Are you ready for when society collapses?

Well I live in an urban area and would have to trek pretty far to get inna woods, so not really in that respect. But I do have a good supply of emergency food/water and guns/ammo so I guess I'm as ready as anyone realistically can be without building a self-sufficient commune in the woods.

Really I don't think I'd look forward to it. While I wouldn't have to pay my bills, I'd miss things like dentists and frozen pizza.

Even during the Middle Ages society never actually ever entirely “collapsed”. It is a poor thing to plan for. Planning for a realistic event like a Depression would make more sense and far more likely to occur.
This is true but I think it's also important to point out that the majority of people back then worked in agricultural production while a minority lived in cities. So like when Rome was collapsing, not that rural people weren't unaffected but they managed to plow along while large cities like Rome basically collapsed with only a small fraction of the previous population remaining.

Today the majority of people live in cities and agriculture is dependent on industrial society.
 
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No. I don’t know if you can really be prepared.

If you can have three days of food and water, maybe stretch for three weeks. If you can put together a month you’re doing better than virtually everyone around you. If things aren’t starting to normalize in some way after a month (government sending water trucks etc) they probably aren’t going to normalize. At that point supplies aren’t your problem so much. You’re in a new world and you’ll need skills and luck and intuition to make it, but you can’t necessarily predict which ones. Stay frosty and make friends with your neighbors.

I’m not a real prepper but I doom some. The main roadblock for me is water storage. A month of food is relatively easy, a month of water seems impossible. Even a week of water for a family of four is like 30 gallons minimum, is heavy, takes up a ton of space. I get real analysis paralysis about it. You can feel free to find me faggy for this, but I also hate how much plastic garbage is involved if you buy gallon jugs at the grocery store. I’ve thought about getting a 50 gallon drum but the only obvious place to store it has temperature fluctuations. Some plastic degrades pretty quickly and will pop pinprick holes (I know from unfortunate experience) so I’m leery of putting a drum somewhere that gets hot and cold.

I’m all ears if anyone has solved the water issue!
Water storage: NEET doomer edition (assuming you got these things cleaned)
  • Bathtub (cut out some tin roof for cover)
  • Toilet tanks
  • Pot with a lid and other kitchen equipment
  • Steel container / stainless tub (cut out some tin roof for cover)
  • Stainless steel milk cans
  • Some spare glass/steel water bottles (yes, one water bottle = +1 day of your life). You can resuse wine/whiskey bottles.
Shower and washing clothes will become a luxury (if you are nearby a lake, use that for this), if you can be very restrictive with those, you can last a very long time with the things I mentioned (just a bathtub is ~120L). But keep you stuff clean!
For clothes: just stack a few +10 pack off brand t-shirts and underwears so you can pile that washing basket for a while.

pepe_apocalypse.gif

I hope you enojoy cooking expired pasta and rice on a fire pit.
 
I think I'd be ready to fall off of the tallest building I can find and get my dead ass in the right place: on the pavement dead.
 
There's a major trail system with a head about half a mile away. It'll do until I can requisition a boat. Since poaching laws will no longer be enforced, we'll be alright. Hopefully.
 
I dont think society will collapse into some weird dystopian wasteland in my lifetime. I think it might get much closer to that in my last years of life assuming I live to be 80+. I think it is going to be a pretty slow burn. There will be an increasing frequency of what I will call 'temporary collapse'. Like when the TX power grid went down in that ice storm, or when it was hard to get toilet paper and flour for a time in 2020. I think rolling blackouts will get more frequent for more people (this is a US perspective, I think shit will hit the fan hard in a lot of other countries a lot sooner). Maybe to the point of everyone accepting that they need to have water, food, provisions for weeks at a time several times a year. I think supply chains are going to suffer more and more and people will get used to not having options in stores, slowly over time. I think bartering with your neighbor will become more and more common as well as theft. I think society is just going to get more and more ragged, and I dont think anyone alive right now is going to recognize when society actually 'collapsed', like how the true start of a war is sometimes decided on after it is over and can be subjective (I believe history books will call the war in Ukraine the start of WW3, meaning we are already in it- but of course no one has seriously declared WW3 at the present).

Idk, I am still trying to save money for retirement but I am also trying to learn how to handle myself if shit gets real. My biggest question on societal decline is this though....when do we collectively stop paying rent? It is going to make me mad if society collapses yet I owe money to a landlord. In a true sudden collapse I assume everyone stops paying rent and mortgage but hunkers down wherever they are. Who knows.
 
No. I don’t know if you can really be prepared.

If you can have three days of food and water, maybe stretch for three weeks. If you can put together a month you’re doing better than virtually everyone around you. If things aren’t starting to normalize in some way after a month (government sending water trucks etc) they probably aren’t going to normalize. At that point supplies aren’t your problem so much. You’re in a new world and you’ll need skills and luck and intuition to make it, but you can’t necessarily predict which ones. Stay frosty and make friends with your neighbors.

I’m not a real prepper but I doom some. The main roadblock for me is water storage. A month of food is relatively easy, a month of water seems impossible. Even a week of water for a family of four is like 30 gallons minimum, is heavy, takes up a ton of space. I get real analysis paralysis about it. You can feel free to find me faggy for this, but I also hate how much plastic garbage is involved if you buy gallon jugs at the grocery store. I’ve thought about getting a 50 gallon drum but the only obvious place to store it has temperature fluctuations. Some plastic degrades pretty quickly and will pop pinprick holes (I know from unfortunate experience) so I’m leery of putting a drum somewhere that gets hot and cold.

I’m all ears if anyone has solved the water issue!
Repurpose an old water heater if you can find one in good condition
 
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I dont think society will collapse into some weird dystopian wasteland in my lifetime. I think it might get much closer to that in my last years of life assuming I live to be 80+. I think it is going to be a pretty slow burn. There will be an increasing frequency of what I will call 'temporary collapse'. Like when the TX power grid went down in that ice storm, or when it was hard to get toilet paper and flour for a time in 2020. I think rolling blackouts will get more frequent for more people (this is a US perspective, I think shit will hit the fan hard in a lot of other countries a lot sooner). Maybe to the point of everyone accepting that they need to have water, food, provisions for weeks at a time several times a year. I think supply chains are going to suffer more and more and people will get used to not having options in stores, slowly over time. I think bartering with your neighbor will become more and more common as well as theft. I think society is just going to get more and more ragged, and I dont think anyone alive right now is going to recognize when society actually 'collapsed', like how the true start of a war is sometimes decided on after it is over and can be subjective (I believe history books will call the war in Ukraine the start of WW3, meaning we are already in it- but of course no one has seriously declared WW3 at the present).

Idk, I am still trying to save money for retirement but I am also trying to learn how to handle myself if shit gets real. My biggest question on societal decline is this though....when do we collectively stop paying rent? It is going to make me mad if society collapses yet I owe money to a landlord. In a true sudden collapse I assume everyone stops paying rent and mortgage but hunkers down wherever they are. Who knows.

Idk if you’ve read John Michael Greer, but in his book Dark Age America, he describes the exact stair step descent you talk about here. So I think you’re probably right. We’ll get used to supply chain disruptions that will become more and more frequent until not having certain goods just becomes normal.
 
If you can manage to have food and protect yourself from threats, your next greatest danger is illness. A severe cold or flu could slow you down enough to kill you. Pneumonia in the cold and wet months will kill millions in this scenario. There will be a major comeback for dysentery and other gastric sickness. Nutrient deficits could mean life or death.

We do a lot in modern society to close ourselves off from these risks. Absolutely nobody is prepared for a long term collapse scenario where there is no governing body.

All of that being said, I would rather die alone innawoods starved by my own shortcomings than serve the golem/the elite/tptb/lizards in a collapsed world. I believe that making yourself socially invaluable is going to be the key to surviving and getting into a circle of other people interested in your wellbeing.

I also believe the collapse of our society is very well underway. Nothing happens all at once and while we often claim to know the single event that caused a catastrophic collapse of the status quo in hindsight, that claim is often biased and easily disputed. Society's failure is always the fault of my enemy, because someone who is not my enemy would not collapse the society I live in. I digress.

My point is that you are living in an actively crumbling society. This is collapse. The revolution will be televised. You watch it every day. The fall of an empire is not always a tragic tale of fury and wars and impassioned dead men and widowed women and scorned cities. Sometimes the wax runs out, simple as. All of our primary social systems are going to remain largely in place. You'll still work, you'll still have to kowtow to someone richer and more powerful than you, you'll still have debts and crime and police. By and large the collapse is not going to feel like much of anything at all except your dollar becoming worthless (which it is) and all of our social values basically turning over on their heads (which they are). One day you'll be a citizen of the United States of America, and the next you'll be a citizen of the United Southern States of America and most people will go "ok", go to work, eat, fuck, game, sleep and be done with it.

Welcome to the machine.
 
I’m all ears if anyone has solved the water issue!
If you have friends or relatives with a well you can get a manual deep well pump installed over the existing well head. I didn't know that was a thing but it is.

If the water table isn't super deep then a standard well hand pump could work. I used to go camping where they had one of these put in close to the lake, guy had it tested regularly, and the water was safe to drink with no bad microbiological contamination. Tasty water.
1718745136629.png
*I wouldn't buy the Chinese made ones though. this is just for illustrative purposes.

The other alternative is having a concrete cistern installed. You could store a lot of water on site for X number of days. I know a guy in a suburban area with one of these, sort of surprised he had one, but looking back not a bad idea.
 
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If you got a water source nearby you could use a reverse osmosis filter with a manual pump.
You can salvage reverse osmosis membranes from some kinds of batteries.

You can also use a manual pump to distill it via evaporation - lower the pressure inside, and it'll boil until the pressure is equal.


It's surprising how many Americans are concerned about water. I suppose water management is much more of a concern there - if you're European, then the most valuable things are old-fashioned manual tools, energy and food.

That extends to America - manual drill press, manual lathes, manual arbour press. You can make whatever the fuck you need to, if you have those tools. Steel is hard to melt, but you can make a furnace out of clay and cast it into a rough shape in sand - then file it down. Basic metalworking takes practice, but it's far from impossible to learn it.

Food, in particular, is a problem I haven't solved.

But I did solve the problem of how to synthesise potassium nitrate from AdBlue, so you can always make black powder, or a full belt of mostly-modern ammunition with a bit of chemistry and manual tools.
 
You can salvage reverse osmosis membranes from some kinds of batteries.
Really? got more on that?
You can also use a manual pump to distill it via evaporation - lower the pressure inside, and it'll boil until the pressure is equal.
Sounds inefficient tbh, is this done at scale? is it cheaper than evaporation thru heat?
I suppose water management is much more of a concern there
Take a look:
1718749594554.png
if you're European, then the most valuable things are old-fashioned manual tools, energy and food.
I would say the most valuable thing would be a boat or something to get out of there. Between the population density and new "diversity" its gonna be the balkan wars times a million.
 
Democracy is collapsing, not society as a whole. Once that fully happens in the U.S., the quality of live will decrease. The U.S. will live on as a dictatorship. The question is: who will be in charge when the music stops. Will it be the Democrats or Large Corporate Enterprise?

It won't be conservatives.
 
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It's not happening any time soon. We've been through worse and are still standing. Just because things may be in a decline now doesn't mean it will be in a decade.
 
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I can't afford to prep, but I have some survival skills, both bushcraft and self-sufficiency. I already eat the geese in the park.
 
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