It’s impossible. There are some natural disasters and national/international crises that you are never going to be prepared enough to get through. If specific events take place, no matter how much prepping you do, you still won’t be able to survive.
Giant meteor crashes into the earth? It’s game over. You can’t prep to save yourself from that.
And I’m here to tell you that that’s okay.
You know why?
Because those things probably won’t happen. And even if they do happen, there’s nothing in your power that you could’ve done or could do now to increase your chances of surviving them.
Not only that, but there are many bad things far more likely happen; things for which you can increase your chances of survival, and those are the things you should be concentrating your prepping efforts on.
When it comes to preparedness, you need to have your priorities set straight.
I’ll say it plainly: when prepping for emergency situations, concentrate first and foremost on events that are more likely to take place.
I’ll give you an example. I live in Toronto where it’s infinitely more likely that I’ll get end up in car crash than that I’ll be bitten by a venomous snake. Toronto actually only has one type of venomous snake, the rattlesnake, and if there’s any chance I’ll be able to get to a hospital after being bitten by one, I’m likely to completely recover. Along with an emergency seat belt cutter & window breaker that I can use to cut through my seat belt and smash through the car windows in the case of an accident, should I also be worrying about carrying a cure for rattlesnake venom in case I am bit?
I’m pretty sure you’ll say it’s enough for me to carry just the window breaker.
And there’s good reason for that: there is of course some use in preparing for the very unlikely, in this case a snake bite when I’m in the wilderness alone, without help, and can’t get a hold of someone who can take me to a hospital in time. There’s some use in preparing for that specific situation because there’s a tiny freak chance that it will happen. But it’s not quite as helpful as concentrating on what would benefit me if I got into a car accident.
And since there’s no way to prepare myself for absolutely everything that could happen to me, it would be wise for me to put my efforts into prepping for the much-more-likely-to-take-place situations: snow storms, power outages in the winter, job loss, etc.
You can’t carry absolutely every item that could possibly help or save you on you 24/7. Otherwise you’d be trying to squeeze a whole hospital supply room into an EDC bag. Just isn’t going to happen.
And you cannot prepare for absolutely everything – which is okay.
Prepare for the worst. Prepare for the most likely.
And then keep these priorities straight.
It’s impossible to prepare for a colossal meteor crashing into the earth because, hell, no one on the planet currently has the means to survive if that were to take place. If the sun exploded tomorrow, we wouldn’t be around for long either, and there’s not anything you or I can do about it. But while these are problems that you really can’t get around no matter how much time, finances, and effort you put into prepping, there are many more likely disasters that could happen to you, your city, or even your country, that you can prepare for quite well.
Concentrate your efforts on what’s really worthwhile to prep for.
No matter how many pieces of kit you have it will always fail. What will not fail is knowledge. Learn to do things without a kit. I know for me a knife is always with me… Well more than one knife ????.
Before the white man came to the American continent, the natives got along “just fine” without a knife.
Of course, they knew all about flint knapping and breaking river rocks to serve as rough “knives” and other sharp instruments for use as arrow heads, tomahawks, skinning tools, chopping tools, mashing (and bashing) tools, etc. In fact, their varied skill set allowed them to survive without anything at all except what they found about them.
We’d ALL do well to learn some of these skills for that day when our own survival “kit” is unavailable.
Learning how to survive without any gear is the ultimate goal of a survivalist, for sure! Not easy to do, though, so in the meantime (until you’ve trained yourself to be able to do that) it’s a good idea to have the kind of gear that could help you survive/make do in a bad situation.
Also there are things that living primitively could not really help you with, unfortunately. Like bad medical situations. If you don’t prep by training yourself to use modern first aid techniques on top of primitive survival techniques, it will be hard to deal with bad medical situations. And a stockpile of medicine may really help in cases like that.
Dunno, basically there are a LOT of things it would help a survivalist to know, and I don’t think it’s possible to survive everything, though yes, most things definitely would be possible to survive with good knowledge & experience of primitive living skills.
Good Post..
Sometimes i wonder about some of these isolated tribes in the Amazon that would go through TEOTWAWKI and never knew it happened..
For Me, i have the usual “gear You cannot live without”, much of which the Amazonian would not even know what it was for..No need for a GPS when You know exactly where You are and the World has come to You with everything your tribe has ever needed and ever will..
Perhaps their own situational awareness is so high that the pretext for prepping is just everyday life as they have always known it. All problems are solved by work ethic alone.
Perhaps modern’ conveniences have created a consumer whose baseline supply of necessities is out of their control and has defined the ‘inconvenience’ of deprivation.
What we must live without becomes a fearful and tragic ‘psyche breaker’ that the Amazonian would not even understand, as everything has always been there all along
Great observations! That being said, I do think that many of us would actually be surprised with how little we could live without. It’s one thing to feel like you want certain things, as they can make your life a lot easier, but you certainly do not need all those things.
For instance, with the proper preps, I can live without any electricity. I don’t need a refrigerator per say. It would make things so much easier if I had one, but I wouldn’t need it to survive!
And of course, a person living in an isolated tribe wouldn’t even think about a refrigerator as necessity in the first place as they would know they’ve lived without one and thus there’s not that barrier that you were talking about!
Just food for thought, considering what you’ve said!
Hey , just stopping by to say Hello — really like this site !!
Welcome!! Glad you like the site :). Thanks for stopping by & hope to see you again, Debbie!