What’s The Point of Prepping? It’s Not About Your Own Survival.

Have you heard the one about the doomsday prepper who almost electrocuted his family by forcing them to sleep in an unfinished castle during a lightning storm? Then you’ve probably watched the show Doomsday Preppers. It aired on the National Geographic Channel about ten years ago. I’ll bet you haven’t watched the spinoff, Doomsday Castle, about a man who sinks his family’s inheritance into a fortress in the mountains. Critics panned the show.

Here’s the twist:

Doomsday Castle is a ridiculous premise, but it also makes a fascinating statement. In his own eccentric way, the dad isn’t just trying to prepare for the apocalypse. He’s trying to use his passion for medieval history to bring his estranged family together, to show them how to cooperate, to face all of the challenges of a world collapsing around them. That’s my charitable reading of it.

If you watch the show through that lens, while thinking about all the stupid shit your own family does, it suddenly becomes much more compelling. Are the conflicts manufactured? Maybe. Is it semi-scripted? Probably. And yet, it becomes something worthwhile, something meaningful. It’s not going to teach you much about surviving doomsday. It’ll teach you about families.

And people.

Well, we’re heading into a volatile moment in politics, and America is nothing if not one big dysfunctional family with a bunch of guns. But you know what? I’m honestly not sweating it too much. I voted, but I’m not going to be hitting refresh on my browser all night waiting for results. That’s not because I feel insulated from the outcomes. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Life is going to be a struggle going forward, regardless of who wins. It’s going to be a political struggle, but also an existential one.

There’s no brunch waiting for us.

Every now and then, I get a question that accuses me of contradicting myself. On the one hand, we talk a lot about prepping. On the other hand, we also talk a lot about accepting the odds of your own mortality and bracing for the day when all of your preparations aren’t enough. They ask: “Which is it?”

They want to know why they should bother learning to build a composting toilet, harvesting rainwater, growing food, or learning about solar generators if they’re going to die anyway. They tell me there’s no point in adding polycarbonate to a window in a door because it won’t stop a horde of zombies.

Back in 2018, Jem Bendell introduced the world to the phrase “deep adaptation” in a paper that changed the lives of millions. It remains one of the most thoroughly researched and resonant papers out there.

Some lines stand out:

The previous paragraphs may seem, subconsciously at least, to be describing a situation to feel sorry about as we witness scenes on TV or online. But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.

So, it’s no small thing that Jem Bendell mentioned my work in one of his recent essays introducing another important framework called rainbow prepping. I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t see it until someone sent me the link. (I subscribed to his newsletter, so we fixed that problem.)

So, what’s rainbow prepping?

In a nutshell, rainbow prepping articulates a framework for everything we’ve been doing and talking about here, either largely informed by, or at least convergent with, the ideas he’s been sharing for about a decade now.

Bendell himself walks the walk, running Bekandze Farm in Indonesia, a place that grows food but also trains others in regenerative and climate-resilient agriculture, building local and regional food security.

There’s two kinds of prepping:

There’s prepping driven by fear. We saw a lot of that this year. This kind of prepping isn’t really collapse-aware. It talks about diesel shortages. It talks about supply chain disruptions. It talks about famines. It implores readers to call their senators while telling them to stockpile silver dollars.

Panic prepping talks about famines in 60 days, not 60 months.

Then there’s the second kind.

I like the term rainbow prepping, because it sums up such a wide range of activities, 15 to be exact. Each letter (RAINBOW PREPPING) stands for something we can do. We don’t have to do all of them all the time. The list includes political engagement, but that doesn’t really count if it’s refreshing your browser on election night. In fact, rainbow politics is kind of the opposite of that.

As Bendell says, “Engaging in politics doesn’t mean assuming collapse can be prevented, but attempting to reduce unnecessary suffering.”

That word “unnecessary” does a lot of work. It reminds us that we’re not going to avoid all the suffering that comes with collapse.

We’ll suffer.

That’s where a majority of the public still doesn’t quite get it yet. They’re still talking about preventing collapse. They’re talking about prepping as a way to insulate themselves from suffering. Bendell is talking about dealing with it. That’s where my head has been as well. That’s not doomerism.

It’s not nihilistic or pessimistic.

It’s stoic.

We’re optimistic, just about different things. I’m not optimistic we’ll prevent or avoid the climate tipping points that trigger feedback loops. That’s already happening. We’re optimistic that, despite the collapse, we’ll still create lives worth living that look unrecognizable from the lives we planned.

Rainbow prepping isn’t about hiding from collapse or trying to move somewhere it won’t affect you as much, even if some of us tried that. It’s about staying where you are and developing the mental and physical resilience to endure a collapse as long as you can, and to make a meaningful life out of it.

Here’s where Bendell comes down on prepping:

Since then I have not seen the goal as being to maximize the odds of individual survival. Nor is the goal about increasing the odds of community or national survival. Rather, I have been inviting attention to increasing the likelihood that we live kindly and cooperatively amid disruption, in ways that create possibilities for both humans and wider life, without any certainty. For the millions of people for whom that idea resonated, it has endorsed a shift from distraction to reflection, from stockpiling to capabilities, and from defence to relationships.

So why am I writing and illustrating a 300+ page survival guide? I hope to increase someone else’s odds of survival, not just my own. And even though odds of survival aren't really the point, making the world better for someone else with the time you have left is most definitely the point.

I also like the problem-solving dynamic. My problem isn’t just how to make a composting toilet or a rain harvesting system work in the suburbs, or how to retrofit a 90s-era suburban house for backyard homesteading. It’s how to keep all these houses here in the U.S. from becoming death traps and environmental hazards, or at least mitigate as much of that as possible.

If I’m honest, my early prepping did start out as an attempt at individual survival. But like Bendell says, anyone who starts down that road with a genuine purpose figures out something more important.

That’s what makes rainbow prepping different.

It’s not about saving yourself, your family, or even your community. It’s not about rebuilding civilization the way it was. We know that’s impossible. So, the point becomes about the work itself.

Rainbow prepping is the act of engaging the problems you see with the tools and resources you have, and not obsessing over the outcome. Living in a bunker isn’t survival. Neither is sitting around trying to timestamp the next disaster. And neither is sitting around calling everything pointless.

What I’m doing is trying to solve the problems in front of me. I’m learning. I’m teaching. I’m finding meaning. Whether or not someone bashes me over the head for a bag of beans in ten years? I can’t control that. I’ll try to solve that problem, but I’m not going to let that future define my life.

That’s survival.

I’ve started working on the second edition of my guide. The launch has ended, but you can still make late pledges and become a backer.