loading . . . Some of The Worst Mistakes You Can Ever Make as a Prepper If youâre into prepping, maybe you remember how it felt at first.
Maybe you wanted to keep it a secret.
You were _embarrassed_.
Maybe you remember how your family reacted when you started talking about bugout bags and rain barrels. Maybe you remember the look on their face and the sound of their voice, like you were confessing to a crime. Maybe your friends and relatives suggested therapy, as if you were wrong to worry about the state of the world and your familyâs future. Slowly, time proved you right.
My evolution as a prepper went a lot like this, starting about five years ago. Iâve done a lot right, but Iâve also made a lot of mistakes. My mistakes werenât spending too much or making bad purchases. They go deeper.
Hereâs what I mean:
### Doubting yourself
Itâs easy to judge yourself for prepping when everyone around you thinks youâre a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Alas, look around.
The whole time, the worst conspiracy theories out there were all true. You were right. I was right. From private islands to underground bunkers, the richest and most powerful people in the world never cared about us.
They couldnât be bothered to save the planet or protect human rights, because they were too busy destroying the planet and preying on our children. They werenât just negligent. They werenât just careless. They werenât just lazy or ignorant. They were the ones causing all the death and destruction.
Theyâre still doing it.
There was never anything wrong with taking steps to protect yourself from these monsters and the fallout from their actions. Thatâs what youâve been doing. In a nutshell, thatâs what prepping is. Itâs about protecting yourself and the people you love, so they can continue living.
Obviously, we have to make decisions with care. We have to plan. We canât just cut a hole in our wall on a whim or buy a pallet of food with no idea where to put it. But wondering if youâre overreacting isnât planning.
Itâs simply self-doubt.
When you doubt yourself, you waste time. You waste energy. You waste resources. You spend a lot of that lying awake at night, wondering if you should be doing something instead of just doing it. Iâve been there, and Iâve done it.
Iâve stopped.
### Taking half measures
If you donât trust yourself, you take half-measures.
Theyâre expensive.
Looking back, my biggest mistake was trying to prep without looking or feeling too much like a prepper. Itâs fine to start out small. Itâs even a good thing. But eventually, weâre all going to have to make bigger decisions than keeping a deep pantry. Weâre going to have to make some hard calls.
Should you get solar? Should you install a composting toilet? Should you get a water generator? Should you build a rain harvesting system? Should you actually start trying to grow some of your own food? Should you try to start learning how to do home repairs yourself, even if thatâs harder? Should you have that difficult conversation with your spouse, your neighbor, or your best friend?
Or should you just keep buying little pieces of gear and hoping they save you? Should you just keep hiding canned goods around the house? Should you just keep browsing Zillow for the perfect bugout location youâll never afford?
We all have different goals and different resources. Weâre all going to make different decisions about whatâs best for us in a collapsing world. Some of us will get that cabin with 20 acres of land. Some of us will make plans for staying in the suburbs. Whatever decisions we make, we have to make them with care.
But simply deferring them doesnât help us.
It only hurts.
### Not committing to a plan
If you donât trust yourself, and you take half-measures, then you never commit to any real plan for a future that many are scared to face.
A plan doesnât have to mean moving out to the country. It doesnât have to mean building a utopian collapse community.
It just has to be a plan. It just has to exist. The plan can change. It often means deciding what youâre _not_ going to do. So, youâre _not_ going to build a bunker in your back yard. Youâre _not_ going to stockpile food buckets and ammo. So, what _are_ you going to do? What _can_ you do? How? When?
Thatâs a plan.
### Only prepping from a sense of urgency.
Prepping got a lot of attention after Hurricane Helene, and Trumpâs election. Suddenly, everyone wanted to learn how to grow their own food. They wanted to know how to fortify their homes against storms. They wanted to know about water purification and bugout bags. Now, it seems, not so much.
Of course, there will be more Helenes.
And more fascistsâŠ
Itâs easy to prep from a place of urgency. Fear motivates us. But when you only prep when youâre scared, thatâs not prepping. Thatâs panicking. Itâs not wrong to feel a sense of panic. Fear is a valuable emotion.
What you do with it, that matters. Panic-buying supplies and then letting them collect dust in your closet, thatâs a mistake.
You have to prep when youâre not scared. You have to gather the supplies. You have to build the systems. You have to grow the food. You have to learn the skills. You have to do it without all the fear in the background.
You have to do it when everything feels fine.
Prepping should be calm.
Not chaos.
### Feeling guilty
Not everyone has the time, resources, or ability to do the same things you can do. And vice versa. Does that mean you shouldnât prep?
No, it doesnât.
You shouldnât feel guilty about building a food stockpile. In the U.S., we throw away 100 billion pounds of food every year, up to 40 percent of our entire food supply. Itâs absolutely nuts. That food could be preserved. It could be stored. Our government and their billionaire donors could end food waste and hunger at the same time, two birds with one stone, with better planning.
The problem isnât resources.
Itâs a lack of will.
Why donât they do it? As we discussed, theyâve been too busy flying private jets to private islands to prey on our children. Theyâve been too busy running international crime rings, maxing out profits, accumulating wealth, and running genocides. Thatâs why they donât do it. They donât benefit.
When you store some rice and dried goods with care, preserve it to last years, with plans to either eat it yourself or share it with someone during a time of crisis, youâre not doing anything wrong.
Youâre doing something great.
Sure, you can make practical mistakes when it comes to prepping. You can store the wrong kinds of food, in the wrong place, with a bad rotation system. But the _idea_ of storing food, water, and supplies comes from a place of logic and wisdom. Civilizations have been doing it for thousands of years. Itâs not wrong. Our leaders should be doing it. But theyâre only storing enough for themselves. Like so many other things, the burden has fallen to you and me.
When billionaires hoard wealth and resources, filling bunkers with gold and gas masks, the media says, âDo they know something we donât?â But when you do it, they call you a doomer and a hoarderâŠ?
Gimme a break.
### Over/underestimating your preps
Thereâs only so much we can do.
No, we probably canât stockpile enough food to survive a famine that lasts for years. We probably canât fight off every militia that comes to our door. Eventually, things could get so bad, they become unsurvivable.
Thereâs middle ground here.
Your preps donât have to guarantee your survival through every disaster for the next two decades. If they canât, that doesnât make prepping futile. If your preps help you live a few more years, isnât that worth it?
If they help you survive one disaster, didnât they do their job?
What are you living for, anyway?
_Who_ are you living for?
Some of us want to stay alive as long as possible, because every day of life is another day with our friends, our families, our children, another chance to do something we love, or at least find meaningful.
Thatâs the point.
### Forgetting to live
Thereâs nothing wrong with prepping, but you can go overboard. Itâs not about the time you invest in it. Itâs not about the money, either.
Itâs the mindset.
Pop culture has conditioned us to see prepping as something we do out of fear. Maybe thatâs how it starts, but think for a minute.
The fear tells you something.
It means you have things, people, and purpose in your life that you value. You donât want to lose them. You want to protect them for as long as possible. So when you prep, focus on that. Youâre doing it from a place of love and purpose. You can protect all of those things. And you can enjoy them. Thatâs the whole point. Some things are guaranteed. We age. Our children grow up. Things end.
You donât want to spend your life protecting something you never experience. You donât want to protect family members you never spend any time with. You donât want to save a life you donât find any meaning in.
You could prep for ten hours a day, and you could do it in a way that makes your family feel loved and appreciated, not scared. You can do it while taking breaks to spend time with them, while telling jokes, while listening to them talk about all the things they enjoy. You can prep, and you can live.
Donât forget to enjoy it.
### Giving up
Prepping is hard. It takes time, and patience. Youâll make mistakes, little mistakes. Youâll miscalculate something. Youâll get the wrong tool. Your crops will die. Itâll make you feel like the whole thing was a waste.
Youâll downplay the good decisions.
Youâll fixate on the bad ones. Youâll feel like quitting, when you shouldâve just taken a break and tried again later.
Donât.
### Prep with purpose
Imagine spending countless hours thinking about all the reasons you canât do something. Millions of people out there do just that. They donât want to prep because they donât want to dwell on the negative. But they dwell on it anyway. They just do it in secret, and they stuff it all down under a fake smile.
Thereâs no shortage of obstacles. Maybe you live in an apartment. Maybe you have an HOA. Maybe you work all the time.
Whether itâs prepping or something else, weâve all had those nights where we couldnât sleep. We were thinking about doing something. Well, some of us just got out of bed and started doing them. We turned the anxieties and uncertainties into action. I mean, we werenât going to sleep anyway.
Were we?
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