4 ms·

I used to have prepper mentality until one day I realized it wasn't about survival, I just wanted to live in a world without consequences.

• gumby 5y ago
  That's an interesting self insight. I have one friend who's a prepper. His basement is full of ammo, weapons and food, and he maintains it (rotates supplies etc). He doesn't talk about it (good opsec!) and is otherwise perfectly normal and rational and a very nice person. If you visited his house you'd never know. His wife thinks it's crazy and laughs about it, but otherwise their relationship is great so who knows...perhaps she agrees but is embarrassed to admit it? He lives in the middle of the suburbs, not out in the boonies. I'd bet several dozen HNers know him personally.
  • ithkuil 5y ago
    It's not utterly irrational to do it. It is an opportunity cost though. What else would you rather do with the time and resources it takes to set that up and maintain it? Everybody is free to pick their hobby though!
  • shawnb576 5y ago
    I totally get the draw here but I think it is irrational depending on your goals: 1. Having enough supplies to get through a few months of uncertainty w/o needing the outside world. This makes sense to me: natural disaster, a bigger-badder pandemic, etc. 2. Ammo, weapons, and food isn't rational to me simply because if things get so bad you need that stuff, you're screwed anyway. Nothing in your house is going to help you when the people who also need that stuff find out you have it. Any violent unrest is going to outgun you very quickly. Ideally we all work towards a world where that isn't a fear for people. Not to be naive but there are real questions that we face regularly (e.g. at the ballot box) that have a bearing on this that is much bigger than trying to insulate yourself or your family from a broad-based slip into chaos.
    • gumby 5y ago
      I agree, though stockpiling for months is over the top. He lives in a place where it's reasonable to expect the government to mount a successful rescue for some major crisis (extended blackout, amazingly bad winter storm, nuclear attack on DC/NYC, etc). One of the states that handled the pandemic pretty reasonably. If things are so bad that you need six months' of supplies....well presumably the crisis will be longer than six months. As for guns, as I said my buddy has good opsec -- he never talks about this, so unless you're the kind of friend who would end up in his basement for some reason you'd never know. But the preppers I casually run into (mostly at shooting ranges) always seem to be the types whose homes would be worth invading if there were a crisis and you needed firearms!
• Hokusai 5y ago
  That fits with someone I knew. He used to be interested in any apocalyptic movement, like the 2020 end of the world. He was never extreme, but he will talk about them time to time. In his case the motivation was he had a degenerative disease. So, I can understand that for him the inevitable end was very real. I still think of him as a reasonable person in unreasonable circumstances.
• readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  You should prep to shield yourself from the consequences of others' actions.