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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

This. I get a similar feeling when the very people who got nearly mad when they were unable to go to the barber for a few weeks due to an global pandemic suddenly call for a civil war. It is just very clear that they completely lack the imagination how it would actually feel to have the gas running out, no food in the stores and everything you worked for threatened (not to speak of your bare life). In that situation you can prep all you want, but what if your wisdom teeth start acting up? What if you suddenly require medication, that you cannot even know of, because you decided fighting alone is better than actually getting to know the people in your community?

The thing with prepping is that the energy you put into one-upping your neighbours should maybe just be put into fizing the issues you might be bracing against.

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There are really several levels of concern as far as I can tell.

1. Temporary disruptions (short term)

2. Temporary disruptions (drawn out)

3. The World Has Changed

1 is really about everyone hoarding TP, "the wheat runs out" between $whenever and the next harvest, etc. It's annoying, but nobody really dies. Just a lot of discomfort.

2 is more when you have to do a cold start of a national grid after a REAL blackout. No electricity for weeks or months. Maybe some deaths, but in the end society basically stays running even though a big thing happens.

3 is a nuclear war, an air-transmissible disease with a 30% fatality rate, etc. The event will eventually end but the world has definitely changed.

Lots of people are prepared for 1, and "the preppers" that folks like to make fun of are in pretty good shape for 2. Almost nobody is prepared for 3 and to try and be prepared for it in a way other than building a self-sustaining community seems like a fool's errand.

The history of man is famines. Mass starvation deaths. We live in an era of unprecedented abundance. For now. The next famine will happen and like every long delayed event will be much worse than the last one thanks to collective loss of planning for now to weather it during the long summer of plenty. The alternative is famine has been solved forever…this seems very unlikely.

Considering the that the average weight loss of a morbidly obese person that stops eating any food for months is 0.7 pounds per day, I'm sure many Americans can survive months without calories.

Ad 3: knowing your neighbours and having a good judgement of their special skills and knowledge (and being on good terms with them) is not an fools errand, but something that might help you with all 3 points and maybe even in your daily life.

There's a good chance than almost nobody in the city knows how to farm in scale.

> The thing with prepping is that the energy you put into one-upping your neighbours should maybe just be put into fixing the issues you might be bracing against.

If anything, the past few years have shown me how pretty much impossible it is to fix things. A pandemic exposing people's willful ignorance and callousness towards their own neighbors, multiple flood/drought/fuel/shipping crises exposing just how fragile our standard of living and infrastructure can be (at least in the first world, it's been more obvious in the third world for a while), and any proposed technological fixes for environmental catastrophe still requiring a ton of resources that the world doesn't have to implement it at the scale necessary.

Meanwhile each country is at each other's throats more than ever before, sparked by Russia's invasion (but it was really there before, just exacerbated). Feels like we just reverted about 20 years there, I hadn't had to worry about nuclear annihilation since high school, and now that's at least somewhat on the table again, great. Love to know how I'm supposed to 'fix' that.

If Dennis Rodman feels it's not safe taking a trip to Russia to be our ambassador, I don't think that makes my chances any better!

I'm not bunker prepping or anything, just making sure the pantry stays stocked and learning some practical, non-technical skills, and I'm likely pretty screwed if SHTF for several reasons, but any time I try to think of directing my energy towards 'fixing' things, I'm pretty much just left with a helpless feeling after trying to think of things to do (beyond just donating some money to a few causes, like the recent floods in Pakistan... but that's not fixing anything, just a drop in the bucket to help alleviate one of endless catastrophes that are happening and will keep getting worse over the next few decades).

The looming sense of existential dread is real. I only hope that the end is swift and painless for most.

Also, the first thing folks who learn to survive in the world after “the event” will probably do will be to raid these bunkers or just pour cement down the chutes / roll a big rock in front of the door. The leaders that led us to this point should not be the leaders in the world after it.

Those leaders will be enjoying retirement in South America.

As an aside, I'd say shows like "The Walking Dead" do preppers a disservice in that its not realistic. I don't mean the zombies - obviously those aren't realistic - but its unrealistic how the actors stay healthy & beautiful while living in such desperate conditions, without sanitation or routine health care.

(OTOH the world that awaits them on recovery will be a paradise! Why? Because zombies represent infinite clean energy. Just put a bunch of zombies on a big mouse run with some bait to motivate them to walk, and boom they can turn a crank indefinitely without any other input, like food.)

True. One thing TWD didn't show was the massive scale of death from drinking non-potable water. That would have killed more people than the zombies.

Rare for any post-apocalyptic setting to accurately depict the shelf-life of gasoline. Despite its whole "WE are the walking dead" schtick the cast seems to mostly prefer cruising around in trucks and RVs even several seasons in.

https://www.bobvila.com/articles/how-long-does-gasoline-last...

Same. This misunderstanding of gas (and batteries) is prevalent in all post-apocolyptic fiction.

Speaking personally, I would watch a more realistic apocalypse scenario where people had to relearn/reinvent older ways of doing things in the ruins of modern civilization, like how to ride/tame/breed/maintain horses for everyday use, how to heat/cook/survive at scale without electricity, running water, or fossil fuels. It's not just the technical challenge of it, but the emotional challenge, the humility required to "go backward", that would make interesting drama.

One show that was unfortunately canceled too soon and looked like it was putting a more realistic spin on the whole "end of the world" trope was "Jericho". It was quite slow and the characters spent a lot of time trying to figure out stuff like how to heat their house, how to make sure they'll have food in the next few weeks, etc. Maybe that's why it didn't work.

I recall actually seeing something like that on that old "Last Man on Earth" sitcom. One episode revolves around the stored petrol having gone off so they start trying to install solar kit.

I think it's like panic buying of toilet paper: you do it because it makes you feel you have some control over your future, not because it makes sense/would work out in practice.

Why are you assuming they are the same people?

Another assumption: why do you think the people involved are the ones concerned with one-upping their neighbors? And one can both work to fix societal problems and prepare for a worst case scenario.

> What if you suddenly require medication

Or how about people who already require medication? With type 1 diabetes, I'd die horribly within a week without a steady supply of insulin - possibly as little as 2 days. The "let's disrupt society and have a civil war because -tyranny-!!" folks don't seem particularly concerned about issues like that.

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