Thread: Prepper vs Prudent

I have always been interested in nature and how people lived off the land. I believe I could do that but yikes, no practice planned. I have tasted things like cat tails and wild celery. I am with big spender when it comes to SHTF prep. I am 20 minutes walk to horse and how much crap do you need to carry ? Enough to get what you need to survive off the land and avoid everybody else. Including the spender clan.

So I decided to re-visit this thread after yesterday, I was thinking about the show "Doomsday Preppers" and how at the end of each show the "Experts" give the astronimical odds of whatever catastrophe was used as a Prepping excuse..

I just thought about the fact that the most outlandish odds were always given for an Asteroid/Comet strike, and I was thinking that perhaps the Show's Experts might want to eat a bit of Crow since one hit yesterday in Russia and injured 1000+ people... A slightly larger chunk o rock, or even a slightly different trajectory and things could have been much worse...

As they keep saying it isn't a matter of if, only a matter of when

Sorry just had to share my morbid sense of humor

Well at least the asteroid missed us that day. Wonder what the odds were on both happening at the same time ?

I watch all the prepper shows, I pick up a thing here & there, but watch it for the crazies that Nat. Geo. finds.
From day 1 I have wondered who the "Prepper Experts" were & where did they get their expert status.
There must be a "Yoda Prepper" out there somewhere ??
I think we should come up with a reality T.V. idea, then title ourselves experts.

If you think about it there are lots of ways to prep. The question is prep for what? You could count the hours I watch TV per year on 1 hand so I don't know about the shows you guys speak of. I have friends that prep for earth quakes and some for economic disaster and some for everything. I don't think any of them are crazy at all. When my great aunt passed away there was the chore of selling her belongings and cleaning out her house etc. Some in my family thought she was nuts for having 8 cases of beans in 1 closet and cases of this and that stashed around the house. They thought she was so tight that she had these things because she bought them on sale. My aunt was very well off and they just thought it was all so weird. Then I mentioned that she had lived through the great depression as a young woman. Maybe the memory of not knowing when or if you would eat was to much for her chance going through again. Maybe she knew that no matter what Uncle Sam says or does things could get real bad no matter how much money you had. There aren't many of those people left alive these days to talk to but I bet they wouldn't think prepping is any crazier than buying insurance.

My grandmother lived through 2 world wars.
Her pantry was stuffed with large amounts of sugar, salt, coffee, and flour.
Cases and cases of the stuff. Those were the things that were unavailable / rationed for a part of her life.
In and of itself, prepping is a good thing.

I think it's a bit ridiculous to project one's circumstances and values onto somebody else. There are infinite disaster scenarios for which any given person is absolutely unprepared.

The asteroid in Russia is a good illustration. With the current technology plenty of things are possible, but what is being done is a matter of cost/benefit analysis. You could monitor for asteroids of the size the one that hit in Russia, but there are a lot of those and they hit the Earth all the time, mostly in uninhabited areas (2/3 of the Earth's surface is oceans). So you could be spending trillions of dollars every year to minimize the impact of events with impact of trillion dollars every few hundred or few thousand of years - it is simply a bad policy. But it makes perfect sense to monitor and prepare for asteroids of the size of the one which passed us by at about the same time but in the opposite direction. Those are far cheaper to detect and track/predict accurately, and their impact upon collision with Earth is many orders of magnitude larger - the cost/benefit is a far better proposition.

Again, just an illustration of my larger point that what I want to be prepared for in my life circumstances probably has nothing to do with what you want to be prepared for in yours, because I may have completely different lifestyle and values than yours. The transferability is simply not there, but as with everything this could easily be used for spending/making a lot of money directly (e.g. preppers) or indirectly (e.g. entertainment).

I keep coming back to this thread over the years hehehe

Seems that another old word for a "new" trend is coming back

"Homesteading"

Of course there are very very few places that still have actual "Homesteading" by true definition,

But

There is a new idea that building "Mini" homes or cabins on a small plot of land to raise, food and critters without having a mortgage and preferably with being totally or partially of the grid is becoming popular again..
The idea is live life with less, and owe little or nothing to anyone, making enough of a living by barter and sales of things from the land to be self sufficient..
The only real hard cash needed if everything is working right is enough to pay property taxes each year...

Seems that all new homesteaders have a Youtube channel however

Originally Posted by gssixgun

Seems that all new homesteaders have a Youtube channel however

And that's the new in an old trend. Double check to see if they have high gain antennas to pull in internet, TV and phone.

I don't know about all this. On the prepping front, we live in a hurricane prone area, and so we keep the basics for 2 weeks survival in place without outside support on hand. We also have "go bags" in case we have to leave quickly.

On the homesteading front, I find it intriguing, but a thing that has passed me by given that I'm headed to 70 now. I lived one summer on the western slope of the Rockies in Colorado on what had been an original homestead; however, it had electricity and a pump for a gravity water storage tank set-up. It was great, but when we went back in the winter, it was considerably less fun. I have to say that having the experience creates a certain yearning for a self-sufficient life from time to time.