Betting Against

We’re a little less than a month into running this site and for me at least still less than a year into talking rather publicly about my interest in these kinds of topics. The most interesting thing to me is that the reactions from people tend to land firmly in one of two categories – either they get very excited because they have also been considering this kind of stuff for a while and perhaps actually doing something in their own right, or they laugh and ask something along the lines of why we would ever consider stuff like this. Sure there are some middle ground people but for the most part that’s true. “Either you are really paranoid or I’m really naive” is a sentiment I’ve gotten more than once. And maybe that’s a fact, because the truth of the matter is as much as I want the future to be sunny and awesome with nothing ever going wrong, I just don’t believe things are going that way,and mostly I just hope things don’t go as badly as I expect them to. Some might say I’m betting against a happy ending.

That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but from my perspective I’m taking steps to ensure a happy ending. In the 34 years I’ve been here the list of things that didn’t work out the way they were supposed to, or the way everyone thought they would, or the way everyone hoped they would… well it’s a little on the long side. In fact even the things that have worked out well were often set into motion by something else not working out so well. And that’s certainly some of the driving force behind my approach to survival/preparedness – if something falls apart, I want to make sure I know how to take those pieces and build something with them. I think most people wait until something happens and then try to figure out what to do, I’m hoping to be a few steps ahead. Read more…

Being Prepared

I was a Boy Scout when I was a kid and had their motto “Be Prepared” hammered into my head on a fairly regular basis. This seemed like sound advice at the time, but even then ‘worst case scenario’ was purely hypothetical and most of the skills we learned were mostly for their show off factor. Sure knowing how to build a fire when you were trapped in the woods was cool, but I lived in the city and I was pretty sure I’d have a million other options for starting fires before I ever got to rubbing two sticks together. Actual disaster happened to other people, so even while learning things they were firmly lodged in my mental never-gonna-need-it file.

Since then I’ve talked to a lot of other people and found that even without training, that isn’t an uncommon opinion. People who live in cities like me are surrounded by infrastructure all the time and we come to depend on it. We don’t need to know how to defend ourselves because the police are just a phone call away. We don’t need to know how to find food because you can’t throw an empty bottle without hitting a convenience store. If you get hurt there’s an endless supply of doctors and hospitals who are happy to take your insurance co-payment or at the very worst a pharmacy down the street where you probably buy band-aids 24 hours a day. We live where we do and pay the taxes we do so that when something goes wrong someone else is there to fix it for us. It’s what we rely on and the reason most people think ‘what if’ is a useless question. The problem of course is that’s all a myth. Read more…