Personal preparation and survival

 Mel Tappan, in his classic and hopelessly dated book "Survival Guns" outlined how most people of the time thought about "survival weapons." They generally said the perfect weapon was a .22 rifle, a black powder muzzle loader, a bow and arrow, or a .30-30 level action. Of course, Tappan went into gun porn for the rest of the book, as we all know that firearms can be used to plow a field, cure infections, and keep people warm in cold weather. For that matter, any "preparedness" magazine usually comes with at least two or three gun reviews or something like that.

While I don't have much to do with the prepper culture, the assumption there always seems to be that a basement full of beans and toilet paper will be more than enough to get someone through a crisis and emerge on the other side, back to the mall and work. 

People can be wiser, and recognize that if the lights go off, it will likely be a long time before they ever come back on. Planning for this still is going to be an issue. Plans often assume that things will occur a certain way, but General Eisenhower recognized that plans fall apart when hit with reality. However, he saw that they still form a template with which to work.

Living in a declining civilization poses a real problem, too. It gets hard to figure out when and where the next giant-sized shoe is going to drop when people are competing more and more viciously for limited space, resources, food, work, and so on. Right now, we're in a civilization that has around 8 billion people living in it. A quick look at a graph of human population over the centuries shows that it began to rise around the beginning of the industrial revolution and taking off like a rocket after dinosaur-powered farming got under way.

Think about the infrastructure that supports that populating growth beginning to give out, even while human population is growing, from global warming, fossil fuel depletion, economic crashes meaning production falls dramatically, and so on. Not a pretty scenario, but this is where adaptability and flexibility come in.

The life that everyone fears going back to would be pretty much how people lived in the 1700s. Not great, but not horrible. The problem is going back there with the volume of people we have now, plus our infrastructure, living skills, and so on. In short, the faster our civilization declines, the faster people are going to die, simply because they won't have a chance to adapt before starvation and disease catch up with them.

This really points to preparation and survival being more to do with mental flexibility than anything. People will hold on to normalcy bias until the death, but for people who can see what is already happening and figure out how to cope with it, they will make it through okay. At least have a plan, which will be your template going forward, don't be slow to realize that things are getting worse, and don't listen to anyone who tells you that "things are going to get back to normal" or "things will be fine." The only people who say that are the ones running on hope and not reality.