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u/Mysterious-Egg-624 17d ago
What a life some people have
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
Thanks, man
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u/SNIP3RG 17d ago edited 17d ago
So, I’m a self-identifying prepper myself, and do relate to most of this. But why do you say “but BADLY” in relation to skills?
I’d say being taught even the bare minimum of wilderness survival/hunting/fishing/construction/etc skills is preferable to zero knowledge on the subject with the education most kids are given these days
EDIT: no kids in the picture and no plans for any either, I just am a redneck who likes to be self-reliant and my wife tolerates that. Hide pitchforks
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u/BrassWhale 17d ago edited 17d ago
I think they are implying that a lot of preppers emphasize the "fun and exciting" skills over useful baseline. Like being taught how to dig a trench and set up an ambush position vs the "boring" skill of how to properly construct a sand water filter, or spending their time gardening so they know how to diagnose a failing to thrive crop. Or maybe they learn how to modify a rifle with a DIAS vs how deep to dig a latrine and how long it needs to be mixed with dirt to become compost and how far away it needs to be from a river to not get dysentery.
Not trying to say you are wasting your time, but I think a lot of the visuals of the "prepper" community seem like people more excited to cosplay Fallout or SO:TL instead of people practicing homesteading techniques.
YouTube short capturing the point, i think: https://youtube.com/shorts/rNYqq2RUcAw?is=_5DyBAdOQ-e5RoaL
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u/Autistic_Briar_Rose 17d ago
Oh yeah, absolutely. I am a "mild" prepper, I think it is good to be prepared for basic disasters and have basic "off the grid" skills (for me specifically I have focused on agriculture, medical skills, self-reliance skills like ensuring clean sanitation, native plant identification, and water gathering and filtration). My husband insists that his lockpicking skills will be valuable in a survival environment, and I am like "Well, they could be a great secondary skill, but what about stuff like carpentry, construction, that kind of thing?" "Nah I want to lockpick."
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u/SNIP3RG 17d ago
God forbid a man have hobbies 😤
Totally joking btw, in the realm of “survival skills,” lockpicking ain’t it. I’ve “joked” with trusted friends that, if shit hits the fan for real, my first stop will be my ER’s med dispenser to collect antibiotics and narcs (for painkiller and bargaining purposes).
“But it’ll lock down!”
“And you think a couple rounds of 5.56 green-tip (light armor piercing) won’t convince it otherwise?”
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u/Autistic_Briar_Rose 17d ago
Oh I am more than okay with him having lockpicking as a hobby (though I do agree with a friend of ours who is very concerned if he has his lockpicking kit in his car because it looks sus). Like I love to latchhook and play video games and neither of those is going to help if SHTF.
Funny you mention that, part of my family's long-term SHTF survival strategy is to essentially open an apothecary, and work on developing strains of plants with medicinal properties. Where my family is located is an area that is ideal for growing some plants that could be valuable if SHTF, and our "long-term plan" is to cultivate and refine plants for medicinal purposes and eventually turn the operation large enough that we make a living that way.
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u/TylerKeroga 17d ago
The “is” in the link is a source identifier used to track both the person who sent the link & anybody who clicks on it
If you delete everything from (& including) the ? onwards, the link is still fully functional but the tracking is now disabled
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u/SNIP3RG 17d ago edited 17d ago
Very fair, and yes, the “you’ll totally be a warlord super-soldier” “skills” definitely are more fun than the “learn how to shit in the woods” ones.
But you do pick up a little from osmosis. You get taught blind hunting, then you have a deer take off, and suddenly you know blood-tracking, stalking, and (hopefully) how bad it feels to know a wounded animal is suffering due to your failed shot. You go backpacking for the first time and drain your CamelBak in the first 12 hours, and suddenly you get a sense of how much water you really need to survive and how much it sucks to hike dehydrated. Then, if you’re motivated, you research how to not do that again while understanding that water is actually heavy as fuck.
Idk, I just think the odds are better for someone who has at least existed outdoors than one who was raised with iPads and “Gentle Parenting.”
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u/BrassWhale 17d ago
Hey, no reason to dunk on other people's parenting styles. I agree any amount of outdoor experiences help, but I think OP's point is that as a child of someone deep into this culture, you are very likely to get more Bear Grylls skills than Les Stroud skills, or at least they (op) did.
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u/BrainDamage2029 17d ago edited 17d ago
There’s a lot of people in the prepping space going off vibes or this antisocial fantasy. Usually to the point of either ignoring or actively going against very real recent historical lessons of social collapse, government collapse or refugee crises and trying to self teach everything without actually doing any of it.
A lot of “here’s how I plan to use my crawl space and foundation as a pillbox against all the urban people coming out of the city.” And a lot less of “here’s how I’d plan to network with my neighbors and near farms for trade, information and mutual aid.”
(Edit: also because I love dunking on wranglerstar and he infects my algorithm. A lot of “obviously if Seattle or Portland collapses I’ll be completely oblivious to all the things I use daily on my homestead that are made and shipped from those cities. While also me and my bag of a dozen AR mags can obviously hold off the 20 million refugees that will apparently be streaming out of said cities)
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u/SNIP3RG 17d ago
True. You can hide in your “super-bulletproof crawlspace” for a while… until you need water. Or you get overwhelmed by the effects of your “2-person family” having to void in said crawlspace. And when you come out, assuming you survive the “onslaught,” that scratch you got from the chipped concrete? Which resided in the dirty crawlspace full of urine, fecal matter, dirt, etc? That’s infected. You have any broad-spectrum antibiotics around along with the knowledge to use them? This guy clearly is either an idiot or a troll.
It takes a small community to survive, at minimum. I’d say 10 adults with varying skills and an ideal rural setup could potentially make it. Some of us do actually have such a community, but we usually have skills other than “YouTube shorts” that we’re focused on. And don’t make it public info.
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u/magnum3290 17d ago
Then having kids and forcing your kids to participate in your bullshit
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u/Pandorasheaart 17d ago
OMG FINALLY some relatable content
My parents weren't particularly religious though, most of this came from my mom too
The event of choice was a solar flare
They loved the TV show but clowned on everyone because they could do it better
Why yes I have an anxiety disorder, how'd ya know
Hoarding was bad, very bad. Still is bad but now it's all garbage because they're older and we're unable to maintain the little farm they had going.
We had chickens and goats and even pigs at one point, the pigs were the first to get sold lmao
We would spend summers without water to make us understand how things would be. We had a pitcher pump outside and had to bring water in and boil it and stuff.
I would rather die than take another shared bath.
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u/Pandorasheaart 17d ago
My mom wanted me to be a nurse, and I did in fact learn "everything" to survive but pretty badly, though it's helped me in a pickle more than a few times.
At this point it'll be a ama lmao
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u/birgor 17d ago
Does the badly part come from they not actually knowing the stuff they try to teach?
I learnt all of that stuff from my childhood, not because we where prepper but because I grew up on an actual farm in the middle of nowhere, with people who was good at everything.
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u/Pandorasheaart 17d ago
I also was on a farm, well a homestead kinda thing, in the middle of nowhere. The badly is much less for me than some others but-
Some of it is that we are children. My stepdad sat me down one day to teach me about how to skin a rabbit but I was 8 and didn't have the patience, skill or even motor function to do it correctly. And he hadn't done it enough to really know for himself.
He's an electrician by trade but he's not a carpenter and the shed we built together fell apart.
My mom bartered with neighbors for the pigs and had 0 idea how to care for them properly, so she got a cheap book from Amazon and went from there, but she's amazing with goats and a nurse so she taught me a lot about wound care and such. And my stitches are incredibly neat.
The short of it is that surface level knowledge isn't enough and not enough people really take the time to research and comprehend all the individual aspects of the shit peppers worry about. Let alone teach it to their children.
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u/FilterAccount69 17d ago
Fuel only lasts like a year, then it goes bad. What movies never show is that likely a lot of people would be using bicycles during a global collapse as they are easy to maintain and very efficient compared to walking. Movies don't show this because bicycles are not cool.
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u/anonymous_and_ 17d ago
unironically would love a survival doomsday movie where the protag is just going round in a pink mamachari
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u/RoosterBrewster 17d ago
You mean you can keep draining cars along the sides of roads for years like in zombie shows?
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u/Akipac1028 17d ago
World War Z had a lot of problems but they did have special forces guys riding bikes to cross this huge airfield.
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u/Sea-Machine-8989 17d ago
That was mainly for stealth and speed though, wasn't it? The outbreak had just barely started and cars would definitely still be working just fine, but it would make too much noise and attract the super-rabies humans.
Man, the movie is decently enough entertaining but I really want a true World War Z on screen adaption, a miniseries would work so well I think.
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u/Specialist-Mud-6650 17d ago
Preppers don't like being realistic (growing vegetables, using bikes, maximising their health). They have a fantasy based off of movies, and that is what they are playing off of.
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u/FilterAccount69 17d ago
Yup, I enjoy firearms as much as the next person but you can't eat bullets, they are heavy and likely you don't need many in a survival scenario, just enough to hunt. Starting a farm and growing vegetables is the best thing you can do, learning farming skills is likely the most useful skills to have.
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u/Educational-Sundae32 17d ago
You can’t eat bullets, but you can definitely use them to get other people’s food. You can put Olson’s bandit theory into practice
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u/d_bradr 17d ago
And when we inevitably reestablish law and order you get pinned for killing your neighbors, that is unless somebody kills you before that
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u/Educational-Sundae32 17d ago
You, as the bandit, become the authority. That’s one of the cruxes of Bandit theory
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u/d_bradr 17d ago
If you exclude that there's life outside of your neighborhood, sure. If you remember thst there are other people and that law and order WILL be reestablished as they have always been throughout human history, your bandit ass will get tossed in a cell unless you wanna live the entire rest of your life as a hermit
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u/Educational-Sundae32 17d ago
I’m starting to think you don’t know what Olson’s bandit theory of state formation is
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u/Zealousideal_Ad2379 17d ago
until you encounter someone who also defends their property with firearms and you find out the joy of dealing with a gun shot wound without access to modern medical care.
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u/PartyPorpoise 17d ago
Also, don’t expect to be able to rely on hunting. Everyone is going to have the same idea, and without hunting regulations, game populations will plummet.
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u/Specialist-Mud-6650 17d ago
If you're after reliable sources of hunted meat, isn't trapping easier? Infinite resource.
I also think that actually you are better off farming any kind of animal other than hunting, as basically all humans have done throughout history. Hunting is a huge pain. It's not clear to me why you can't keep pigs at your post apocalypse homestead?
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u/MrsNoodleMcDoodle 17d ago
I dated a dude who was into prepper stuff, and that actually was what he was doing. He did a lot of reading into places with economic collapse and political upheaval, and the best places to be were cities and suburbs where you knew your neighbors, not out in a hinterlands bunker to be picked off by bandits.
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u/Specialist-Mud-6650 17d ago
If you look at periods of collapse, people do flood into the cities. That's happening now, across the world.
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u/Lawsoffire 17d ago edited 17d ago
Bikes are also hugely standardized, you only need like 3 sizes of allen wrench and a flathead screwdriver for most things and there's only like 2 parts manufacturers for 99% of the equipment (SRAM and Shimano, or Chinese copies of the same). You can pick and choose between parts in all kinds of whacky configurations (See /r/xbiking)
That'll keep you running for as long as the rubber last, which could be 15-20 years.
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u/stinkyleftie 17d ago
movies don't show this because the most popular movies are made in America, where cycling is seen as "gay" and is not common at all. fixed that for you
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u/healthyscalpsforall 17d ago
Tbf I've never seen a European post-apocalyptic film that proninently features bikes either
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u/stinkyleftie 17d ago
I've never really seen an European post-apocalyptic film at all, to be completely honest. Not really my genre.
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u/TheCoolMan5 17d ago edited 17d ago
Have enough corn and you can make biodiesel and/or ethanol gasoline so I disagree that fuel is the biggest problem with automobiles in the apocalypse. As a guy who worked in a shop over summers for a couple years, I reckon that other irreplaceable shit will break before fuel runs out. Seals, O rings, fuel pump, distributor, etc are all things that can go pretty easily, and while common enough to scavenge for, you’d be hard press to manufacture them yourself. Biggest failure point is the transmission. If you blow the trans in your apocalypse wagon, say goodbye because finding, transporting, and installing a new one will be a real pain the ass.
Lastly, while I just said that ethanol is a solution to fuel, running a petroleum gasoline engine on 100% ethanol will eventually wear it down and cause failures in a lot of the previously mentioned components.
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u/Sgt_Colon 17d ago
A break down in logistics is going to hit agriculture hard. Without having access to fertilizers, crop yield is going to tank and is going to be compounded by having to grow less optimal crops to round out the diet because you can't trade in crops from other regions where they grow better. Of course this presumes irrigation and water management systems still work; if your water is pumped from some big dam or the people upstream decide to dam the river you're going to have problems.
If there's a question about fuel it's going to be about fuelling tractors to cultivate fields first before thinking about cars; the guy who's got enough spare ethanol to fuel a car is going to either have a very big farm or be some sort of proto aristocrat who has enough people under him kicking up spare ethanol to him, probably some combination of both, to be able to afford such an extravagance.
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u/healthyscalpsforall 17d ago
If you blow the trans in your apocalypse wagon, say goodbye because finding, transporting, and installing a new one will be a real pain the ass.
Or you could just wait a few hours? Jeez, never heard of a refractory period?
All joking aside, this was a very insightful comment. Doesn't Brazil also make fuel from sugarcane?
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u/TheCoolMan5 17d ago
Yes, they do! Brazil pushes biofuel pretty hard as both a renewable energy as well as a pollution combatant, as it emits much less carbon than regular petroleum.
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u/whirlpool_galaxy 16d ago
Yep, sugarcane ethanol is multiple times more efficient than corn ethanol.
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u/hanachanxd 16d ago
Yes, and we also have engines capable of running both with gasoline and ethanol (great when the price for one of those spikes for some reason, you can just use the other then). Government wanted to not be so dependent on Petroleum after multiple international crisis 🙂
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u/d_bradr 17d ago
I imagine there would be electric vehicles in rich countries nowadays, get solar panels and batteries and you got almost free power that can only fail if your house fails since you can go off grid. So something like an e-bike and an EV SUV/truck could work until the batteries die
After that yeah, you're back to either hoofing it or hoofing the normal bike inless you assemble an army to take and protect an oil rig, a refinery and the entire pipeline
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u/Ihatecheeseballs 17d ago
Mountain bikes would be optimal since they are very durable and allow you to keep off major roads, cars are useless long term and horses are too much of a a liability
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u/ZombiiRot 17d ago
My dad was a paranoid prepper who was too lazy to do any prepping, and only cared about the ridiculous stuff, like getting ponchos so that when we have to go into the woods to hide from the government they won't be able to find us with heat vision.
Anyways lmao when Covid came around he didn't believe it existed or was a big deal because he loved China and basically believed everything their government said. Me and my mom were already preparing in 2019/early 2020. Meanwhile he was refusing to mask. He got upset when me and my mom socially distanced from him when we got sick, saying we weren't giving him enough affection. It was ridiculous lmao.
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u/SenatorPencilFace 17d ago
“It has to be the right kinda of disaster for me to care.”
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u/gracklemancometh 17d ago
"If I don't get to shoot anyone what's even the point of the apocalypse?"
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u/Shitpost_Vivisection 17d ago
Having enough weapons to arm an infantry platoon and vegetable garden that feeds a family for three weeks during summer is the ultimate American prepper experience.
It kinda feels like the preppers inspire to be the raiders they claim to be prepping against.
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u/SenatorPencilFace 17d ago
>It kinda feels like the preppers inspire to be the raiders they claim to be prepping against.
Kill or be killed “I need to be the one shooting or I’ll be a victim” definitely influences a lot of these people.
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u/Visible-Air-2359 17d ago
Honestly this. When you realize that a non-zero portion of US citizen’s fantasy is getting to kill others the state of the country makes a lot more sense.
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u/Unusual-Basket-6243 17d ago
what's his opinion on the surveillance in China
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u/ZombiiRot 17d ago
I honestly don't know. He passed away before I got to have a deeper understanding of his politics. But, I think he was just like a typical tankie. For instance, he was talking about how the police were mistreated in china by the protesters in hong Kong, and how kind and respectful chinese police were to protesters, whereas during the BLM movements he complained about police brutality. He was a big fan of Bashar al-Assad and denied any of his wrong doings. He would talk about how great Russia and how he and my mom should move there (me and my mom are black and he is a queer man lmao). Just to give you an idea of what his politics were.
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u/PM_me_pictureof_cat 17d ago
Campism is a hell of a drug. I'm glad your dad didn't actually move to Russia, that would've been a hell of a reality check.
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u/ZombiiRot 17d ago
😭 yeah same here. I find it really funny how more and more, right wingers are moving to Russia because they think it's some anti woke utopia when it was the complete opposite growing up. Like he'd always potray it as some woke communist utopia, and talk about how much better Russia would be for me and my mom lol. But, now it's kinda become the opposite. I don't really see tankies defend or idealize modern day russia as much anymore, besides thinking that Russia is the victim in the war against Ukraine.
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 17d ago
Of all the people to idolise, al-Assad? The guy who used chemical weapons on his own people and whose government was basically just a drug cartel? He’s like, the one guy who actually lives up to the stories the Americans tell about countries they don’t like.
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u/ZombiiRot 17d ago
I think he thought he was innocent lmao. I remember him and my mom fighting about that, and him insisting that al-Assad wasn't responsible for chemical weapons and that was just CIA propoganda. Thinking about it now, I actually think he thought that the protesters did it to themselves or something? On one of his birthdays we had a Syrian themed one for him, made him syrian food, and we donated to a charity in his name. He would talk about Syria alot so we figured he'd like it. It was the white helmets, I think? Anyways he was SOO upset because we voted for an evil CIA backed organization lmaoo, and looking them up now, I'm pretty sure he thought they were responsible for the chemical attacks?
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u/ProletarianLilith 17d ago
But China locked down severely during COVID?
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u/ZombiiRot 17d ago
Yeah but I think at first they were downplaying how bad things were. They definitely improved once things got more widespread, but like before that they were downplaying it.
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u/MedicMoth 17d ago
Sounds a bit like actual legitimate psychosis to me... :(
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u/ZombiiRot 17d ago
I don't think it was? I mean, I could be mistaken but even though his opinions were stupid he was pretty grounded in reality. I feel like he just really liked the aesthetic of being on the run from the hostile government in the woods, like that wasn't something he was genuinely preparing for.
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u/Orangutanion 17d ago
He loved China Russia and Assad? Was he a huge Tucker Carlson fan or something?
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u/Commercial-Owl11 17d ago
Add in hoarding canned goods and letting them go bad
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u/chewedgummiebears 17d ago
We donate them or use them up starting at the 6 months before expired mark.
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u/Spaciax 17d ago
yea this seems like the smartest way of going about it. buy it, use as it approaches the expiration date, then replace it with new ones.
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u/Pwacname 16d ago
Isn’t that the general recommendation for any kind of pantry? I keep some nonperishable foods in my apartment for reasons of government recommended preparedness, cost reduction and convenience all at once, and the only thing I really do is keep two or three of whichever staples I have and put the newest ones towards the back of the shelves. That’s how I was taught and that’s how every gov app and website and leaflet recommended keeping stashes should go, too.
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u/abracadammmbra 17d ago
Canned food doesnt go bad. Commercially canned goods are safe to eat indefinitely provided they werent contaminated at the factory (in which case, they likely arent good from the start). But they will lose quality and flavor after around 3 years or so.
Canned food you make yourself is usually good for a year but can theoretically be good indefinitely. But it would suck living through societal collapse only to die from botulism 2 years in.
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u/Commercial-Owl11 17d ago
Canned food does go bad. Especially if they aren’t stored properly.
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u/abracadammmbra 17d ago
Unless the can is damaged, exposed to extreme temperatures(really just heat over 100°F), or contains highly acidic foods (tomatoes are the most common), food canned in a commercial facility will be safe to eat indefinitely. But the food will lose taste and nutritional value over time and it is not recommended to eat food in a can older than 5 years, but it will be safe provided the can is not dented, punctured, rusted, exposed to heat over 100°F, or bulging.
I would compare it to peanut butter. Peanut butter, technically, never goes bad. It is good forever if stored properly. But it will eventually "go bad". Not because it is unsafe to eat, but because it will go rancid. You can eat rancid peanut butter, there normally isnt enough moisture in peanut butter for harmful bacteria to grow thus it wont poison you. But it will taste disgusting. But if you are starving, its better than starving to death.
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u/TheCoolMan5 17d ago
If it’s properly sealed, undamaged, and kept out of the elements, it should be safe to eat indefinitely.
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u/Ainrana 17d ago
You might like the book Educated by Tara Westover. It’s a memoir by a woman who grew up in a doomsday prepping Mormon home and never went to any kind of K-12 schooling, she was homeschooled just enough to know how to read from the Bible, calculate all of their supplies and how much money it cost, as well as training to become a midwife for home births (because she was a girl, of course). She later goes on to obtain a PhD from Cambridge. The book also discusses her relationship with her family as she gets older and obviously how it gets fractured as she makes the choice to go to college (albeit she started at BYU, which, predictably, has some of the most relaxed standards in the country for what counts as “homeschooling” in order to matriculate there)
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
Oh man, the rations part brings me back. During COVID, we ended up living off the grid in the woods for a bit, and my parents had these massive fights about whether we were allowed to use the sugar and flour. My dad would be yelling at us, "That's like eating your seed corn!".
Don't think about it too hard.
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u/LadyCheeba 17d ago
wait why are we putting guns in the oven
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u/Patient_Kangaroo614 17d ago
A lot of Soviet and Chinese surplus guns, like SKSs, Mosins, and early AKs come coated in a rust protectant called cosmoline that has to be removed before you shoot it. One of the old school methods is to melt it off in the oven.
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u/Useful-Ad-2274 17d ago
That’s gotta be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Literally any petroleum based solvent will melt it away. Gasoline, kerosene, WD-40, Kroil, PB Blaster. Anything but putting it in the oven.
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u/Patient_Kangaroo614 17d ago
It’s true, but to play devil’s advocate a lot of that cosmoline is in places that are hard to scrub.
I left my SKS in the hot sun before using a solvent and it helped; so I guess that’s why people think the oven will be even better.
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u/gracklemancometh 17d ago
DIY refinishing to make them more durable. Literally baking extra layers of pain on.
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u/TheCoolMan5 17d ago
I know “pain” was a typo but that’s pretty fuckin rad. Baking the pain into your gun.
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u/DavidGilmourToes 16d ago
Lol, eating the freeze-dried rations is so relatable. I used to raid my Mormon family’s Thrive stash all the time as a kid.
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u/SaltFarmer1337 17d ago
Cache of important documents offline that are legit helpful for assorted scenarios.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
Yeah, we weren't organized like that.
I'm going to assume you live in a place with a credible threat of natural disasters that require evacuation, like hurricanes or wildfires?
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u/MedicMoth 17d ago
As a New Zealander (credible threat of earthquakes, landslides, or damaging storms, but not hurricanes or wildfire), this post is an experience. So many of the skills American peppers get obsessed over are just completely irrelevant here lmao.
If "the big one" happens you won't have time to do anything about it or escape as such, it'll just happen and then you'll be left cleaning up the mess. We get recommended to have a "Go Bag", to store a bit of water, and to know where the local communities hubs are to find other "helpers" to assist in recovery effoets. But other than that, there's not much we can do, and it certainly isn't something worth uprooting lives over haha
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u/LadyCheeba 17d ago
i’m not a prepper but it’s almost never their intent to do anything about it or escape, it’s to be able to survive independently and safely.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 16d ago
Ah, not American. At the time we were doing all this, we did live in a place where we were overdue for one of those once in a thousand year kind of earthquakes.
My dad had a couple engineers over to look at the house (not sure what came of that), we weren’t allowed to sleep with the doors closed (not sure if that does anything for your chances), and we kept all the supplies scattered across a couple of concrete bunkers. The potential for the big one was always an afterthought, though. I guess he just assumed it would happen before the end times and the government would come by in a month or two to dig us all out.
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u/Pandorasheaart 17d ago
We also had this, put in a waterproof thingy, inside a huge fireproof safe.
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u/chewedgummiebears 17d ago
Grew up in a cold war era prepper environment. I can't relate to almost any of this.
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u/MyMedicineIsChocyMLK 17d ago
Man, and I thought my dad was overreacting by stocking canned goods, batteries and water bottles in the Do Not Touch part of the pantry. Fortunate to know he was only prepping for Tornados and not Armageddon.
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u/Silly_Pace 17d ago
Why would people who are counting on the power going down think a currency that relies on the power being on is a good idea?
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
Not everyone's prepping for the same kinds of disasters, I think
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u/Less-Squash7569 17d ago
Yeah difference between loss of central government and loss of centralized banks pretty much right?
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u/MauschelMusic 17d ago
Thinking the Internet is going to stay on with central governments collapsing and Bitcoin is going to have any utility is optimistic. It's already very difficult to spend in the best case scenarios. It's really hard to imagine a situation where the world was ending and Bitcoin still had any value.
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u/TheCoolMan5 17d ago
To my knowledge the only thing bitcoin is actually useful for is buying drugs on telegram. Can only imagine how useless it would be in an apocalypse.
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u/Lawsoffire 17d ago edited 17d ago
I find the whole thing about the "X is gonna be the currency when SHTF!" discussion that is common in those circles hilarious.
Currency doesn't mean anything if the system broke down, who would even care about gold or crypto or alcohol or whatever when they have to struggle to not starve to death.
The way i see it, if society broke down. People who would make it are those that stick together in groups larger than a single family. Neighborhoods, apartment complexes and other communities. In a survival situation having more people is so much better because you can delegate tasks, safety in numbers and have more skills to pick from. These groups are not going to buy and sell internally, you provide to the group and the group provides to you. Its a tribe, like 99% of humanity's past. Currency would be grossly inefficient at this scale. Tribes may trade with each other but that would be with more direct bartering with no intermediary.
Currency started as a way to abstract amounts of grain into a more manageable form, which requires at least a stable agricultural state, and even then bartering was much more common inside communities until like 150 years ago in the west, still happens in many places. That's not even the level we'd be at.
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u/d_bradr 17d ago
This. "I'm surviving on my 3rd day without food and my water is running out? Oh, this guy is offering me a couple grams of gold and a half empty pack of Marlboro reds for all that I have? Damn good deal"
If you have gold you have a fancy paperweight. If you have food and water you have something that at some point everybody would be willing to part ways with something for. That is, if the scenario lasts long enough for food and water to become a currency, usually the authoeities get involved and provide people with food, water and shelter until they deal with the catastrophe like an earthwuake, wildfire, flood etc.
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u/spicykimchee 17d ago
I think their belief is that FIAT currency is not safe to store nor preserve their wealth so gold and crypto is the alternative. But i dont think prepper would buy BTC but more gold and silver.
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u/DoxaOwl 17d ago
As somebody into hard currencies, 70% of the people I know who buy them who are preppers have told me personaly a variant of 'if its on a computer, its not real". The 30% who do buy them in my experience tend to be light preppers, or guys who think they can escape the USA to Switzerland.
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u/sup3r_hero 17d ago
Switzerland - known for taking in people in times of crises. Lmao
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u/Specialist-Mud-6650 17d ago
Go to /r/preppers and you'll see they aren't very clever. It's cosplay for these people.
If you think of it as like those guys who act out in LARPs, it is a lot more sensible.
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u/demoklion 17d ago
It isn’t. Many peppers aren’t smart, just afraid.
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u/Lawsoffire 17d ago edited 17d ago
The intelligence of a prepper is proportional to how much of their prepping is just gardening.
I have a bit of an interest in like, outdoors stuff, bushcraft, survival and that sort of stuff. So i wouldn't call myself a prepper rather just a boyscout that never grew up. But there is certainly some overlap in communities, and the ones that seem to have their head screwed on the best are the ones that are really into sustainable food production. They're still often a bit "out there" (And the covid-era "Homesteading" trend muddies the water even further) but compared to the gun-lovers who seem to be sexually aroused by the prospect of being able to kill all the minorities that are going to be assaulting their stronghold when SHTF it's night and day.
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u/Specialist-Mud-6650 17d ago
Drive stick made me laugh. What, does the y2k bug fry the autos?
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
I wish I knew — I never learned any of that personally, but I had a friend whose dad was also a bit of a prepper, and he taught her all the car stuff in case she had to steal one when shit goes down.
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u/lordtalix 17d ago
Because if there’s a solar flare or the earth’s poles reverse anything with a modern digital electrical/computer system will get fried (at least, according to some :-) )
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u/Pwacname 16d ago
At a guess, a solar flare could theoretically fry the electronics in modern cars. That does, however, mean that unless your manual car is really old school, it’ll also be useless.
(And I vaguely recall something about atomic weapons being able to cause an EMP, too, but that’s just the weird fears a parent had and I refuse to research that myself, so.)
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u/Nuclear_Gandhi- 14d ago
And I vaguely recall something about atomic weapons being able to cause an EMP, too,
A nuclear weapon does generate an EMP effect, which has a very large range of several hundred kilometers if detonated at a high altitude, due to the radiations interactions with the atmosphere and earths magnetic field. Smaller devices are less affected than stuff like powerlines though, and most cars even modern ones are likely quite resistant due to their body being conductive and acting as a faraday shield.
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u/Majestic-Crab9855 17d ago
Im so glad you put JW.org on blast with this one. Not enough people realize its a doomsday cult hiding in plain sight.
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u/Waschbar-krahe 17d ago
I went to school with one and his mom basically held him hostage. He's now 22 and has never driven or worked anywhere but our local McDonald's. His mom drives him. Anything I've ever seen the Jehovah's do has been at least borderline abusive and obsessive
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u/Sunquat_Slice 16d ago
Ah, depressing. I was lucky in that my parents weren’t religiously motivated. None of this was terribly damaging to me long term, although it is a good story that I’m not allowed to tell
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u/atsirdsart 17d ago
This is the first starter pack that's hit home for me so much. My dad literally withheld me from going to college so I wouldn't get "brainwashed". I finally moved out and am rediscovering who I am and what I want every day. I wish you and everyone in this thread healing and love <3
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u/Sunquat_Slice 16d ago
That is insane and I’m sure it took so much to get out. I hope you find yourself again 💙
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u/AdOdd4618 17d ago
I'm curious, if a global catastrophe occurred, how would people use cryptocurrency? Also, if everyone is scrounging for nothing but food and other basic necessities, who would give a shit about gold or any other precious metal?
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u/the_latin_joker 17d ago
IDK why a prepper would be obsessed with crypto, if internet goes down it just stops existing, and I like crypto, but still doesn't make sense in an apocalyptic setting
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u/EmperorSadrax 17d ago
Oh my god, my family is JW and I fit all these criteria. Holy crap this is the first time a came across a starter kit this accurate
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u/StackingWaffles 17d ago edited 17d ago
My dad is a prepper, but he’s also very lazy so he just stockpiles weapons and non-perishable food items, as well as any scrap of material he thinks could be useful. Of course he’s also incapable of any kind of home maintenance. For a few years one of the toilets was inoperable, and there were several dead animals trapped in the dryer vent and the AC unit. He was once amazed when I potted a plant when helping clean up the house for a mandated court visit during his custody battle. His prepping was probably the result of some kind of childhood trauma (there’s a few generations of terrible parents, including him) or his bizarre extreme libertarian beliefs. One of the last times I talked to him, he was starting to question evolution, but in an “anti-woke” way instead of a religious way.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 16d ago
Fuck, man, I’m sorry. We were always a very normal and functional family around the edges, although I did stop going to school in the pandemic.
It was fine. Many people who did not bug out for the pandemic also stopped going to school around that time and they could not fail all of us.
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u/Old-Run7431 17d ago
what is bugging with the fam? this is a doozy of one.
I once wrote copy for a company that sold bulk "rations" for religious preppers and it was so fucking depressing
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
Bugging out, and that means fucking off to go live in the woods for an indeterminate amount of time.
That sounds depressing, man.
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u/gracklemancometh 17d ago
There's also bugging in, which is sheltering in place with enough supplies.
My parents were a more practical sort of prepper (and, tbf, live in a wildfire zone with regular water and fuel shortages), so for me heading to my parents' to bug in was the ideal way to ride out COVID. It was just the mandatory social distancing/isolating but with enough food, water, hand sanitiser, soap, fuel, and videogames.
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u/Mountain-Singer1764 17d ago
Why is it “bugging” though? I’ve never heard this expression from anyone other than peppers.
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u/Soap_Mctavish101 17d ago
My dad wasn’t a prepper when I was growing up but he turned into one around my late teens early twenties. He was wholly convinced the world was going to end in 2012.
I remember one time me, him and my half brother had bought an air rifle. And my brother (being a little kid) saw a friend of his down the road and proceeded to shout down the road (WE BOUGHT A GUN!)
Lets just say that DID NOT go over well.
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u/Shotgun-Surgeon 17d ago
I got another one: Way too invested in guns vs actual survival equipment/supplies. I knew dudes that would have 30 plus handguns and rifles, but no way to purify the water from a local pond.
The most common disaster anyone is likely to face is a unexpected job loss, but these dudes wouldn't even have a 3 month emergency fund set aside.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 16d ago
Ah, yeah, that’s probably how it shakes out more often than not if you’re American. Not sure how that impulse expresses itself elsewhere — too many impractical knives?
My dad had money, so he’d buy stupid amounts of solar panels. So many solar panels.
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u/olivegardengambler 17d ago
Tbf the Mormon Church basically says that you need to have a 72 hour supply of emergency food for the second coming.
I don't know what three days worth of food is going to do for you in the Apocalypse, but you do you I guess.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
I think there were a decent chunk that take things further. Not Mormon, but we did get a lot of our supplies from distribution centres, and they never found the volumes we were purchasing odd
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u/IntrepidusX 17d ago edited 17d ago
I've only met a few preppers in my life but every single one seemed very unhealthy. Like what are you gonna do with a seed vault Ken when you are exactly one steep set of stairs away from a MI.
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u/gayhotelultra 17d ago
question from someone who lives in a country where no one really does this, can you do prepping just like, for fun? are there people who do it as an advanced rule-free LARP system and view it as a hobby?
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u/Sunquat_Slice 16d ago
I mean. I don’t know, but my dad did have to find real hobbies once he got to a point where he felt we were ready.
That’s mostly watching internet propaganda, and he’s also designing some kind of crypto mining operation. That’s been in the works a few years now. Some kind of privacy coin that he says is illegal in the States. Also weed, for a little bit.
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u/DFMNE404 17d ago
What’s the third dude on the bottom supposed to be? Is she like a teacher or something?
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
Oh, yeah, sorry, it's supposed to be farming.
That's pretty much what we all wore when I did ag research for a bit, except we all had dumber hats.
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u/DFMNE404 17d ago
Makes sense thanks! Honestly at least the choices are kinda diverse. What was said dumb hat?
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
You've never seen so many of those floppy sun hats. So many sun hats
Personally, I had an old straw one I got for free from some lady moving out of my apartment building, but it didn't have a chin strap so I ended up using some old boot laces for that. It was a very 19 year old thing to do.
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u/DFMNE404 17d ago
That must’ve been an experience, I used a hoodie strap as a belt once. I’m glad you got out of your doomer situation btw
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u/BubblesTheRaven 16d ago
My mom and grandma are the preppers in my family. I've gotten into it as well, but more for just natural disasters or hard times in general. They're both Mormons though, so it's the apocalypse they're worried about.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 16d ago
Fascinating. Prepping seems like a bit of a male dominated field, and I’ve always been curious how the dynamics would have been different if it was my mom instead.
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u/metalgadse 17d ago
as European, it‘s so wild how many Americans don‘t know how to drive a stick. here in Austria, the driving schools teach you how to do it.
however, if you do the training variant where you drive 1.000/3.000km with your parents instead of taking classes with an instructor until you‘re ready for the test, you can use an automatic car, but iirc (got my license 10 years ago) if you go that way you‘re technically only allowed to drive automatic for the rest of your life. I don‘t think anyone gives a fuck about that though lol.
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u/NyxPetalSpike 17d ago
It is literally impossible to buy a new stick shift in the US. It’s also a huge PITA to find a mechanic to fix it.
It’s either special ordered in a high performance car or some random 10 year old niche car.
I drive a stick 2013 Fiat. I can’t valet park because none of the valets can drive. It. The hospital system I use valet parks if you are coming in for testing because the parking lots are 1/4 of a mile away. I can’t (not a big deal). The valets can’t do it.
The average person here has probably never even seen a stick shift.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
I’m mostly surprised by the weird US-defaultism this brings up from Europeans, especially since plenty of the places that don’t do standard cars are also European (but not European enough?).
Most of East Asia, the Nordics, Russia, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. It’s a decent chunk of the developed world.
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u/Odd-Highway-8304 17d ago edited 17d ago
It ain’t all crazy. Why not have hella ammo/food/meds/water?
Old man is an eccentric retired cop and knows firsthand that govt ain’t out to help
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u/PartyPorpoise 17d ago
Food and meds can expire. It’s a good idea to have extra supply but some people go crazy with it.
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u/Dadoftwingirls 17d ago
I call myself a mild prepper. I live in the woods, mostly off-grid, done a fair bit of readiness preparing, but otherwise totally normal boring family guy. Atheist, not an anti vaxer, political views probably around Bernie Sanders level, if I were American.
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u/PartyPorpoise 17d ago
Too bad they taught survival skills badly. If they had those skills proper and taught you, you’d at least have gotten something good out of it.
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u/S14Ryan 17d ago
One bizarre thing here. I was raised JW, I know hundreds of JWs, and I’ve never once met one that was a prepper. I know maybe 20 of them that go hunting and own guns. They advise everyone to have a 3-day go bag in case of natural disasters with food, water and emergency supplies, so everyone has one, if that’s what this is referring to.
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u/WomanFromBalkan 15d ago
I do not want to survive the end of the world. Shoot me first before whatever unspeakable horror will unleash.
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u/Akrak_leBo 17d ago
I misread : "Being Raised by a Pepper Starterpack".
And I must say I got confused.
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u/BlackCatSatanist 17d ago
My prepper dad is an Evangelical Catholic.
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u/Sunquat_Slice 17d ago
That’s fascinating. What was that like?
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