I’ve been looking at some YouTube videos about prepping, and oh boy, is there some super stupid stuff out there. It’s no wonder people think of the whole thing with disdain. But let me share some of my impressions.

The actual “preppers” seem to be the ones offering the most impractical, immoderate and outright foolish advice out there. Basically, it’s the guys with a huge house, multiple acres of land around it, who are living out the fantasy of surviving apocalypse by returning to a combination of 18^th century technology and Robinson Crusoe-esque approach. Their advice on how to prepare for a power outage is to store a year’s worth supply of gas canisters, gasoline and all sorts of gadgets, plus solar panels, generators etc. My reaction to this is a facepalm, thinking about how useless this advice is to an average urban person with a two bedroom flat, no particular storage space available and with only a parking place in front of the building, without a garage. Mind you, that’s how most of the world actually lives. No, you can’t have livestock, chickens or grow crops there. You also can’t store much of redundant supplies. You don’t have a secondary location to bug out to, because if you did, you’d probably be there already.

The second group are the people who regularly have hurricanes, tornadoes or similar natural disasters in their area, and who already have regular experience with conditions that require them to be able to ride it out on their own. They usually also have a large house with land, but they aren’t preparing for an imaginary scenario, they are preparing for a realistic scenario they already experienced, sometimes regularly, and so they know exactly what they are talking about and you should pay attention. Unfortunately, their advice usually assumes you also have a large house, a garage, plentiful storage space and a piece of land. That makes some of their recommendations inapplicable to average urban people.

The third group are the people who are already choosing or are forced to rough it out on a daily basis. This includes hikers, mountaineers, hunters and homeless people (for instance, someone living in a camper van or a trailer). They are forced to be space and weight efficient, either because they have to carry the stuff on their back, or because they live in an extremely confined space where storage space is at even more of a premium than it is to an average person. Also, their life depends on not screwing it up – take too much, you’re screwed, don’t take enough, you’re screwed. Insulate too much and you suffocate, don’t insulate enough and you freeze. They are forced to be extremely practical, and they will use the most modern gear available if it increases their odds, and they will also use the most generic stuff available if it does the job.

The fourth group are the survivalists and bushcrafters. They will try to approximate stone age conditions, use mostly the tools and materials that can be scavenged or harvested from the environment, and they will light a fire with almost nothing, just to show off. While this is definitely something to be aware of as a possibility, because you can never guarantee to be able to access everything you need and it’s good to have some ideas on how to improvise solutions, this bushcrafting/survivalist approach is something you adopt when you’re about to die, and then you do in fact die. This makes it something to avoid resorting to at all cost if any other solution is available.

The fifth group is something I actually haven’t watched on YouTube – it’s the experience of people who actually survived wars, regular power outages and all kinds of shit. It’s the people who know what a kerosene lamp smells like and what kind of light it produces and what a pain in the ass it is to read under it, as you try to reduce boredom in a shelter while your back yard is under a combined sniper/mortar fire.

While all of the above is informative in some way, I would recommend absolutely not taking seriously any advice outside of groups that actually had real life experience with adverse conditions. This means you want to listen to the homeless guy who lives in a camper van, the family who has to improvise their way through a hurricane season each year, a hiker/hunter who has to figure out how to make it on a multiple day trip in adverse weather/terrain conditions, and someone who survived the siege of Sarajevo or Vukovar. Everybody else is full of shit.

Avoid stupid ideas, such as improvised fire making, cooking solutions that will get you killed indoors, or things that would require you to do them in an open unheated space during the winter. Avoid things that have unrealistic or unsurvivable implications. Learn from the experience of people who actually had to figure it out and who had to find something that’s practical, convenient, cheap, and just works, and you can pull it off in a camper van. Also, the war/siege survivors; what they wished they had, what they had that was super useful, and what got people killed.

Your most likely scenario to prepare for is a week-long lockdown with power outages that can last a day, maybe two. Also, scenarios where the gas grid is out, gas stations are overcrowded and there are limitations and curfews imposed, there are power reductions, and the water is occasionally cut off for up to half a day. This is realistic and believe it or not I already had all of that at some point or another. It was very rarely or never all at the same time – basically, you have water, but no electricity, or you have water and electricity but the stores are empty and the fuel is rationed, or you have everything but there’s a lockdown and you can’t access anything outside of your home, or everything basically works but there’s a mass panic that brought the communications down and people are out in the streets, freaked out and sometimes violent. I personally survived hyperinflation, failed economy/country, war, earthquake and two pandemic scares (one was a smallpox scare in Yugoslavia when I was 2, the other was recent). If you think that stuff doesn’t happen or doesn’t concern you, good for you I guess, but where I live power outages that last half a day are something that happens quite regularly, and last year we had water outages that lasted half a day too, because the water grid was being worked on. In my previous place, I survived a pretty major earthquake, but the building was structurally damaged and we eventually had to evacuate. The kind of prepping I’m talking about is not about doomsday, it’s about survivable inconveniences that can turn quite bad if you’re completely unprepared for them, or you mishandle things in stupid ways. The biggest boon I had from prepping was that I already went through scenarios ahead of time and when shit happened, I was calm when neighbours were in shock and panicking. This psychological effect can’t be overstated. Overreacting or underreacting to a situation can create serious trouble from something that could have been a minor inconvenience. For instance, overreacting to a power outage by making a charcoal fire indoors can get you killed or set your place on fire, when you could have had a butane camping stove and a cartridge at the ready, made some tea by the battery light and had fun times with your family. The attitude that shit just happens and it’s normal can be one of your major assets, while people who expect everything to be fine will freak themselves out.