Future plans

[bigpaul]

(29 May 2021, 16:29)Ajax Wrote:

(29 May 2021, 12:51)bigpaul Wrote: Common sense isnt common any more, most people have modern attitudes and are more in tune with their mobile phones and gaming than preparing for an event they think will never happen.

I cannot fault this observation. If 'survival' was about pushing buttons then a few might make it. If survival means getting off a bum-bum and doing stuff (and it does) then they are pooched. Modern day education feels more like indoctrination and common sense is almost extinct - I wonder if it is on an endangered list somewhere or if folks are swilling champers and toasting its demise?

thats why the mortality rate post collapse will be very high and survival rates very low.
survival is not something most of the general public know anything about and they all rely on the system for their daily survival whether they acknowledge it or not.
remove the system and they will not survive.

[Skean Dhude]

There are a few out there that you cab build relationships with. The more you can convert your family or close friends the better though. Much safer than letting others into your orbit.

[MaryN]

My personal preference is to build a relationship within a small group; which actually I am slowly managing to do. The covid lockdown has been a bit of an eyeopener for some people in this area. At the beginning of the trouble last year I managed to engage a neighbour in a fairly serious conversation as to how she and her family were going to cope. It is fairly rural here (one bus a week into the local town and back on the same day!) and no local shops, and we started to have problems fairly early on with shortages in certain foods and items. She got a fairly stern lecture about prepping and stocking up to ensure her family were o.k. Months later, she hugged me and said it had saved the day - her food stocks had carried them through without problems, and she was carrying on in that mode. Since then we have collaborated on just about everything. She and her partner have come over to lend labour to us, and vice versa. It works well, and I do feel that relationships are the way to go (if you get them right). SS is right; it does take a certain type of leadership to keep a small community on the right track, but I do feel that we are heading in that direction. It is impossible to foresee anything further than the day ahead, but I'm working on cementing a practical relationship. Who knows!

[Mortblanc]

The real problem?

All the "preppers" are waiting for the "big collapse" when the past year is showing that it might not be a "big collapse", but a series of things you though you had survived and were over, that culminate in a slow, lingering retreat for all on board.

Rome did not fall, and the dark ages did not start in a single day. It took two generations for the troops to leave Hadrian's Wall, the Roman villa system to slow to a halt due to lack of trade, the cities to empty and the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings to replace the Celtic male gene pool with their own.

The entire system did not "collapse" the day the Romans sent the letter that told the Romans in Britain they were on their own. Society had been wilting for 50 years and would continue for another 100 before someone looked at a Roman ruin and said "Who built that? We don't make that kind of thing any more!"

The sickness we just dealt with for 18 months is nothing compared to the financial situation it has caused due to bad planning and appeasement at the highest levels. Soon we will wish that we had weathered the storm without the complete closure of the world economy.

Most of us, at our age, even though we have been preppers for decades, have our homesteads and crops, may never see the end of the coming "recession".

[Straight Shooter]

Thats a fine assessment MB ! And I have to agree with you ...........MB is back ! .

[bigpaul]

I have always thought that SHTF was NOT going to be "one big bang" but a series of smaller events one affecting another which affects a third and so on, some so small most people wouldnt even notice them.

[Skean Dhude]

It has been clear for some time that the West has been declining. It has accelerated over the last 30 years as we have not developed anything new since the 90s. Everything we have is based on something developed before then and simply improved. We have encouraged the weak and mediocrity has flourished. Now we promote the inept based on a physical attribute instead of a skillset and wonder why everything is cocking up. We are a stupid species. No other species does what we do.

I've always advocated that when we fall we will have difficulty getting back to where we are now and that it won't be in our lifetimes. Prepping is to increase our chances to make it through the troubled stage where we have a lot of people around, no infrastructure or supply chain to sustain us and just what we have and can maintain ourselves.

Eventually we will settle down, after the big die off but it won't be easy rebuilding. All the surface coal is gone we will need to dig deeper and won't have the tools. Diseases we thought long gone will kill and simple accidents will be fatal.

Imo we need to be leaving our planet to survive, mining asteroids, remote bases. That will be a lot easier from where we are now and I. If we don't before a collapse then we will be stuck here until our species dies.

So prepping for me is improving the chances for me and mine to be here to restart.

[bigpaul]

we have come so far as a species that when everything fails we have further to fall, we have put all our eggs in one basket and put our trust in computers running everything and no back up systems because of course " it will never fail" !
in the past when civilisations collapsed the survivors could simply access their daily needs by their own physical labours and sit back and wait for society to reassert itself no matter how long that took, this will be impossible for most of the population as they no longer have the skills or knowledge to allow them to do this.