can choose more reliable sources. Why would you watch the news, when you know they’re lying about every word other than “the” and “and”?
No TV in 30 Years??
But you have missed..er….i
t’s coming to me….
give me more time…….
I’ll tell you in a minute.
Or two.
Well maybe four.
Or five or so.
Still coming up with something. Please just give me a little more time.
Found it..
you missed…
Scooby-Doo
Just Google what I learned from scooby doo to see why.
Try to find the thing you’ve missed. Your brain is telling you something.
n
A bolt hole in case you suddenly become persona non grata.
It would suck to be coming home and notice a CNN Chopper and various Black Vehicles around your place. You turn away to leave quietly and think “Who do I trust now”?
After all we DO now have a Ministry of Disinformation, Yes Comrade? The Black Maria cannot be far away now.
A friend of mine has one, it’s a abandoned looking tool shed. No windows, no door, wood fire scorch marks on the floor from a tweeker visit. Under the flooring after you get out your screwdriver is the windows, door and other useful items.
All stored in a root cellar style box of plywood well sealed with epoxy paint. There is even a sand point well down there with a pump and spare leathers vacc sealed.
Before this time He had that shed “Locked Up” full of useful stuff until tweekers visited and stole everything they didn’t destroy.
Just a thought.
With the real estate market about to roll over like Michael Moore at a Golden Corral, you may find that ultimate retreat property soon!
What are you basing this on? There is no overlap with what caused the 2008 crash, there is still a home shortage. The rising interest rates may slow the run up in prices but there are no indication prices are about to drop…other than wishful thinking.
I don’t think the market will crash as far as I’m Sid in 2008, but there are already signs of a correction, especially at the upper end of the market.
Don’t forget that real estate is the ultimate local asset. There are parts of the country where there is an excess of houses and parts where there is a shortage.
Many of the places with shortages are big cities that have intentionally limited supply. I don’t see why anyone would buy there to begin with, but that’s just me….
Not trying to ‘prove’ anything or start a fight – just some thoughts:
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/05/is-housing-bubble-thats-about-to-crash.html?m=1
As a Survivalist I should be in “Raise the Drawbridge, Man the Ramparts” mode, but I just don’t seem to find the energy or inclination. Logic tells me that a nuclear war would lead to Mutually Assured Destruction, and any World Leader in his Right Mind would see that as reason enough not to take that step for which there would be no return. But I don’t think Biden or Putin are in there right mind. Then there are the Wild Cards, North Korea’s Dear Leader and whomever is running Iran’s lunatic asylum. So that leads me to accept that our future is uncertain at best, and I’m being optimistic. I’m 70yo and suprisingly unafraid, trusting in my relationship with God to get me through.
I don’t know if there is such a thing as ‘Too Prepared’. The Gulf Oil Spill taught me that something out of left field will render nearly all preps useless if they all have to be transported in one trip. Pre-positioned and set in place at a safe as possible location is your only option.
If I were in your shoes with preps (I’m not, not nearly so), I’d probably focus on any potential health issues that need taking care of. Without your health, you don’t have much.
As eluded to by above contributors the location element may be the missing piece of the puzzle. Take a long quiet walk to do a mental thinking checklist assessment of your status and then prioritize vulnerabilities on the strategic or macro level. Having the guns, food, cash, and camper gear is cool, but is there any other categories that if neglected or put off till later will have a catastrophic effect overall come crunch time. For want of a nail, as the old phrase goes. I have some of my own shortcoming categories like most folks but getting to as best of a tactical and strategic location is a top tier category overall. Us LMI individuals follow the news/conflicts for history lessons for those kernels of wisdom to avoid those bad things.
Stay frosty.
“‘if youre worried all the time about getting hit by a train, stop looking down the tracks to see if a train is coming.’” – keep looking for the train cause ya might have to cross the track, but more importantly, stay well back from the tracks – kinda like “trust, but verify”. I do what I can as far as not taking on any debt, being careful about my personal security, my health, and my “state of mind” – but there is an awful lot that is so far outside of my hula hoop that I can’t even see it, much less have any effect on it. And as far as long-term “survival” in a TEOTWAWKI scenario, being like “The Man” character in The Road, yeah, that’s not for me – not at all.
i’m confident in my preps but the other guys have me concerned. extended family, friends, neighbors, little ol ladies, kids. how can i turn them away? the preps won’t last a farting spell like that. and when the ebt stops, what then?
Mmmmm…let’s see….. COEDS! How many coeds do you have stored in the basement?
take a look at real life and not conjecture. In the Ukraine the people hiding in the basement at the steel plant ran out of ammo, food water and medical gear (gangrene and amputations and no bandages) in under a month.
What makes people think any of us could do any better?
When the real SHTF the survivors are either stocked up like the US military or they GTFO like their hair is on fire, which in some cases it was.
Those people weren’t “hiding out” they were hostages and human shields. No preps were made for their survival just the Azov nazis and foreign mercs.
Part of the problem is not knowing how far they will go and what technology they have that we don’t know about. If your looking down the tracks – what if they have the technology to make trains silent and invisible (just a ludicrous example, I know)
As far as food – are we talking months or years? They are openly destroying food processing plants, killing millions of birds, not feeding the dairy cows etc. My thought is, buy while you can. Even though we know it is coming – it will still seem sudden when it really hits.
Yep, I fall prey to that feeling, too; “Ooh!, those are on sale, I should buy more.” Despite having as many or more than I can reasonably use. Uncertainty is hard to wrestle with. If you knew an “event” would last a month, and you had 6 weeks of every supply, you could rest easy. If you just don’t know how long, or from whence, or what form an event might take, more is always better. And at this point just hedging inflation is a worthy pursuit; nothing’s going to get any cheaper.
You can’t ever have enough…stuff…the peril of the American mindset. Focus more on skills, abilities and fitness….I am way happier since I started working on improve my skills and fitness. Can you reproduce enough in your garden for seeds for the next 3 years? Fix all of your vehicles and house? First aid x 10????
Elon musk “might” have enough to build a self sustaining ecosystem that is independent from all the vagaries of risks in our world. If he builds it on mars and the he still has solar flares, aliens and general bad luck/weather to contend with…for everyone else, keep grinding. If you’re here, you’re ahead of 95% of the population, but those 95 grasshoppers are going to show up to jack your ant hill at some point, so diversify your risk to make more ants out of grasshoppers and stack everything deep enough to provide for your colony and keep out the horde.