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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

The major point that the author misses is that by being obsessed with upcoming catastrophe, you lower your quality of life now (not only with prep expenses, but also with stress and paranoia) in exchange for surviving a low-probability disaster in the future, where even surviving would be a pretty miserable existence.

There's a surprisingly solid mathematical case for living in the present and near future, and accepting the risk of catastrophe that you'd only have a marginal chance of surviving and thriving in. In WWII Austria and Poland, a huge catastrophe, the people who escaped suffering weren't the preppers, they were the people who saw writing on the wall and moved away.

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"in exchange for surviving a low-probability disaster in the future, where even surviving would be a pretty miserable existence."

You're assuming the very worst case there; there's a wide range of outcomes between "everything's great!" and "there's a supermutant banging on my door". Consider France, mentioned as place where many violent events have occurred, but which most people would still consider a nice place to live.

Prepping for 2-4 weeks of independent survival can also assist in the event of a power outage, major snow event, or any number of other mundane events.

It also has social benefits. It's nice if a small burp in food shipments doesn't produce rioting in the streets because there was no slack in the system. Prepping is putting slack in the system. Even if done for what may seem like a dumb reason, it really should still be encouraged to some degree.

Or consider a much more common catastrophe such as weather. Clearly there are more places prone to these types of disasters (like hurricane prone areas), but it is not hard to cut off a supply chain for a few days. Even when there are forecasts of heavy snow or something the grocery stores empty real fast. Prepping is for events like this.

I've had tornadoes destroy my brother's house twice and my father's once. My grandmother's house was also damaged.

Prepping for me is more fun than anything. Although, I'm far less prepared here in Tornado Alley than I was living in SF. A tornado mostly wipes out a mile wide or so, not a vast area, so my concern is only riding out the initial damage. In SF a large earthquake could be very devastating.

So my probability of a tornado hitting my house is much higher, yet I'm prepared less. Some of us take into account more variables.

I grew up with a family that were outdoorsmen (and women). So having guns around was never something odd. They were never toys (except the toy guns) and we respected them. I guess living through the Great Depression jaded my grandparents somewhat. They were prepared to take care of themselves first. Be it with guns, with land for cattle, chickens, stocked pond, and a small farm, they viewed them all as just part of life.

My grandmother offered me any of my grandfathers guns I wanted when he passed. I only took one of the rare(ish) ones as a memento. I have my own handguns and rifles, but nothing on the volume that they had.

Preparing for possible outcomes is actually enjoyable for me and my family I'm sure. They loved shooting, hunting, fishing, even the manual labor of farming. I didn't get it as a kid but as an adult (software engineer & entrepreneur) getting your hands dirty and doing manual work is quite rewarding to me now. Plus shooting is just plain fun!

> The major point that the author misses is that by being obsessed with upcoming catastrophe, you lower your quality of life now [...]

I think that's because the author isn't talking specifically about the obsessed. There are plenty of levels between doing nothing and being obsessed, and that's where most people exist.

I completely agree.

I have many rifles (and many AR-15s) because I like the things mostly, not because I'm trying to build an arsenal for the apocalypse. If I weren't enamored with them in particular I would have one or two, maybe a few spare parts, and the money I've spent on them would be spent on other things.

There are lots of things I do based on this subconscious analysis. For instance - I have a fire extinguisher in my vehicle. It was ~$100, and is certainly not something that most people have. I bought it and installed it because it seemed like something that would be very bad to not have if I ever needed it. In fact, I'm on my fourth fire extinguisher; the first three were used to put out fires on other people's vehicles that I happened to come across.

The thing that I think a lot of people don't understand about this is that it's primarily about mindset. I want to be responsible for myself and capable of handling any reasonable issues that arise in my life without calling upon others unless necessary. For me, from a practical perspective, firearms represent the ability to secure myself and my family and to keep us safe. From here, gun control is an attempt to remove my ability to do that.

You can be prepared without lowering your quality of life.

The financial acumen necessary (edit: that one develops while striving) to prepare (edit: against future disasters) can also lead to greater fiscal responsibility, but additionally, being prepared can lead to peace of mind and prevent obsessiveness.

Disclaimer, I'm LDS, where "Emergency Preparedness" is a thing[1]

Never have I seen it as something stress inducing, but I have often heard stories where "emergency preparedness" comes in handy for some completely unexpected circumstance.

That of course is less applicable to guns than it is to food and monetary reserves.

[1] https://www.lds.org/topics/emergency-preparedness?lang=eng

I don't prep, FWIW, though I often think I ought to at least on some minimal "survive for a few weeks" level. I think I will finally look into that.

    > obsessed

Do the smoke detectors and fire extinguisher(s) in your house mean you're "obsessed" with your house burning down?

There are degrees of prepping.

You could set yourself up to survive at least a few weeks "off the grid" with a few hundred bucks' worth of nonperishable food and water and shelter. That wouldn't get you through total societal collapse or a war, but it would get you through a lot of Hurricane Katrina-style disaster situations where help, in some form, is on the way but the food supply is disrupted. That's not obsession by any measure.

After that, yeah, things ramp up pretty quickly. If you're trying to survive a governmental collapse you need a pretty massive stash of food in order to survive months or years and if things go longer than that you'll need to start producing your own food at some point because AFAIK even MREs don't last forever.

Whether or not long-term doomsday survival is a realistic option or not, that's up for debate.

Being self-sufficient like a settler in the American West from the 1850s is absolutely not enough, not by a longshot, because if things collapse tomorrow in America there are going to be 350,000,000 million desperate people and some of them will be hostile... not exactly something they dealt with in Little House on the Prarie. A person would either need to stay completely hidden with a few years' worth of food stores, become a refugee, or.... I guess, band together with others in some sort of natural or man-made fortress. The latter option's a bit laughable unless you're truly dedicated to becoming a regional warlord with the biggest fortress/army in the region. (Good luck with that)

Where do you propose low- and middle-income people move to from the U.S., and when? And what country is it that will take in refugees from the U.S., if you wait too long to move?

Here's an even better question: "what country would be any better if the world's economic lynchpin is no longer a safe and stable place?"

If the US becomes unstable, it will cause everywhere else to become equally unstable if not moreso.

Sometimes people just have fear of an event occurring, and disaster preparedness is a way to help calm that fear and gain a sense of control. I'll confess that the threat of a nuclear exchange with North Korea has caused me a fair amount of concern in the last six months. But reading about nuclear attacks and disaster preparedness has helped me manage that concern.

Moving away is a different kind of preparation; it's certainly not doing nothing. Moving is a lot more extreme than keeping some spare food & water in your basement.

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