The only thing the paranoid preppers did was raise the price of ammunition.

Going back to COVID. one had to wear a MOPP IV suit and decontaminate everything you touch 24/7, including the interior of your car and the ultimate petri dish, your mobile phone. For the folks who grew a beard and wore a mask, FU, you compromised the mask.

My prepping involves knowing how to make beer/whiskey from the dirt up. I figure anything else I can trade from there. Including your women.

https://youtu.be/t3lFHqWELE0?si=u3GoHTxEt83KYgbJ

I do have to admit, I'm prepared for fires and earthquakes. Doomsday seems crazy, though. I have a bug out bag, etc... I'm not going to live under the preconceived notion that I'm going to survive a nuclear attack or race war that'll never happen. Pepper's get fucking insane. The number of people who start digging down without any understanding of structural integrity is insane aswell. Especially in places near fault lines. Building firebreaks, storing food and water, forming a microgrid if you live in an area where they might turn off the electricity, etc... those are all realistic and important. Also, fuck anti-maskers.

I was always under the impression we'd go nomadic if things got bad, traveling to where it is habitatable year round and food is more available. I'm keeping myself mentally and physically healthy enough to walk long distances while not being picky about what I eat or where I sleep. I find the whole concept of hunkering down indefinitely is itself untenable.

I have to sit at home and watch TV??? The horror!

Piers Morgan, famous conservative, on how you have to sit on your ass https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/piers-morgan-good-morning-britain-rant-coronavirus-people-outside-a4394466.html

I would add to this that covid did cause a major resurgence in a different flavor of prepper: "back to the earth" people who strive to, among other things, produce more of their own food (be it growing produce, raising livestock, or even doing more cooking and baking using raw ingredients rather than relying on premade food). Interest in gardening, homesteading, baking, and learning to live off the land skyrocketed during peak covid. Sure a lot of that interest has subsided, but much like how the great depression permanently changed the attitudes of people who lived through it in regards to reusing things instead of tossing and replacing, the experience of scarcity and uncertainty regarding basic goods (for most first-world folks, for the first time in their lives) made a permanent mark on at least some of the population. And this is a much more practical type of prepping, because instead of coming from a fantasy of what disaster might befall the world, it was a direct response to a disaster that actually happened.

this is so fucking spot on, whew

Why the hate on prerppers in this comment section? It sounds kinds fun tbh, and the skills of living in the woods are useful even outside of apocalypse.

In hindsight it doesn't feel like it was a proper SHTF moment. Some of the early reactions did make it feel like one but in the end not that much happened where I live. Try to stay away from people for a while and use a mask seemed like the extent of it. Spent a lot more than outdoors than I usually do.