Analogy Of The 20 Titanic Lifeboats

[John]

Well seeing you are loving this lifeboat anology so much I thought I would take it a step further and see what you think of this.

ANOLOGY
A big ship is safer than a small life boat; therefore, you should only man the life boats and leave the big ship if you are pretty sure that it will really sink. Even a big ship in trouble is far more stable, has more resources, and can better stand a storm, than small life boats.

My viewpoint would be, that we are on a ship that may potentially get in big trouble, but that is still not yet sinking, it is not even really damaged yet. If you leave the ship now, the ship will sail on, leaving you behind, all on your own. The big ship may collide with an iceberg and sink, but it is far better prepared to sail through a heavy storm than a small life boat.

Let's keep working the analogy.
"Manning" the lifeboats is at least one step before "deploying" the lifeboats. If and when it becomes clear you should abandon ship, you want to be near or on a lifeboat. The other choice will be standing at the back in the crowd pressing to get a seat on a boat precisely at the moment it becomes clear to everyone that the lifeboats need to deploy and the ship needs to be abandoned. Hope you are a good swimmer!
So for me, "manning" the lifeboat means taking what small, hard earned wealth I possess now and either purchasing some property alone or with others. This property needs to be usable to at least provide subsistence agriculture. Where I live, these kinds of properties are already rising in value faster than other real estate. As a lifeboat it need not ever float completely on its own until the ship crashes and starts going down. If the ship is only listing and struggling, we will still be tethered and floating alongside.

Will this little lifeboat be able to float on its own? That could be the hard test. Waiting until it is desperately needed to float to begin learning how to sail and test its sea worthiness would be an extremely stressful and risky plan in my way of thinking. So my suggestion to anyone else who is planning to have a little boat similar as me, take all the "sailing" lessons you can now with your own agricultural efforts, however big or small. Gather all the hard earned advice you can from the old seafaring salts.

If others take this course of action then maybe, just maybe, my lifeboat tethered together with other lifeboats might just manage to come through the storm.
What I'm sure about, is that for my family and those close to me, I don't want to have our only choice to be "swimming lessons". And waiting for those lessons to begin at the time when we need to be exiting the ship and leaving shark infested waters for the nearest rock or shore.

"Again, in that day each little tribe will live by itself and to itself and go its own way, and their differences will soon be more than they were even in the first days of [humankind], according to the accidents of survival and of place... In the distant years after these first years, the tribes will grow more numerous and come together, cross fertilize in the body and in mind."
- George R Stewart, Earth Abides (1949)