Category Archives: society

Photographic frustrations

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While we’re at photography, I have to mention that I’m hugely annoyed by the fact that everywhere I look on the forums or the YouTube people are exaggerating things into hysteria. By that I mean the extreme and opposite “cults” – on one side, you have those who think they need to have the most technically sophisticated equipment in order to make anything of value, and on the other hand you have the “lo-fi” groups such as lomography, who intentionally screw things up as much as possible technically, and people in those groups are all supporting each other in the most extreme nonsense.

The truth, of course, is that both sides kind of have a point. On one hand, equipment is important, and I often found myself just staring in awe at the beautiful renderings from a high-end lens or a camera, that manages to get parts of the image completely crisp, just to seamlessly flow into toffee-sparkles of blur. However, it is also the case that photography is much more than merely a formulaic thing where you get the best hardware, apply a correct technical procedure and get everything sharp from corner to corner, and you have the perfect photograph. If I had to describe my personal attitude, I’d say that for someone who sees photography primarily as a way to capture my own thoughts and feelings, and not the things in front of the lens, I’m very technical about it. 🙂 So, let me make a small exhibition of photos that combine things that would make people in dpreview forums have a fit.

Equipment: Canon 5d, EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5. That’s the lens that’s almost never seen outside of lo-fi circles, because it’s one of the first EF lenses ever made, dating from 1987, where it was sold as the kit zoom for the EOS 650 film camera, the first in the EOS lineup. It is so lowly rated that it’s not even seen as something that deserves testing and rating at all, and putting it on the 5d would be seen as a ridiculous “lomography” move. Let’s see some more pictures I’ve taken with this combo:

The macro shots are taken using the extension tubes. Nothing fancy, just the cheapest stuff from ebay. The results, however, are very much not lo-fi. In fact, I could make prints from the original raw files that would be as big as anything one could realistically print from the 13MP 5d sensor. B2, no problem. B1, possibly, but I’d have to massage them somewhat, but those are all material that can go between 70-100cm on the longer side. Mind you, I’m more interested in color than resolution and sharpness, but there’s plenty of both. Let’s see the next heretical combo: using Olympus E-PL1 micro 4/3 mirrorless pocket camera with its 14-42mm plasticky kit zoom, that would be universally poorly rated:

How about using Sony A7II with the FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, that’s always trashed in the reviews as something you should immediately remove from your camera if you want the pictures to be any good:

Those pictures weren’t taken with said equipment because I wanted them to look like shit, or because I didn’t know any better. The files are all B1-print sharp. There’s a saying “if it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid”. In this case, if “inferior” equipment creates results that get a green light from me regarding technical quality, maybe it’s not inferior. Maybe, just maybe, you’re just holding it wrong, to paraphrase Steve Jobs. 🙂 Or maybe people tend to lose perspective when they compare gear. For instance, if a lens renders closeups with glowy spherical aberration and ethereal softness, it’s only an “optical defect” if you’re trying to use it where those effects detract from the image. Also, if it’s “only” tack sharp from f/8 to f/16, and you use it for landscape photography, what’s the problem? Also, colors are either ignored or hard to test, but if a lens renders beautiful, crystal-clear and perfectly neutral colors, should that somehow matter less than resolution in conditions you don’t intend to use it for?

I had the misfortune of being forced to produce results in life using whatever was available and working in conditions that would be immediately dismissed as unfit for anything, and this is not just about photography anymore. If you don’t have a hammer, use a rock. If you don’t have perfect conditions, learn how to turn imperfect ones to your advantage. For instance, I learned to meditate in conditions so terrible, that I could later resist all kinds of interference. If everything tries to kill you and fails, you become indestructible. I was always annoyed by people who keep whining about their tools and conditions – they can’t do anything spiritually because they don’t have a perfect guru, and don’t know the perfect technique of yoga. In reality, that usually means they are more interested at finding imaginary flaws in order to justify their inaction and inertia, than they are at figuring out a way to avoid the obstacles and make things work anyway.

I had an experience at the University in early 1992 that changed my perspective on excuses forever. You see, one of the professors had a rule that you can’t be absent from more than 5 lectures in a year, or he won’t allow you to take the exams, basically failing you by default. Before one lecture a girl approached him and gave him a letter of medical excuse for her absence. He said, “Young lady, you misunderstood me. I do not care whether you were absent with or without a legitimate excuse. If you were absent from more than five lectures, you simply cannot have sufficient knowledge to take the exam. Therefore, the reason for the absence doesn’t matter in the slightest”. This clicked incredibly hard – nobody cares about your excuses for failure. You just have to find ways to succeed, because there’s no other way to avoid disaster. It’s basically like climbing a cliff; you have to find a way to do it perfectly and avoid falling, because if you fall, nobody’s going to give two shits that the cliff was slippery or the rocks were crumbly. If you failed for “valid reasons”, you failed and you’re fucked regardless. So get your shit together and figure out a way to make things work and to attain success. That’s probably the reason why the whiny “demanding” people annoy me. They think excuses matter.

 

What the …?

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Just in case, I looked at the official Los Angeles plan in case of nuclear war:

IMMEDIATE ACTION FOR NUCLEAR EVENTS

If a nuclear event is occurring or about to occur:

GET INSIDE a sturdy building as quickly as you can, even if you are far from the blast site. Go to a room without windows on the lowest floor that’s close to the center/core of the building. If you are unable to get inside, take cover behind a sturdy object and stay low to the ground.

STAY INSIDE the building. Shelter-in-place. Do not go outside or look out windows to observe the blast and fallout, as this can expose you to radiation and cause serious damage to your eyes.

STAY TUNED to updates from public safety and government authorities or trusted media sources. Some communications systems may be down. During emergencies, simple text messages often work best. You may also want to have a battery powered or hand-crank radio.

My immediate thought was that this doesn’t make any sense, since the houses in the LA area are made of super-combustible material, as evidenced in the recent fires where the houses burned down faster than trees. The main hazards in a nuclear blast are overpressure and thermal radiation, which means fires and 3rd degree burns. The entire LA building code is a terrible match for sheltering in situ in case of a nuclear blast. Then I thought I already saw identical instructions a while ago, and indeed, it’s the city of New York. It looks like someone in FEMA figured out they don’t have any realistic plan in case of a nuclear war, so they made a plan-like list that is now mindlessly copied everywhere, including places where such “plan” would amount to suicide.

This is so stupid I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, because I know how those morons are thinking: they need to “have a plan”, because someone could ask them what’s their plan for x, and now they can say “we have a plan for x, go to our web site, it’s a great plan”. However, let’s see what it all means.

Back in the 1950s, people in America were taking nuclear war very seriously, and the plans were made by the people who actually made the atomic weapons in Los Alamos, and who had first-hand experience with nuclear blasts, having observed the tests from the closest possible proximity. What they recommended was widely ridiculed later, but as I learned more about the nuclear weapons, I got to understand their thinking.

Their plan was to evacuate the political and military leadership into nuclear bunkers or high in the air, in order to preserve the chain of command and have control over the situation. The next idea was to evacuate the major populated centres, but they soon realised that this can’t be done. Basically, you’d have to do it in a timely and orderly manner, have enough shelter space, with food, water and fuel, for population of every major city. They ran simulations and figured out that an order to evacuate would cause instant widespread panic which would block the roads and make evacuation impossible. Even if they managed to evacuate, they couldn’t possibly care for hundreds of millions of people. Also, an order to evacuate would necessarily be given too late, because they would avoid giving it until the rockets were already flying, and then it would be too late for anything other than sheltering in-situ. If you gave the order early enough, the enemy would take it as a sure sign that you are preparing for a first strike, which would increase the probability of pre-emption, and it would make the political solution less likely. Also, when you give the order to evacuate everything, your society essentially ceases to exist. Your economy is no longer there. You started spending the supplies of last resort. No, that’s not something you want to do unless the nukes are already in the air, and then you have 20 minutes max, which is not enough to evacuate anything. It is, however, enough to move into your own basement, essentially to shelter in-situ.

So, let’s make a list of the dangers of a nuclear strike, and see what kind of measures would make sense.

If you are close enough to the blast, nothing can help you. You are dead. In some rare cases, being in a very deep bunker would help, but that calculation doesn’t matter for the urban centres, only for the military command bunkers. Basically, the urban centres are impossible to evacuate in time because of the traffic, there aren’t enough shelters for the population, and for them, the only advice you can give them is to shelter in situ, avoid the windows and all kinds of objects that could become airborne in conditions of overpressure, hide from the debris and cover yourself with a white reflective cloth to reflect as much infrared as possible; that was actually tested and it helps a lot. Similarly, paint your house white, because it reflects most of the radiation. Dark stuff burns much more quickly. Also, yes, duck and cover. Hide under a desk, a chair, and cover your head and face with clothes in order to protect yourself from heat and debris. Depending on the strength of the blast, you will either die or not, but if you take those measures you will reduce probability of all kinds of injuries that would get you killed in the aftermath even if they are not that serious normally, because forget medical care, that’s not happening. Also, the area where the nuclear blast is absolutely deadly is quite small compared to the area that is quite survivable if simple protective measures are taken, and you can’t do anything for those in the ground zero of the blast anyway. Imagine concentric circles of the target – those in the black centre are dead anyway, and no measures could save them. Those on the periphery of the target might survive with the simplest of measures, such as avoiding the windows, hiding under a desk and covering themselves with a white sheet. Between those two, there’s a gradient of probabilities, circumstances and luck.

So, their thinking was that the most likely targets are going to be military sites and urban centres (black on the target). For those, nothing could be done. Those close to the blast (grey on the target) are mostly fucked; probability of serious burns, lacerations, radiation injuries, being buried alive in the ruins etc. are very high, but some general precautionary and protective measures could still help them. However, the largest percentage of people are going to be more lightly impacted (the white on the target), and very simple measures such as “duck and cover” could drastically improve their outcomes.

There’s a very good reason why those protective measures were introduced in the 1950, only to be completely abandoned by the 1980s. You see, in the 1950s there was a very limited number of nuclear weapons, and delivery vehicles were very primitive. The calculation was that America had to deal with a dozen or so hits in the urban centres, at worst. However, by the 1980s, as the number, yield and sophistication of the nuclear weapons grew exponentially, it meant counting on thousands of hits in the urban centres, with hydrogen bomb MIRVs. The calculation then became obvious – nothing can be done to save the population once the nukes are in the air, so all efforts must be directed at avoiding the nuclear outcome.

However, we are no longer in the 1980s. Neither America nor Russia have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons armed for the first strike. Sure, the number is still high, but have in mind that those are mostly battlefield weapons, not the intercontinental ones. The expected number of intercontinental warheads expected to actually strike is numbered in the hundreds, and since those are precious, they will aim mostly at the military installations. Striking at the cities is useless for the first strike, and exists only in the plans for a retaliatory strike. As the number of deployed nuclear weapons grows, it becomes tempting to wipe out the urban centres as well, but as things are right now, very few if any urban centres would be targeted. This brings us back to the 1950s and the “duck and cover” exercises, because they become very relevant if we assume that civilian targets will be at the periphery of any nuclear strike, unless they are considered of military importance.

So, what would be the reasonable advice in case of a nuclear exchange? First, don’t be on the X. This means evacuating early and being nowhere near the expected target zones, or the zombie apocalypse zones of the aftermath, which for the most part means the urban centres. Second, expect to shelter in situ and have at least two weeks of supplies that would guarantee that you don’t have to exit your shelter early. Third, adhere to the “duck and cover” principles as laid out in the 1950s; those guys built and tested the nukes themselves and had hands-on experience with that stuff, and knew what they were talking about. Fourth, have a radiation sensor so that you can know what is safe and what is deadly, and fifth, yes, have a radio or some other means of getting the public broadcasts, especially the ones of local importance.

 

Thoughts

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I’m watching the coverage of the LA fire and multiple things cross my mind.

The first is compassion. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in it, and I’m thinking, if I had to map the areas of the world where the most guilty people for all of today’s evils live, the place that’s burning would be in the top 3. And yet, when a man’s house is burning down, you feel bad for him and want to help, especially watching from a distance, when you don’t know who the man is. And that made me think further – what do we even know about all the people who are suffering? If we knew the karmic background, would we still be feeling sorry for them? We see a little girl who lost her limbs in a petal mine explosion and we feel sorry for her, but what if she were a cruel man who raped his baby daughter and this is his hell? If we saw him before, we would feel righteous anger and curse him with all our strength to be punished by God to all the extent of justice, and yet, now that we no longer see that past life and the context of the suffering, we see the maimed little girl and wish damnation upon those who caused it – and the godless people of course always blame God for such instances. In case of those Americans, we know that all the leftist propagandists live in those burning houses, we know that most of those people are the ones causing the virtue signalling hysteria, insisting that men can menstruate and women can fight men in combat sports, insisting that women be hired as firefighters and soldiers, and that some stupid fish species should be given its favourite brackish water at the expense of the LA water supply, because imagine the suffering of all those little fishes in water whose salinity isn’t to their liking. So, misguided compassion can be said to have greatly contributed to their misfortune, and now I feel misguided compassion watching their fate.

Would we ever feel compassion for anyone if we knew the whole karmic background? It’s easy to see the victims and instinctively think them innocent, but innocent victims seem to be a very rare kind in this world: basically, the Christians think there was only one in history, and his suffering was redemptive for all of mankind. If they are hard pressed to think of another, they will name his mother. And yet, I don’t think it’s all that simple. The circle of evildoers who in turn become victims is for the most part merely an aspect of this world, where the wheel of samsara turns to make both evildoers and victims from everybody, and they all keep investing their energy into the system, trying to make things right, trying to have a better opportunity, trying to live a better life, causing harm, trying to repent for it and fix it, ad nauseam. People who are deluded and think they are doing good, but are in fact doing great harm, while pontificating about virtue by eating their vegan gluten-free toast. People who watch their houses burn and feel compassion for the innocent victims, investing energy and focus into the world, bleeding into it to make it fertile.

Buddhists have the right idea about compassion – they will say that the intelligent person will see all that cycle of projection, suffering and ignorance and feel compassion at those suffering from it, but the solution is to detach them all from the world, from this entire cycle, and not keep feeding this fire with gasoline. Essentially, proper compassion is the kind that liberates from the world, not the kind that gets you entangled and the kind that gives the world’s victims the feeling of validity of their endeavours here.

Another thing I noticed is how illusions shatter. Expensive homes, expensive computers and other gadgets in them, expensive cars, the illusion of untouchable and powerful America, it all burned down and turned into a heap of burning trash. It suddenly doesn’t matter which model of car, phone, computer or microwave oven it was, when it’s all lost – and guess what, that’s what happens when you die. You lose all your material possessions, it no longer matters which brand your watch, handbag, car or phone it was. No more status symbols. It’s just you, and what you are, in your true nature, stripped of things and illusions.

Purpose and meaning

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My son recently got into photography, and, as those things usually go, he started experimenting with film, since he heard all kinds of stuff on the Internet and wanted to check it out for himself. My reaction was “wait, film is actually still being used?” The last time I checked, Kodak went bankrupt and stopped producing film altogether, Fuji left the film market, and when I did my last experiment with film you could no longer get anyone to process E6 properly, and the best you could do was get some of the C41 emulsions that were still being produced (mostly Kodak Ektar and Portra and Fuji Reala), develop it in some rare places that still do it, and then either have it scanned in their Frontier minilab (to your detriment), or try to do it yourself, and good luck with that since film scanners were basically an extinct species at that point. Since the result of my experiment was that a 12MP m43 digital camera matched Mamiya 645 medium format with Fuji Reala negatives in resolution, and handily beat it in dynamic range and colour quality, I decided that film is not worth the hassle anymore, put the film gear in a drawer and thought that was it. However, it appears that the film market was having some kind of a resurgence – it’s mostly because of the motion pictures industry that started using it with some regularity again, and those C41 emulsions are being packaged in 35mm and medium format rolls, and black and white film was never much impacted by the move to digital. Also, there’s a surprising amount of activity around film, but when I looked into it, I was shocked that I couldn’t find good examples of film photography online anymore. Almost every example of pictures taken with film that I could find online looked like absolute garbage. I was like “that can’t be right, there has to be someone who shoots film because it’s beautiful”, but if there are such examples I couldn’t find them under the pile of all the hipster lomo garbage. I literally had to use my old film scans in order to show my son what film colours are supposed to look like when everything is done right – fresh film of good quality processed in good chemicals and scanned on a proper scanner. I literally couldn’t find an example of EBX online that isn’t cross-processed in C41 chemicals or developed in cat piss and scanned by a webcam or something, pretending it’s art. My first thought was “why do the film photographers put up with this”, but then I realized: they are actually actively looking for that, and when I saw a “film emulation” plugin for Lightroom that emulates the results of poor scanning, it became clear: people think film looks like shit, and they actively seek out this as a result, thinking it’s “nostalgic”. They actually want it to look washed out with colours that look like a result of age-fading for decades in some drawer. They don’t try to make film look good, because that look is perceived as “digital”. Not just that, but they are so obsessed with the “look”, that they completely neglect the photography itself, thinking that the “look” itself is somehow “art”, and when you look past the fact that the photo is taken on a poorly processed colour negative, there’s hardly anything there. A house, a street corner, a garage door. It’s all generic, stereotypical, vacuous and meaningless. Sure, most of everything used to be that way because most photographers used to follow trends and copy the things they saw somewhere without really understanding what made it good, but I think it’s even worse now, probably because poor results get applauded in some online echo-chamber and this amplifies the noise and kills the signal if there ever was any.

I continued to explore the technical part of what they are doing today, and found out that scanning, as expected, is a problem, because they are still using the same scanners that were current when I used to shoot film, but those are aging out of their life span and people are figuring out new methods, and the best one is to basically put film on a lightbox, and take a picture of it with a good digital camera with a macro lens. The detail captured is pretty much on par with film scanners, and the colours are in fact better. Then I asked myself the obvious question – why not just use the digital camera in the first place? And then it started dawning on me: that would be easy. That would skip over all those artificially introduced problems. It would reveal the fact that the photographer doesn’t actually know what he wants to do, has no ideas or goals in his work, and hides this under all the artificial problems created by using a completely fake technological process that pretends to be authentic, the way vinyl records mastered from digital files are a fake process pretending to be authentic.

Then I went deeper, trying to figure out why people create artificial problems for themselves and then whine as they solve them – it’s not just photography; I saw people heating their house with a wood stove or have an old car that keeps breaking down so that they have to fix it, and in general create all kinds of problems for themselves, and then solve those unnecessary problems in order to pretend that there’s something going on in their lives.

And there it is: they create fake problems for themselves because there is nothing else. The real problems are completely beyond their ability to solve, and the lack of smaller, solvable problems reveals the fact that their lives are empty and meaningless, and they are trying to bury this realization under all kinds of artificially created clutter.

Here’s where I really started thinking, because I remembered that experiment with a mouse utopia, where the scientists created an environment where mice will have absolutely everything they need, and the mice soon started acting in all kinds of dysfunctional and self-destructive ways, and their “civilization” collapsed in a very ugly way. The phenomenon became known as a behavioural sink, and humans seem to manifest the same patterns. When they lack obvious obstacles and problems to overcome in their daily lives, they reveal their existence as meaningless and start circling the drain.

Apparently, everybody needs to have a sense of a “mission”, a grand over-arching purpose of civilization and society, in which they partake by living their daily lives. If there’s no mission, and the problems they face daily are too easy and trivial, both mice and people go insane.

So, what’s the mission?

That’s an interesting question, because the same question seems to have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. The mission was initially obvious – Rome was threatened by the Gauls, by Carthage, by all kinds of powerful neighbours. However, as Rome grew stronger, all those threats were eliminated, and as there were no obvious threats, and there were centuries of peace, people had enough time to think about what was the whole point, and the answer was no longer apparent. People started doing all kinds of extreme stuff to fill the spiritual void created by the fact that there was no longer an obvious problem their existence was meant to solve.
This is why Christianity took over the Rome like a wildfire. Christianity introduced a new mission. The physical life is merely an entrance exam for the true life that is beyond it, and what we do in life is a choice for either God or vanity, for eternity or nothingness. This is a mission, an over-arching mission that saturated both civilization and individual lives with meaning, the same kind of mission that made the Egyptians build the pyramids. They probably thought they were building the mirror image of the Orion’s belt on Earth, and as such they were building a portal into the afterlife, merging Heaven and Earth. Similarly, the Christians of the “dark age” thought they were building Heaven on Earth, living the Augustinian God’s Kingdom on Earth. However, for some reason this sense of mission wore out, probably because they neglected the things of this world to the point where they were philosophically vulnerable to modernity and humanism, which pointed out that science should be applied to produce technologies that improve daily lives of people. At some point, modernism took over from religion, and the idea of conquering the world with science and technology and creating a modernist technological utopia became the dominant over-arching purpose.

This made complete sense when there were entire continents to be conquered and colonized, but we quickly ran out of those. Then we started “conquering” wastelands like Mt Everest and Antarctica, where “to conquer” no longer meant to go and live there, but to go in and out quickly before you die from hypoxia and hypothermia. “Conquering space” first meant to put something into orbit, then to put a man there for a few orbits, then to put a man on the Moon for a short period. However, the pattern soon started to emerge: space is even more hostile than the worst, most hostile and uninhabitable places on Earth. If you put a man in orbit for a year or so, his health degrades significantly. If you put a man on the Moon, radiation will quickly kill him, not to mention that there’s literally nothing there to sustain human life – it all needs to be brought from Earth, at great cost and literally zero benefit, because there’s nothing on the Moon. If Antarctica is undesirable as a place for human settlement, Moon is even more so; Antarctica at least has breathable atmosphere and radiation shielding. So, what’s there in space after the Moon? Mars? Let’s see: corrosive soil that is hostile to life, thin unbreathable atmosphere, no radiation shielding, already lost its atmosphere once to solar wind because it has no magnetosphere, and it’s even more expensive to get there than to the Moon. Also, there’s absolutely nothing there worth getting. What’s next? The satellites of the gas giants? Far from the Sun, so insufficient heat. Some have water. None have breathable atmosphere. Extremely hard and expensive to get to. Also, there’s nothing there.

Planets around other stars? Sure, if you have faster-than-light travel, but speed of light is very slow and it seems to be an insurmountable barrier for our technology. However, even if you get there, what evidence is there of places that are hospitable to human life? None. For all we know, the planets are all as inhospitable as Jupiter, Mars, Venus or the rocky bodies, and the star systems are mostly non-unary, which means stars orbiting the barycentre, often creating 3+ body problems of chaotic orbits, and squeezing each other tidally to produce extreme coronal mass ejections that sterilize the planets periodically. In order to realistically colonize something outside the Solar system, and not just go somewhere else to die, you’d need FTL travel that allows you to inspect a vast number of star systems quickly in order to filter out the inadequate ones. That’s completely beyond the reach of our technology, either now or in a foreseeable future.

Also, science fizzled out. It promised a lot, but the curve of progress flat-lined decades ago, and there’s nothing going on other than marketing for industry and politics, because science is currently a marketing brand rather than a method. Science no longer promises great things, and even if it does, people don’t really believe it.

So, let’s summarize this before it turns into another book. In the Ancient Egypt, the Grand Mission was to connect Heaven and Earth, to build a portal between the world of the living and the world of the dead. After that failed, their civilization fizzled out. With Rome, the Grand Mission was to build a huge empire to protect themselves and project their image upon the world. After that succeeded, everything felt empty and people tried to fill this emptiness with all kinds of crazy behaviours, until Christianity gave them another Grand Mission: create the world in the image of God, and choose an eternal afterlife in God. At some point, this fizzled out, and science offered the next Grand Mission: master the physical world, conquer the world, then the Solar System, then colonize the nearby star systems, and create a Galactic Empire, and maybe become Masters of the Universe. That went great until people landed on the Moon, but the next step never came, and as our space exploration atrophied, and our efforts turned to all kinds of navel-gazing, culminating with the Internet, people in general feel there’s no Grand Mission at all, no point to Everything, and thus no point to anything, and if they face this outright, they go insane like the mice in their behavioural sink utopia. And so, in order not to go crazy, they create fake problems for themselves, like living in some wasteland on primitive resources in order to keep themselves busy with survival despite not needing to, or doing photography with film, or maintaining an oldtimer car that keeps breaking down, or doing Christmas every year, where they pretend it’s something meaningful to do, spend all the money, get annoyed by the family and relatives, get fat from too much food and hung over from too much alcohol, and depressed in early January when all that shit passes and they are left with more debt, more lard on their arse, and meaninglessness of their lives staring at them from the abyss of the future. So, what do they do? Invent fake goals, create non-existent problems that require fixing, and make everything worse so that they could feel they have a purpose in making things better again.

There’s obviously a real problem underneath all the dysfunction, and it needs to be addressed, not just covered up with pointless nonsense. To me, the answer is obvious. The purpose and the point of our existence is not in this world, it’s on the other side. If this life is to have a purpose at all, it is to get to the other side safely, without leaving pieces behind, and by choosing the right kind of spiritual existence for ourselves, the kind we would actually want to have forever. St. Augustine was right all along; it’s just that people got side-tracked by materialism, which hijacked science and turned it into a false theology. God is still the Eternity which we are trying to reach, by following the Ariadne’s thread of God’s presence through the labyrinth of the world. That is the Way, for both the civilisation, and the individual person.

Prepping mistakes

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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 18th 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, 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.