60 Days Later: Remember When Everyone Thought They Were Going to Starve?

Everyone seems to have forgotten the urgent predictions from earlier this summer about empty shelves, fuel shortages, and famines. They were supposed to happen in early July. We’re still waiting. They’re running late. I don’t know what everyone else did to get ready. My family spent the last few months growing vegetables, installing rain barrels, building composting toilets, and testing water generators. I finished a course on electrical wiring so I can actually do stuff.

Back in May, the internet was filled with dudes telling Americans how screwed they were. They weren’t talking years.

They were talking weeks.

60 Days…

These viral podcast interviews and clickbait articles were generating millions of views. They spawned endless discussion threads full of anxious Americans who had no idea what to do other than fill their pantries with canned tuna and “start a garden.” What specific advice did the doomsday bros offer? Abandon your financial responsibilities. Quit paying your mortgage. Devote every last penny to prepping. Sit down on the kitchen floor and melt into a blob of despair.

And so on…

In an interesting plot twist, many women (including myself) tried to offer a different message. After years of trying to sound alarms, suddenly we were the calm mongers. Once again, nobody wanted to listen.

Suddenly, it was cool to overreact.

What did we say? We pushed back on the fear. Because this time, the fear was unwarranted. The advice was reckless.

Yeah, things were going to get bad. They were always going to get bad—for reasons far wider and far deeper than any single war or any fascist regime. But you can’t put a date on collapse. Sixty days? A hundred days? A thousand days? Nobody really knows. That’s the whole point of developing more sustainable systems, so that you don’t freak out when “it” finally hits your personal fan. If anything, that’s been my central message for nearly half a decade now. You don’t prepare because you know when it’s going to happen. You prepare because you don’t.

We advised everyone to consult history and science. We advised them to come up with a systematic plan to address their anxieties. We told them the fears of shortages and famines would subside, but the need to develop sustainable and resilient ways of living would persist. That’s the underlying reality.

Above all, we advised everyone to keep paying their rent and mortgage. We said they would have to keep going to their jobs, even as they planned for doomsday. We told them that the financial system wouldn’t collapse overnight. The data centers that calculate their debts would remain intact.

The strangest thing happened:

Those who’d spent years telling “doomers” like us to calm down suddenly took the opposite stance. They lectured us on the gravity of the situation. They presumed to explain prepping to us. They bashed us for not taking the problem seriously. They questioned our expertise and credentials.

A handful of men said it was time to overreact, it was time to put your life on hold because disaster was imminent…

Everyone stopped and listened.

Readers left condescending essays in the comments on my posts, or they sent me nasty emails explaining why they were pulling their support. They called me irresponsible. They accused me of misleading the public.

It’s been eight weeks, 60 days.

In fact, it’s been longer.

There’s no famine.

We’re still looking at very rough crop reports, compounded by droughts and supply chain problems. And yet… You still have to pay your bills. You still have to show up to work. School is still starting back in August. We probably will experience shortages and higher prices, but what’s new? That’s the story of the 2020s. People respond, defending the doomsday bros. “Things are still getting worse,” they say. No kidding. They’ve been getting worse for a long time, and they’ll continue to get worse. Maybe they just weren’t paying attention until someone with the appropriate status managed to say something that soaked through.

Meanwhile, I wonder how many people took practical steps to prepare for an actual disaster. I wonder how many of them built the communities they called for. I wonder how many of them gave up when they learned how hard it is to engage in “prepping” while meeting all of your other responsibilities, because those don’t simply go away because there’s no food.

While the rest of the world was busy trying to prove their predictions, some of us just got to work. This is how I’ve spent my time.

For so many people, doomsday predictions are simply a fantasy. They’re an excuse to abandon their obligations. They give us all permission to envision a different world, to dream about escaping the systems we’re trapped in, because the systems are certainly killing us. There’s no question about that.

But you don’t need a super drought to install rain barrels. You don’t have to live in fear of starvation to start a garden. You don’t need to have panic attacks over Ebola to start wearing an N95 again. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make, and that’s the point so many people don’t want to hear.

This is the crucial flaw we have to overcome. You can’t just “prep” when you think you’re going to die. You have to do it all the time. You have to stop thinking of it as prepping and see it as a necessary way of life. You have to nurture the communities even when you think you don’t need them.

And yet…

It’s easy to sit around and guess when we’re going to have shortages or famines. It’s easy to watch YouTube videos and think you know how to harvest dew with twenty dollars of supplies. It’s easy to run around the internet telling everyone how to build community or quit their jobs and start a commune on a farm. But that’s not how life works. That’s a fairy tale. That’s how you die. That’s how you end up in a cage match at a box store over the last case of bottled water.

If this is what it means to be a doomer, to sit around on your phone or a laptop constantly predicting bad shit and doing nothing at all to get ready for it, then I’m not a doomer. I never was. It was just an insult launched at me, a term that I reappropriated for a while. But that’s not me. It’s not you. From the very first days of the pandemic, we took action. We helped people. We tried to inform them, and that’s how we wound up with the label.

The ones who actually manage farms and homesteads will tell you. The real deal? It’s difficult. It’s a commitment. It’s not something you pick up after a viral article and then put down when the doomsday predictions fade.

And if you live in the suburbs…

It’s even harder.

Guess what?

Hundreds of millions of Americans aren’t going to survive by moving to the country. They’re not going to adopt the lives of their supposed homesteading forefathers. The math doesn’t add up. It’s not sustainable.

Millions of us are going to survive by staying exactly where we are. We’re going to survive by adapting. We’re going to survive by transforming our suburban hellscapes into enclaves instead of trying to escape them.

We’re going to survive by building loose networks with people we might not like very much, instead of fantasizing about utopian communities where everyone agrees with each other and sees the world the same way.

We’re going to survive by learning to harvest rain from our shitty asphalt shingle roofs and learning how to filter it. We’re going to survive by learning how to rejuvenate our back yards full of hard clay. We’re going to survive by repurposing tools. We’re going to survive by scavenging and dumpster diving.

As for this summer, my family has done a lot. We grew our garden. We reorganized our garage from top to bottom as a survival nook. We installed our rain barrels. We made our composting toilets. We came up with ways to do all this without running afoul of our neighbors and their manicured lawns. We did it while the rest of the internet was freaking out over tank bottoms.

We built our water filtration systems. We tested them. No lead. No iron. No mercury. Safe levels across the board.

For the next week, we slow down a little.

We wait for final lab results on our water harvesting systems. (I’ll post them as soon as they’re ready.) We polish our plans. We get ready to do a major update on the survival guide, which already runs 200 pages.

We live.

This is how you survive. You plan. You execute. You live. You don’t wait for another viral article warning you about a disaster. You don’t sit around trying to put a date on collapse, because that date will almost always be wrong. You learn to accept the uncertainty of a chaotic future, and you manage it.

It’s the way now.

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