Is Prepping Over?

Are we in a "post prepping" world?

I’m seeking feedback from the whole community, so comments are open for everyone. And you can always join our Discord server to share your thoughts.

I don’t know about you, but I’m bored with prepping. And I think I’m boring you, too, if subscriber numbers are any indication. There are only so many ways I can say “store food, store water, store fuel, have a medkit, etc.” I’ve been talking about this with my friend Jon Stokes and we both share that sentiment.

The problem is that we seem to be in a post-prepping world. 2020 was the high-water mark when preppers were vindicated with a killer virus, lockdowns, empty store shelves, riots, and election chaos. It was the Great Happening that so many of us had prepared for.

And then… life carried on. Things settled back into something resembling normalcy. Go to work, pay your taxes, and go on with life, despite ongoing wonkiness and a mass case of adrenal fatigue.

Except… something’s wrong, and we all know it. Shelves are often still bare. Prices are astronomical. Shipments regularly get lost. Drunks swerve down highways in broad daylight. Everywhere I go, people seem broken. You walk into a store and no one greets you. Often, there’s no one at the checkout counter at all, or the clerk is wearing earbuds. That’s not to mention the general crime and lawlessness. The little sorts of things that serve as potent portents of our age.

I’ve been trying to hide from this slow, steady decline—what Stokes calls “the crumbles”—but it’s just impossible to hide from. It can only be confronted.

Building the Future

As I see it, we’re past prepping. People fall into three categories:

• Prepped before 2020

• 2020 made them believers

• They’re never gonna “get it”

Maybe you’re not in a position to prep. Or maybe you have a different concept of prepping: many Americans have migrated to Mexico to avoid inflation and American craziness, leading many Mexicans to complain about their country being full of foreigners. I can’t help but chuckle at the irony.

Prepping only gets you so far. Prepping can get you through a rough patch, like a storm or a flat tire, but there’s only so much you can do in middle age to prepare for a lifetime of hardship.

The reality is, that’s what many of us Millenials are facing. We were raised to survive and thrive in a world that effectively ended on 9/11/2001. Most of us are simply stumbling around in the dark with little to cling to. In many ways, Unprepared is a fitting title for this publication.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve reached the conclusion that our generation is a lost cause. That doesn’t mean joy can’t be found—in fact, I tend to cling to it anywhere I can find it—but we’re just not living in the rose-colored world of the ‘90s anymore.

So increasingly, my attention is turned toward my three children and our presumptive grandchildren. If you subscribe to the Fourth Turning theory, we’re currently in “weak men create hard times.” I see it as my duty to form the strong men that will build the next good times. I increasingly care less about my old age and more about my family dynasty 20, 30, 50, and 100 years down the line.

So I spend much of my time thinking about how to shape these young minds that will build the world to come. So many of the younger Millenials and Zoomers have given up on life entirely, retiring to a life of isolation and escape like those of the hikikomori in Japan. I want to steer my children away from that fate, but—if the trend continues—it may mean more responsibility for them, as well as influence. That’s a heady thought.

So what are my goals for my children?

• To appreciate and seek beauty.

• To cultivate virtue and to always seek the good and the pure.

• To be disciplined to achieve their goals, even when they’re difficult.

• To provide for themselves, their spouses, and their children.

• To have a sense of history and tradition so they’re neither easily fooled nor feel unmoored.

• To be culturally literate. For instance, can they understand a reference to the Bible, Homer, or Shakespeare? Do they understand the giants upon whose shoulders they stand on, or will they believe history began in 2010?

• To be strong both physically and mentally.

Which leads us at last to our topic of conversation: what should Unprepared look like in the months and years to come? Our recent post on our collective desire for doom offers a preview.

Less prepping, more building

I want to shift from being reactive to being proactive. I want to focus on the problem of cultural rot and how we can reverse the trend. Even before COVID, drug addiction, suicide, and overall despair were reaching new nadirs. It was during Obama’s second term that American life expectancy began to decline (so much for the Affordable Care Act).

Of course, we’ll always do the sort of meat-and-potatoes preparedness articles we always have, like our recent reminder to buy seeds. I think one of the strengths of the email newsletter format is we can offer little seasonal reminders like that.

And I think part of being able to build is to avoid the sort of major setbacks we can prepare for. You can’t advance if you’re always being set back. But at the same time, I don’t want to be stuck in an endless treadmill of responding to never-ending problems. Prepping should be a cornerstone of this sort of construction.

I want to talk more about the cultural currents behind the rot, and how we can develop ourselves: our bodies, minds, and souls. Because we can only build a better society if we have better people. And of course, self-sufficiency (such as it is) is a big part of that.

What do you think? Is this the right direction for Unprepared?