It's Okay If You're Bad at Survival

It was 11 pm.

There were only a few jars of pasta sauce left, a can or two of beans here and there, among the rows and rows of empty shelves.

I held two jars in my hand, wondering what was more important, getting what my family needed, or leaving something for someone else. That’s when a woman walked past me with her shopping cart, shaking her head.

“I’m just trying to get one week of groceries,” she said.

I don’t know if she was passing judgment on me or commiserating. When you’re on the spectrum, that’s kind of how life goes.

So, I put one jar back.

The shortages continued, but that’s when I started going for the dry goods—the stuff left behind that nobody else seemed to want. We managed. For many of us, those months in 2020 when you couldn’t even find rubbing alcohol were a wakeup call about how fragile our grids and supply chains were.

When strangers look at me, they see a fragile creature. They don’t see a marathon runner who got up at 6 am on Saturdays and ran 10 miles in negative digits, through snow, on ice. They don’t see someone who spent entire summers in the south without air conditioning. They don’t see someone who almost got blown off a mountain by 50 mph winds. They don’t see someone who knows how to survive. For some of us, surviving isn’t the hard part. It’s protecting our families.

That’s the hard part.

When you’re in our camp, it’s not your own future that keeps you up at night. It’s your children’s future. While everyone else talks about the future in these abstract and ideological ways, you think about it in the hardest, most practical sense. You’re actually carrying the future with you. That’s what it’s like to be a parent in all this. The thing everyone else talks about, you’ve got it in your arms, and you’re trying your best to protect it until it can take care of itself.

According to FEMA, you’re supposed to store at least two weeks of nonperishable food for every person in your house, in case of emergencies.

I’m not sure what kind of living situation FEMA envisions for 80 percent of humanity, but my marriage started out in a studio apartment. We were thrilled to have a stackable washer-dryer in a utility closet. It was a first for us, after spending our 20s using this thing called a laundromat. We didn’t have a yard.

We had a parking lot.

Things have changed over the last several years, and now we’ve got to find a way to store those supplies whether there’s space or not. We’ve found ourselves getting awfully creative to meet the challenges of a collapsing society. Even now, we don’t have five acres to do whatever we want.

We find ourselves compromising.

And failing.

Most of us are never going to own the perfect rural retreat for prepping or homesteading, two things quickly folding into the same endeavor. It occurred to me recently that the internet is full of off-gridders telling you how to do it right. Maybe we should try something different.

Maybe we should talk about doing it wrong.

We should be sharing our successes, but we should also try admitting our embarrassing failures. We can learn from each other’s mistakes. We can learn from each other’s efforts to survive in circumstances far from ideal. We can talk about the hard limits and uncertainties we face.

I’ll start.

I’m going to offer up my insights and experiences, similar to another recent post—but a shorter, more shareable version.

My family’s prepping journey began in 2020, just trying to make enough space to manage supply shortages without indulging in the full-blown panic buying and hoarding that dominated the headlines.

By then, we’d finally scrounged up enough money for a down payment on a house. It was about 1,200 square feet. That’s about half the size of an average house in the U.S. Can you believe that? There was no garage, no basement, no dining room, no laundry room, and no pantry. The kitchen could barely accommodate one person at a time, and one little table to share meals.

On the upside, it had—get this—two bathrooms.

We still had no place to store emergency supplies, so we made one.

My first prepping project: Turn a closet into an emergency pantry. We found somewhere else to put our clothes, and we made it happen. We started keeping extra water and nonperishable food. FEMA would’ve been so proud of us. On the nights I wasn’t grading papers, I was watching 12 Monkeys and scooping dried beans into mylar bags or drooling over homesteads on YouTube. As you probably know, there’s a whole class of videos by homesteaders and preppers showing off their root cellars and basements filled with canned harvests.

One night, I read a post by a guy bragging about his new rooftop solar. Better get yours fast, he warned, before the Russians and Chinese cut us off at the raw material buffet. For someone trying to spare a small child from heat waves and power outages in the south, where the heat index is already hitting 115F degrees, a backup source of electricity feels pretty important.

We were right.

Over the next year, we swung between violent storms, tornadoes, and heat waves every other week. They knocked out the power. Our grid was already flickering. Say what you will about solar panels, they saved us.

The preppers on YouTube were all talking about renting heavy construction equipment to dig root cellars and storm shelters. A handful of dudes managed to dig one out with shovels. It took them weeks.

Instead, we got motorcycle helmets.

Yes, it’s backed by research. They improve your odds of surviving a severe storm significantly. Bonus, they’re far cheaper than installing a tornado shelter in your garage. My spouse thought we were going to look dumb hiding from tornadoes in a closet. On the other hand, he wanted to live.

So we got the helmets.

That’s how we got through our first season of collapse, not with a homestead, not with a tornado bunker or even a basement, but with a closet of food, hiding in our bathroom with motorcycle helmets.

We’ve tried backyard homesteading with mixed success. We have the books. We’ve watched the videos. We have a decent idea what we’re doing, but it’s hard. It takes at least a couple of years to get the hang of it.

Here’s something they don’t tell you in all those prepper videos: If you’re trying to grow veggies in the suburbs, you’re often going to contend with something called fill dirt. What’s fill dirt? According to the internet, “Fill dirt is a type of soil used to raise or level ground… It’s primarily used for structural purposes, like creating foundations or backfilling retaining walls, rather than for supporting plant growth due to its lack of organic matter and nutrients.”

The whole time, I’d wondered why we kept finding screws, nails, shards of glass, and random chunks of metal in our yard.

It was all fill dirt.

So, we had to buy topsoil and compost—lots of it. We built raised beds, and we wheelbarrowed that stuff around for days.

Growing some of our own food obliged us to pay even more attention than usual to drought conditions. That led us to dive through local history, and that’s when we discovered all the horrifying photos of cracked river beds and dust storms all around our home, where we lived, just set back a century.

We didn’t live “at the heart” of the Dust Bowl, but we were very much in Dust Bowl territory. So when the climate scientists talk about the return of Dust Bowl conditions in the 2030s, they’re talking about us.

That was going to happen to us.

We got a preview of that future one weekend, traveling to see family. We were gone three days. We tried to Macgyver an automatic drip irrigation system for our food garden, but it didn’t work. A heat dome settled in while we were gone, and it killed everything in less than a weekend. The corn. The beans. The tomatoes. The kale. Everything. The future was already here.

One day, I just said it out loud.

“We can’t stay here.”

My spouse agreed. Sooner or later, we would have to move. None of our preps were a match for the wrath mother nature was planning for us. It doesn’t matter what kind of solar panels you have or how great you are at growing food, not if you find yourself in the middle of a Steinbeck novel.

Nothing spurs regret like investing in a little suburban homestead and then realizing you live in a future Dust Bowl.

But that’s what we had to do.

We moved.

The solar gurus say adding panels raises the value of your home. Well, not when you live in the middle of Trumplandia, and especially not when you put solar panels on a tiny little home with a tiny little kitchen. As we learned, anyone who could afford the extra cost of solar would just buy a bigger home and install a new system. There weren’t many sustainability nuts around here, only the kind of preppers who buy gas generators. We kinda got screwed.

It was tempting to stay where we were, with a cheap little house paid off that nobody wanted except predatory landlords. That would’ve assured us a reasonable amount of financial security, but you have to wonder what good financial security does if you’re living at the edge of a Dust Bowl.

Sometimes, survival is about getting out.

So we got out.

Even now, we run into hard limits. It’s difficult to homestead in the suburbs. You can’t just tack a rain catchment system onto your roof. All the rain catchment experts say standard shingles don’t produce potable water. Even if you have the best filtration system, you’ll risk all kinds of contaminants. You can install a different kind of roof, but that’s a cost out of pocket. It’s also another risk you’re taking if you ever have to sell your home. Not everyone’s going to see a rain catchment system as an asset. In fact, most will probably see it as a burden.

We thought about retrofitting a shed, but even that ran into problems. What good is a rain catchment system on a shed?

Are we going to run pipes from the shed to our house? Are we going to install a solar pump to ensure running water? What happens when it breaks down? What happens when we can’t replace the filters on our reverse osmosis system because tariffs and world wars have crushed our supply chains? Are we going to haul buckets of water into our home every day?

At one point, I was turning umbrellas upside down and screwing them onto rain barrels and trying to rig up a filter system with vinyl tubing.

I made a portable dew catcher, and it broke.

Long story short, all of my projects eventually work. It takes several tries to get them right. It takes a lot of time. It’s frustrating. They all look very haphazard. They don’t look like something made by a professional. They look like something thrown together, because that’s what they are.

There’s plenty of days I chuck everything into a pile and think about quitting. My doomsday homestead in the suburbs will never look as nice as something you see on PrepperTube, but I suspect those people have lots of help.

We also hold back.

Sure, we have an ordinary compost pile. (We actually have two.) We’ve researched the basics of building a composting toilet and starting a hot compost bin. We even put one together on a swivel. It looks cool. And yet, are we really ready to start composting our human waste? What if it smells, despite our best efforts? Are we going to risk pissing off the neighbors? What if we screw everything up? What if something goes wrong, and we accomplish nothing but stinking up the block and creating a biohazard? What if we wind up on the local news?

How big can our backyard garden get before it inspires an HOA?

Is there really a point to installing a shutout valve on our plumbing system? Maybe it prevents our toilets from gushing sewage during a grid collapse, but doesn’t that just mean the pressure builds up at the valve? What if the grid collapses so bad, sewage bursts the pipes and floods us anyway?

I’ve made bugout bags three or four times now. They’re always a little too small, or a little too big, or they don’t fit in my driver’s seat. Some nights, it’s still overwhelming to think about what we need to put in them. Should we make room for full-face gas masks with spare filters, or stick with half-face respirators and goggles? Should we take a small bugout bag with us every time we leave the house?

As someone who’s been trapped on backroads during a wildfire with a hungry kid in the backseat, I’m inclined to say, yeah, it’s not a bad idea.

There’s no single, definitive answer.

Sometimes, it feels like moving to the suburbs to satisfy my family was a big mistake, but it also would’ve been a mistake to strongarm them into a lifestyle that would’ve made them miserable and grouchy.

If I had it all to do over, I’d design a house from scratch and build it with completely different materials and different systems. But that’s just the thing. Unless you’ve got tons of time and disposable cash, you don’t get to design your own house. You have to live in the house you can afford.

My biggest prepping mistake of all?

It’s probably not buying the wrong kind of house. It’s probably not accidentally moving into a Dust Bowl. It’s probably not even investing everything in my community when I should’ve been raising sheep in the mountains or something and telling everyone else to build community.

It’s probably spoiling my daughter.

Let’s face it, she doesn’t need four different flavors of ice pops to choose from every day. She doesn’t need a playroom full of toys, even if they’re all secondhand. We send her to an outdoor forest school. She’s learning survival skills. She’s learning to identify plants and trees on sight. She’ll be able to forage one day, but that presumes there’s anything left to forage when she grows up.

What if there isn’t?

That’s what makes prepping so hard. We only have so many hours a week to devote to developing the knowledge and skills to survive, and we have to make hard choices about what to put first. Should you spend your time learning how to rig up solar panels, or should you learn how to forage? Should you sell all your stuff now, cash out your savings, and try to homestead? Or are you better off staying put and doing the best you can where you are?

Nobody can tell you.

What we do know is that 330 million Americans aren’t going to make it homesteading in the traditional sense. That math doesn’t math.

Many of us are sitting here admiring the dedication our elders have shown by learning how to raise chickens and grow tomatoes in a low-energy environment. If you’re in your 30s or 40s now, you’re slapped in the face with a reality check. We don’t have decades to figure this out. We don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to invest in a piece of land. We live in a different world.

We have to do the best we can where we are, with what we have. If we wait for that perfect homestead, then we do nothing. If we invest everything in a few acres out in the woods, we’re taking a huge risk. If we fail, nobody is going to come and save us. We’ll be stuck there with no alternatives.

So:

It’s okay if you’re not building community right now, because you need time and space to do something else. It’s okay to try and form a prepping group and it falls apart. It’s okay if you’re not building a rain harvesting system because you haven’t figured out how to make it work for you. It’s okay if you try to grow vegetables, and they all get scorched in a heatwave or devoured by insects.

It’s okay if you try to build something, and it breaks. It’s okay if you finish a homesteading project, and it looks like crap.

It’s okay if you can’t carry a bugout bag. It’s okay if nobody wants to help you prep. Maybe you already know it’s okay, but it’s just nice to hear someone else say it. Maybe you’re not planning to do any of this, but you still find it interesting to read about. All of this is okay. It’s okay if you read all the survival books, watch all the homesteading videos, and it still doesn’t work the way you want. It’s okay if you get home from work, and you just don’t feel like doing any of it, not tonight.

It’s okay if you’re not ready to give up the grid yet.

It’s okay if you get hit with a disaster, and you still don’t feel ready for it. You’re probably never going to feel ready.

It’s okay if you fail.

So does everyone.