How To Talk About Doom

Well, I've been back on X for a weekend. Although it's nice to browse around a much bigger platform with more going on, it's also been...

Well...

Let's just say that over the last 24 hours, I've heard that our food supply is going to be destroyed, we're going to go to war with Iran, the government is going to seize our assets, a financial collapse is underway, and that the president is both trying to undermine the dollar and strengthen the dollar.

Oh, and AI has become self-conscious, teaching itself new languages and engaging in tasks on its own, without any explicit orders.

So, all of this is going to happen next week.

And apparently, TikTok is now censoring posts about Gaza and Ice with reckless abandon. They're not even trying to hide it. Posts about those topics get zero views now. Not just less views, zero. It's a total blackout.

It's been a lot.

A few years ago, these headlines made me a nervous wreck. It drove me to do more panic prepping than slow, deliberate planning.

Fortunately, I've changed. I've grown. Hopefully, so have you all. There was a time when I felt pressured to articulate the most urgent, doomiest version of the truth in order to compete with the louder doomers. And I've got to admit, it wasn't a healthy dynamic. It wasn't great for my family either.

Honestly, yes, we are heading toward financial collapse. Millions of Americans are already living at or below the poverty level. They already know food scarcity. Data centers are, in fact, driving us over a cliff years ahead of schedule. Diseases are, in fact, running rampant. But we have yet to find ourselves in another pandemic, which would really be a second, simultaneous pandemic to the one everyone is ignoring.

In reality, collapse is taking far longer than we expected. It's slower. There's twists and turns. One minute, we're going to war with Iran.

The next, everything's "fine!"

Our nervous systems take quite a beating when we ride these whiplash updates. Of course, the toxic optimists have the wrong solution to this problem. They tell us to simply ignore the news altogether. Focus inward, they say, on your own personal, intellectual, emotional journey. This kind of self-indulgent, pseudo-intellectual nonsense has found a nice home on a few platforms, at the expense of public awareness.

So, what do we do?

There's a middle path here. We stay informed. We keep learning and honing new skills. We prepare however we can, without chasing our tails.

We don't have time to waste, but we still have time.

At least, some of us do.

I've gotten much more strategic in how I talk about all this, even with my spouse. We're on the same page now. We can talk about events. We can talk about prepping. But we do it in a more calm, practical way. We don't have to convince each other that the world is falling apart. We don't have to dwell on it. We already know. Even if I was on my own, I would just go about my prepping in largely the same way.

True, there's a certain kind of loneliness that comes with the territory. But so what? I've always been weird. I've always been an outcast. I've always been different. All this? It's just another manifestation, with higher stakes.

We have tools. We have plans. We have systems. More importantly, we know our limits. We know what we can do, and what we can't. We have accepted our mortality, and not in that wood kind of way. Maybe our deaths will be messy and violent. Until then, we'll fight quietly. We can catch dew. We can eat weeds. We can handle some disasters, even longterm shortages. We don't have bunkers filled with food buckets, and we don't need them. We'll live until we can't.

So many people out there are going to be so surprised when it finally starts affecting them, but that's one of the realest benefits of prepping. It's not just a physical activity. It's not a pointless attempt to escape collapse.

It's an entire mentality, a life philosophy.

Being prepared means being emotionally grounded, not freaking out, even when you're fairly sure you're going to die. It's about having an educated, informed, and mature understanding of the forces acting on you, even if you can't do much about them on a given day. In some ways, maybe it's about even having the agency and awareness to choose how to collapse on your own terms.

Doomscrolling and catastrophizing are exhausting when you don't have any sense of purpose or belonging. But when you finally find the practical things to do, and you already know what's going to happen over the next five or ten years, it becomes more manageable. The "when" of it becomes less overwhelming.

Nobody can predict exactly when or in what order it's all going to fall apart. It's fine to think about. It's even fine to talk about. Just understand, you don't have to answer that question. You don't have to know.

Anyway, toward that end, I'll have another updated version of the guide to post in a few days. I've already revised a dozen pages with more information on plants, weeds, and herbs. Next, we'll talk about canning, and maybe fixing a flat tire.

Ah, what the hell, here's the latest version:

I've gotten several nice emails since the last post. I'll catch up on them over the next few days. I hope these thoughts help soothe any anxious minds.

Until next time,

Jessica

Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported project. It also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund, which focuses on individuals driving meaningful change.