Here’s my case against Doomsday Prepping. While I think that prepping for a few months loss of access to basic services is a little nutty but theoretically justifiable, I am convinced that prepping for a Hollywood-style apocalypse is totally pointless. Of course, by most people’s standards, having three months of dehydrated food on hand is just completely insane, but by prepper standards I’ve basically given up and will just die in the second wave rather than the first. Yes, I do keep an excessive amount of long term storage food on hand–my urban-dwelling family of five is prepared for roughly three months of loss of access to basic services, but I’m not even remotely interested in doing any more. Rather, it’s about why I don’t prep for The End Of The World As We Know It, TSHTF, the apocalypse, the collapse, or whatever else you want to call it.

Both aspects appealed to me, especially the gear part.īut this isn’t a treatise on prepping. In other words, prepping is hyper-consumerist in practice and anti-consumerist in outlook (sort of in the way that war is frequently justified by the desire for peace). Prepping has two peculiar aspects that I found completely compelling: 1) it involves shopping for and acquiring Really Cool Gear, and 2) it has a community that longs for a world where we’re no longer compelled to work jobs we hate so that we can buy Really Cool Gear that we don’t need. I had dipped my toe in the waters of prepping, and I started to read more about it online. I didn’t even own anything that qualifies as a “survival knife” until 2012.

I didn’t take things much further for a few years. As far as I was concerned, we were ready for an earthquake, and that was that. Later, I added double-barreled coach gun for defensive purposes, making it my first time to live with a gun in the house since I left home for college at 17. A lot of people in the Bay Area keep stockpiles of food and water on-hand for when The Big One hits, and since my wife was super nervous about earthquakes and I’m a former Boy Scout, we picked up a few cases of MREs and a water barrel. We’ve rounded up a list of places to go to prepare for the worst - but hope for the best.My first real exposure to the world of prepping came in 2008, when I became a new father and we moved to San Francisco, an earthquake zone. Those of us who can't afford to relocate at the first sign of oncoming disaster will need to make sure we're prepared for whatever comes our way. Will we find ourselves surfing on pieces of the Frost Bank tower as Austin floods? Battling radiation grackles that are pecking at our houses? Will I-35 transform into the Mad Max Fury Road as we crawl around the city looking for water? But it’s also kinda true, right?Īmidst historic deep freezes, hurricanes and other natural disasters that are hitting Texas and the rest of the country, some are left to wonder what the coming years are going to look like.

That’s part of the opening monologue from the first The Lord of the Rings movie. I feel it in the water I feel it in the earth I smell it in the air.” Okay, you caught us. It’s the End of the World As We Know It: The Central Texan’s Guide to the Apocalypse

Doomsday prep