The Burning Question None of The Preppers Are Talking About

In one of the apocalyptic shows I used to watch, one of the characters loses his mind. He spends years wandering the ruins of civilization until he meets someone. That someone tells him something important:

“It’s not enough just to survive,” he says.

“You have to survive for something.”

That moment has stayed with me over the years, as civilization unravels, as we face heatwave after heatwave, drought after drought, storm after storm, war after war. More and more people grasp that they should be doing something. They want to know how to store food or generate water. They want to survive. And yet, I wonder how many of us are asking the most important question of all.

What are you surviving for? Who are you surviving for? As things get worse, as surviving gets harder, what’s going to keep you going?

Survivalists and preppers come in generations. Fifty years ago, earlier generations of preppers wanted fallout shelters for a Soviet invasion or a nuclear war. They stocked them with guns and canned corn. They didn’t plan on staying down there in their backyard bunkers forever. They intended to emerge after it was all over and rebuild society. As misguided as they were, they envisioned a future.

They were surviving for something.

The original homesteaders didn’t plan to live in the woods forever, working from dawn until dusk, working their butts off to survive another harsh winter. They wanted to build towns. They wanted civilization to reach them. Many of them worked conventional jobs for part of the year. They still needed money to buy tools and supplies. They didn’t just live in isolation.

They were surviving for something.

That’s the core of survivalism and prepping. You survive a global disaster that wipes out a huge chunk of the population. Then you rebuild.

You see a future to live for.

That’s one of the biggest differences between earlier generations of preppers and this one. We’re not just anticipating a single catastrophic event. We’re not even predicting a series of them. The science tells us we’re in for a breakdown of civilization everywhere, a collapse of the very ecosystems that sustain life. There won’t be any coming back from it—not in our lifetimes, not in ten lifetimes. We’re ruining the planet in a way that will last thousands of years, probably tens of thousands. Maybe forever. By the end of the century, humans might be gone. Any humans left certainly won’t be building any global civilizations. Our descendants will probably be living in tribes again, maybe small villages or towns.

That’s what we’re preparing for, a degrowth, a shrinking. We know about the vast amounts of struggle, pain, and suffering ahead. We want to minimize it. We’re not just prepping. We’re also trying to develop sustainable ways of surviving a set of conditions that will only get harsher over the next several decades. It requires a fundamentally different mindset from the kind of prepping that remains popular on the internet, the kind that talks about storing food and water for a finite number of years, without much thought about what happens when grids fail, when the power or the internet doesn’t come back.

It’s already happening.

Look at Gary, Indiana. Residents there have gone weeks without power after storms with hurricane-force winds blew down the infrastructure. And yet, the data centers surrounding them hum along. Yes, racism has played a big role in that crisis—but it’s also a warning to the rest of us. Anyone who thinks the color of their skin is going to protect them from this level of systemic neglect is practicing their own racism. We’re not immune to this forever, just temporarily. We’ll find ourselves in that same situation soon enough. Regardless of your gender, your ethnicity, your social status, once you and your community cease to be profitable, you don’t matter to them. They won’t come out and fix your power. They won’t fix your water treatment plant. They won’t rebuild your house. What then?

When that happens, it’s not just about surviving.

What will you survive for?

Appropriately enough, my family recently went on a trip. I stayed home, recovering from an infection and following my treatment regimen. (We all still mask everywhere in public.) It was the first time in years I had a few days to myself. I thought I was going to enjoy it a little. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought, and not just because I was sick. I missed them.

We all have these little moments. Our spouse comes home a little late. We don’t hear from someone for a while. We wonder if something happened to them. Our brain starts running through scenarios. We ask ourselves:

What would life be without them?

It’s not pretty.

Those moments remind us that we’re social creatures. Some individuals out there truly have nobody in their lives. Many of them tell us, it’s not pleasant. Even the introverts among us need something to survive for. At least, that’s my take. When I catch myself thinking I would be just fine on my own, I have to stop and remember that I’ve never truly been alone, even when I’m at odds with society, even though I prefer to spend a lot of time by myself.

What am I surviving for?

I’m surviving to protect my family, all of them, even the ones I don’t necessarily like that much. I’m also surviving because I have a high tolerance for the macabre, and I want to see what happens. I want to make it to 2050. I want to see how many of us are left. I want to bear witness to the collapse.

I know, that makes me strange.

It makes me wonder. Maybe a lot of people don’t want to think about prepping, beyond the panicked notion of stocking up on food or reading slop articles about living like the pioneers. Part of them doesn’t want to think about survival on deeper levels, because that’s precisely when you run into the bigger questions. You start thinking about things like your purpose on this planet. You start to ask yourself why you would want to survive in a world where it’s not just a famine or a pandemic, but a lifetime of pandemics and famines. What are you doing with your life? That’s an uncomfortable topic even during normal times. Why? Because millions out there are bereft of purpose and meaning. They’re just muddling through. It’s not entirely their fault. The ones at the top, the politicians and the billionaire stringpullers, they want it like that. They want everyone to feel useless.

They don’t like it when you have a purpose. A purpose makes you strong. A purpose makes you do selfless things. A purpose makes you resist. If you’re only out for yourself, you’re much easier to manage.

Selfish people break easy.

My point:

We all need something to survive for. We need a reason for hanging around. Maybe it’s a person, or maybe it’s an idea. Whatever it is, it’s part of a vision for the future. Even the bleakest vision is still a vision.

What are you surviving for?

Everyone has a vision.

What’s yours?

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