The Time of Play Pretend Prepping is Over.

I've noticed something:

People love fear.

Even as the world steeps in climate denial and hopium, everyone seems to have their own pet fears. Some people live in fear of socialists. Others live in fear of famine. The tech bros who fantasize about Skynet live in deep fear, even dread, of their own creations. Listen to them talk about AI possibly destroying humanity, and a certain giddy excitement breaks through scowls. "It's going to be horrible," they say.

Then they almost grin.

Financial experts expect the doomsday prepping industry to grow, even as recessions and economic collapse eat into everyone's budgets. Many of our friends will be secretly throwing their money away on food buckets and assault weapons, living in fear of crises that will never happen, and blowing off the ones happening right in front of them, all because they have an image in their head of what it means to prepare for disasters and collapse, and which ones deserve their attention.

What does that mean for us?

You might know a YouTube Channel called City Prepping. The videos that get the most views? They're not about growing tomatoes or getting rid of garden pests. They're about buying stuff. They're about all the bad things that are happening, or about to happen. That's not the channel's fault. That's just where the attention gravitates.

The last few years have taught me and my family something important. Stockpiling food? That's not so hard if you have the means. Neither is packing a bugout bag or buying the right emergency supplies. And neither is starting a small garden. Not everyone can do it, but the process itself is pretty straightforward.

It's not hard to sit around and talk about the next crisis, either.

What's hard?

Apparently, masking on a regular basis is hard for a lot of people. Taking black widows seriously is hard. Forking out money to replace your attic insulation is hard, because that feels like something you shouldn't have to spend money on. Learning how to fix your plumbing is hard. Learning how to get pests out of your garden can be hard. Deciding what to fix yourself, and when to hire someone, that can be hard.

Watching other people suffer, and knowing there's limits on what you can do to alleviate that suffering, that's really hard.

Figuring out who you can trust, that's also really hard.

For all the talk about community over the last year, it's harder than ever to find one. It often feels like the people who talk the biggest talk about communities are the worst at building them. They're the first ones to start gaslighting you. They're the first ones to start berating and belittling you. They're the easiest ones to offend with a little direct honesty, and they're the first ones to bail when things get rough.

Weird way to build community...

A lot of people have spent the last decade play pretending when it comes to the broader idea of prepping and survival. They still don't get it. To echo William Gibson, the collapse is here. It's just not evenly distributed.

There's no reversing the collapse at this point. It would be nice if we could keep electing politicians who won't actively try to kill us. That would be great. But in all honesty, none of them are coming to save us. None of them can, not even someone like Mamdani, who probably genuinely wants to help. But even these noble public servants are going to find themselves overwhelmed by the burning planet.

Above all, it's about mindset.

An appropriate mindset matters more than anything else. It's about knowing when to act, when to take a proactive approach to something, when to rest, and how to tune out the noise. It's about grounding yourself, and not giving into what one of us recently called "threat fatigue," the point at which you just give up and let things happen, even if we could prevent them. It's about valuing knowledge and skills, not just guns and beans. It's also about accepting the fact that you'll need help.

Sometimes, you'll have to hire it.

It's also about finding balance, between so many things. For example: Many of us are having to balance our reliance on the grid with the desire to get off it. On the one hand, we want to ruggedize. We want to build self-reliance. On the other hand, there's something to be said for appreciating the grid and using it for as long as it's here. One day, it won't be, but that doesn't mean we can just quit our jobs and start farming. Some of us will just have to ride it out on the grid as long as we can.

That's where we're at.

It probably doesn't look or feel too much like prepping to deal with black widows, our latest saga. And yet, the climate crisis will be introducing quite a lot of deadly little things into our lives, things that will want to get inside more and more as the weather destabilizes. Collapse also means more damage to your home, and therefore more ways for the deadly little things to get inside.

As it turns out, we were exactly right to take a black widow encounter in our hallway seriously. Our new pest control company is already replacing our insulation. They're already starting a treatment plan.

They described our attic as "a death trap."

You don't hear that every day. Suffice it to say, you don't want to spend your collapse sleeping directly under a death trap, if you can help it.

You'll have enough problems.

They told us that after we contracted, btw. If anything, before that they were holding back. Apparently, black widows are just fine laying eggs in old attic insulation. They'll nest there. That's what makes a potential attic infestation so much worse than anything else. You will never find the egg sacs before they hatch. The whole thing could be a ticking time bomb of little baby widows.

As we suspected, they'll fan out into the house looking for warm cozy places. A black widow doesn't have to kill you. It could simply cause permanent nerve damage. The tissue around the bite could go necrotic. With a black widow bite, you do not sit around and wait to see what happens. You go to the hospital.

This runs completely contrary to what our old pest control company said, and also to some of the gaslighters here who tried to make me (and the rest of us) feel shame and embarrassment for taking the problem seriously.

If a single black widow bite doesn't kill you, it could still cost you several thousand dollars in medical bills. Who can afford that?

By the way, going to the hospital now isn't the same as it was six years ago. Our healthcare system has been through a pandemic, and it's broken. It's still going through that pandemic. On top of that, it's been under siege by fascists for a decade.

It's significantly diminished.

Throw this into the larger mix of MAGA Republicans gutting healthcare and shutting down hospitals and medical centers in more rural and remote areas, and you could in fact start to see people dying from spider bites again.

This is the mindset of someone who's truly collapse aware, someone who considers daily problems in these broader contexts.

And then responds...

That's what collapse means. It means problems that previously didn't mean much in the developed world start to become a problem.

Things change.

Threats evolve.

Imagine filling a basement bunker with beans and shotguns, and then letting black widows move in next to your emergency food cache or even crawl inside that bugout bag you spent so much time organizing.

Imagine talking and talking about community, and then attacking someone simply because you don't know enough to properly assess a threat.

Imagine prepping for a government takeover or a famine, but not learning how to harvest dew. Imagine preparing physically for a bugout but not walking yourself psychologically through the scenario of losing your home and everything you own.

Imagine having little or no time to recover between disasters. It's a hurricane. Then it's an arctic blast. Then it's a tornado. Then it's a wildfire. Then it's a heatwave. Then it's shortages. Then it's an ICE raid next door.

Then it's a deadly spider.

We're not used to living like this. It feels new. It feels dreadful. But there's a hint of good news here. If you walk into it, if you sort of embrace it, if you stop yearning for a bygone era, if you stop trying to talk yourself into complacency, you can adjust. It's not so different from how our ancestors lived. They dealt with constant threats, and they were able to take them all seriously without losing their minds.

Can't we learn to do that?

When I saw that black widow, I didn't panic in the familiar sense. My heart rate didn't even go up. I just grabbed a jar and a lid. I'm not a spider expert, but I knew it looked different from a normal spider and it could be dangerous.

I trapped it.

All of this was a process. It was based on gathering information, talking to people, and making decisions. This is the way. This is, I think, how our ancestors could deal with threats without going nuts. They just dealt with them. They didn't spend their energy pining for brunch. They didn't give each other speeches about hope. They identified threats. They dealt with them. They probably even relaxed, but not in the same way we've gotten used to relaxing. Part of their brain, part of their group, was always attuned to their environment and ready to deal with the next threat. The kind of comfort and safety some of us grew up with? They never knew that.

Maybe that's why some of us, survivors of prolonged trauma and abuse, are so much better at all this than many of our peers.

It fundamentally rewired us.

We can deal with the threats. It's nothing new for us. Our nervous systems adapted. In a normal world, we might be struggling. But in this world, it's almost like we were made for it, and we're the ones who carry our families through these crises.

That's what it means to live in collapse, unevenly distributed.

This is what it means to prep.

It's not play pretend anymore.

It's real.

Thanks for reading. I hope these posts keep you sane.