The thing I never quite understood about the prepper thing is, even suppose you are a real master of hoarding lots of long-shelf prepackaged food and ammo - beyond a certain point, you are going to have to become a FARMER if you are going to sustain you and your family (and neighbors? A lot of the prepper mindset seems to presuppose zero cooperation with anyone and that everyone will be a homesteader straight out of American Western mythologies).
I’m going by the typical things that preppers tend to say online and IRL - as if they’ll just “live off the land”. That they’ll just subsist off of shooting rabbits and deer. I always ask them, and I think most people don’t know - how many acres do you think it takes for a hunter-gatherer to sustain themselves, per person? Even in the most ideal of habitats?
And yet - many of the things being hoarded and the skills being talked about most often seem to revolve around guns and ammo and storage of (pre-packaged) food, and not a whole lot about growing food.
I dunno, maybe the people more serious about it realize the emphasis would have to be on having seeds ready and deep knowledge about farming. But the more vocal just seem to think all they’ll need is many rifles, lots of bullets and bars of gold or something…lol, what the fuck would the value of gold be in the most dire of circumstances, but I digress… 🤣
If the disaster is bad enough you only have to survive off of your hoard until enough other people die off that one can scavenge. COVID showed us how brittle JIT supply chains are. How many people die in 3 months without access to daily medication? How many broken arms or ankles go septic or heal badly? How many staph infections, bad teeth, tetanus, botulism or whatever that used to kill and now we can get ready treatment for? Just got to stay in the bunker until all the more dependent and unlucky die then you can come out and spend the rest of your short life fighting over the remains of technological civilization with the other preppers.
What gets me to is just age factor. If your old enough to have a property your all hoarded up in you are likely to old to handle what comes after. At the very least its not much of a life. Also you have this property but the only thing that makes it yours is the legal framework around that. Its wierd. My prepper thing is like that cyanide and happiness where the one guy says he has everything he needs to deal with the apocalypse in his backpack and his friend says that can’t possibly hold everything you need and the first friend pulls out a noose.
Farming isn’t something that is easily picked up and takes years of practice. Which means that the ones who realize your point end up actually just becoming homesteaders and aren’t really labeled as preppers. Off-grid living does have a fair bit of popularity as well. Homesteading is really difficult, and many fail. It isn’t something that you can drop a few thousand in as a hobby and act like you’ve got it figured out. Homesteading means actually moving and living your ideals. So imo a lot of what you describe is that prepping can be treated like a hobby, something you obsess over and throw some money at to feel more protected. Homesteading requires reworking your entire lifestyle and can’t really be done as a hobby. The ones who have made that lifestyle change aren’t described as preppers, they aren’t waiting for an event to suddenly change their lifestyle where they have to adapt. They have already forcefully changed their reality so they could make the changes on their own terms and timeline.
I agree with you, hoarding might help you in the aftermath of a storm, but isn’t going to do much in an actual collapse. Even farmers would be in danger of starving if fuel became unavailable. Subsistence farming and modern mechanized farming are very different.
Having had my fair share of first-hand experience as a child/adolescent with various communes of different stripes, I’m aware of the “back to the land” movement that many hippies went through - and then of course, nearly all of them abandoned. There are very few of those left in America. For good reason.
Farming is fucking hard work. When I see preppers idly talking about “living off the land”, I just chuckle. I’ve heard that shit since college, but I’ve seen it as a kid, and…well, these arm-chair asshats are not going to be able to cut that lifestyle any better than a lot of rich-kid hippies were back in the 60s and 70s…
Like you said - someone cannot just do that kind of thing as a hobbyist or via spending a bit of money here and there. Having a cache of things for an emergency and/or bug-out bags for fleeing wild fires is one thing, doing subsistence farming for a lifestyle - very different things. People trying to make a real go at homesteading - hey, more power to them if that’s what moves them.
Also, I grew up among Amish/Mennonites. Mennonite practices vary wildly, but most don’t forgo modern conveniences. But even in the case of the Amish…there is a fair amount of “cheating”, shall we say… 😉 They might do better than a lot of people under a system collapse, but I still think even for them it might be an adjustment. No more “borrowing” an English neighbor’s tractor under cover of night, or buying a refrigerator or freezer as a “gift” for an English neighbor.
Really you have to outlive 99.9999% of the population to have a chance at surviving as a hunter-gatherer. Industrial agriculture has increased our population well beyond the actual carrying capacity of the land.
That might not be enough nines. There’s a lot of humans.
Industrial agriculture has increased our population well beyond the actual carrying capacity of the land.
We could feed everyone on earth with a fraction of the food the world produces, capitalism forces most of it to be thrown out because someone can’t make money from it. Just go look at the dumpsters behind every grocery store, restaurant, etc. - they will be full of food that the store has deemed unsellable.
Yeah, that’s another whole kettle of fish, but you are right. And it is sickening when you learn about intentional measures being used by various businesses to prevent dumpster diving/freeganism.
They don’t just do that with food, by the way…IIRC, the “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy” doc covered both purposefully ruining food and consumer products…
The thing I never quite understood about the prepper thing is, even suppose you are a real master of hoarding lots of long-shelf prepackaged food and ammo - beyond a certain point, you are going to have to become a FARMER if you are going to sustain you and your family (and neighbors? A lot of the prepper mindset seems to presuppose zero cooperation with anyone and that everyone will be a homesteader straight out of American Western mythologies).
I’m going by the typical things that preppers tend to say online and IRL - as if they’ll just “live off the land”. That they’ll just subsist off of shooting rabbits and deer. I always ask them, and I think most people don’t know - how many acres do you think it takes for a hunter-gatherer to sustain themselves, per person? Even in the most ideal of habitats?
And yet - many of the things being hoarded and the skills being talked about most often seem to revolve around guns and ammo and storage of (pre-packaged) food, and not a whole lot about growing food.
I dunno, maybe the people more serious about it realize the emphasis would have to be on having seeds ready and deep knowledge about farming. But the more vocal just seem to think all they’ll need is many rifles, lots of bullets and bars of gold or something…lol, what the fuck would the value of gold be in the most dire of circumstances, but I digress… 🤣
If the disaster is bad enough you only have to survive off of your hoard until enough other people die off that one can scavenge. COVID showed us how brittle JIT supply chains are. How many people die in 3 months without access to daily medication? How many broken arms or ankles go septic or heal badly? How many staph infections, bad teeth, tetanus, botulism or whatever that used to kill and now we can get ready treatment for? Just got to stay in the bunker until all the more dependent and unlucky die then you can come out and spend the rest of your short life fighting over the remains of technological civilization with the other preppers.
What gets me to is just age factor. If your old enough to have a property your all hoarded up in you are likely to old to handle what comes after. At the very least its not much of a life. Also you have this property but the only thing that makes it yours is the legal framework around that. Its wierd. My prepper thing is like that cyanide and happiness where the one guy says he has everything he needs to deal with the apocalypse in his backpack and his friend says that can’t possibly hold everything you need and the first friend pulls out a noose.
Farming isn’t something that is easily picked up and takes years of practice. Which means that the ones who realize your point end up actually just becoming homesteaders and aren’t really labeled as preppers. Off-grid living does have a fair bit of popularity as well. Homesteading is really difficult, and many fail. It isn’t something that you can drop a few thousand in as a hobby and act like you’ve got it figured out. Homesteading means actually moving and living your ideals. So imo a lot of what you describe is that prepping can be treated like a hobby, something you obsess over and throw some money at to feel more protected. Homesteading requires reworking your entire lifestyle and can’t really be done as a hobby. The ones who have made that lifestyle change aren’t described as preppers, they aren’t waiting for an event to suddenly change their lifestyle where they have to adapt. They have already forcefully changed their reality so they could make the changes on their own terms and timeline.
I agree with you, hoarding might help you in the aftermath of a storm, but isn’t going to do much in an actual collapse. Even farmers would be in danger of starving if fuel became unavailable. Subsistence farming and modern mechanized farming are very different.
The ultimate preppers are just called Amish.
Having had my fair share of first-hand experience as a child/adolescent with various communes of different stripes, I’m aware of the “back to the land” movement that many hippies went through - and then of course, nearly all of them abandoned. There are very few of those left in America. For good reason.
Farming is fucking hard work. When I see preppers idly talking about “living off the land”, I just chuckle. I’ve heard that shit since college, but I’ve seen it as a kid, and…well, these arm-chair asshats are not going to be able to cut that lifestyle any better than a lot of rich-kid hippies were back in the 60s and 70s…
Like you said - someone cannot just do that kind of thing as a hobbyist or via spending a bit of money here and there. Having a cache of things for an emergency and/or bug-out bags for fleeing wild fires is one thing, doing subsistence farming for a lifestyle - very different things. People trying to make a real go at homesteading - hey, more power to them if that’s what moves them.
Also, I grew up among Amish/Mennonites. Mennonite practices vary wildly, but most don’t forgo modern conveniences. But even in the case of the Amish…there is a fair amount of “cheating”, shall we say… 😉 They might do better than a lot of people under a system collapse, but I still think even for them it might be an adjustment. No more “borrowing” an English neighbor’s tractor under cover of night, or buying a refrigerator or freezer as a “gift” for an English neighbor.
Really you have to outlive 99.9999% of the population to have a chance at surviving as a hunter-gatherer. Industrial agriculture has increased our population well beyond the actual carrying capacity of the land.
That might not be enough nines. There’s a lot of humans.
We could feed everyone on earth with a fraction of the food the world produces, capitalism forces most of it to be thrown out because someone can’t make money from it. Just go look at the dumpsters behind every grocery store, restaurant, etc. - they will be full of food that the store has deemed unsellable.
Yeah, that’s another whole kettle of fish, but you are right. And it is sickening when you learn about intentional measures being used by various businesses to prevent dumpster diving/freeganism.
They don’t just do that with food, by the way…IIRC, the “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy” doc covered both purposefully ruining food and consumer products…
Yup, especially shoes and clothes.
Yeah, but we couldn’t feed everyone in the world if we had to rely on the natural environment.
There’s just too many of us and not enough good living areas, so we’re stuck in the trap of agriculture.
99.9999% of the current world population is just under 8,000 people.
Yeah, definitely at least another 9
sorry i meant that backwards, 8,200 is how many folks are left if you remove 99.9999% of the population!
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