The Key To Practical Survivalism
A couple of years ago now, I wrote an article for Hyperion Magazine called Survivalism 2.0. To paraphrase, I wrote that prepping as espoused by the overly dramatic American reality shows was pretty useless and counterproductive, and what you’d call practical survivalism was, until very recently, simply a case of surviving daily life.
Assuming you live in the West right now, and even extended out to most of the world apart from a few pockets; it’s very easy to survive now. It requires no thought. You don’t really have to worry about starving to death, neither wild animals or your fellow man are likely to kill you, and providing everything in the wider world continues to tick over, planning for the future is as straightforward as knowing that you can plan for the future.
Survivalism While Ignoring The World
Despite the above, if you’ve visited social media recently, you’d think there was imminent blood-bathery going on. Just today, I spent a few minutes on Twitter and saw people calling for some girl to die because she supported genocide, (she’d bought a cup from Starbucks,) some guy saying that Yemen needs to be nuked, (Houthi rebels in the Red Sea) and a whole bunch of “Satanic Paedophiles run the planet” Jeffrey Epstein case-file stuff.
Also included, a weird rabbit hole of people who believe Trump is the literal, biblical antichrist and we’re about to have The Rapture/End Times/Armageddon.
Now… maybe one or all of these are true. If so, they’re a little above my paygrade.
But they’re useful to frame my point: There are almost certainly things you should be doing to better secure your safety, health and success in the future.
If you allow yourself to be caught up in the disaster of the moment, then you are scrambling your brain to the point you won’t know what to do.
This induces a state of faux-helplessness.
So, ignoring all of that is step one.
Pressing Concerns
There will be pressing concerns that you should attend to before worrying about the Gaza conflict or whether Stephen Hawking attended an orgy populated by underage girls. (Can’t believe I’m writing that, but I don’t make the news…)
So, as a real example, there’s localised flooding in my area. I’m not overly concerned about it affecting me personally in the sense that my home is in danger of flooding, but watching people in other areas close to me brings into sharp perspective more real world, pressing matters that might need attending to:
- What happens if roads are cut off and I need to get to a hospital?
- What happens if supply lines are cut off for a few days and I can’t just “pop to the store” for food?
- And this one, which will strike fear into all our hearts: what happens if the internet goes down and I can’t continue my 5-day blogging streak?
While these seem like “not the end of the world” concerns, that’s the reality of practical survivalism.
Practical Survivalism
The pop culture misconception about survivalism is concerned with the end of the world as we know it. It’s even got its own acronym: TEOWAWKI.
The reality of things is that if say, a meteor hit the Earth tomorrow and it caused TEOTWAWKI like in Cormac Macarthy’s The Road, your survival plan, tins of spam and so on are going to mean nought.
- Meteorite
- Zombie Apocalypse
- Nuclear Warfare
- Trump being the literal antichrist and setting the four horsemen of the apocalypse upon you and kickstarting the book of Revelations
You’re probably going to die.
That’s not a knock on you or your Rambo-like attributes; it’s just a case of running the numbers on very long odds. Even with the biggest collection of tinned food and as many rounds of ammunition as you can fit in your decked-out bunker, you probably can’t shift the odds from less-than-one-percent survival rate to a two-percent survival rate.
However…
Let’s just say there’s an Earthquake where you live. Or, there’s a particular bar in town that you frequent that’s full of criminals and ne’er-do-wells who like to get a bit clever with knife-crime.
In this scenario, having the correct risk assessment approach makes a real statistical difference in potential emergencies and their outcomes.
Having a plan for likely issues, whether in avoiding them or overcoming them, massively increases your chances of continuing to live a good life.
We’ll come back to this at a later point, because it’s important and ties well into everything else I talk about here.