It seems silly to spell it out, but it needs to be said: every person, regardless of their politics or age or income or location, benefits from being reasonably prepared for emergencies.
You should be prepared. Your spouse, kids, parents, neighbors, and friends should be prepared. Liberals, conservatives, gun slingers, vegans, young adults in their first dorm room, working moms, soccer dads, and grandparents in the country — everyone should be prepared.
“Prepping” is not a dirty word. Prepping is not limited to the tin-foil-hat stereotypes producers love to put on TV. Most preppers are rational and they come from all walks of life.
Many preppers are very intelligent and successful — so much so that they have a front row seat to the forces in our world making things worse, and it has caused them to take action and get prepared.
This is the best time ever to be alive, and life is generally good for most people in the developed world. But the comforts of modern life are a fluke in the grand scheme of our history, and many experts think we’ve already peaked.
We’ve taken all this for granted and assumed it will continue, which creates an achilles heel that leaves billions of people at the mercy of unstable systems. Billions of people are unable to do simple things like start a fire or dress a wound.
We live in an unpredictable world and it appears to be getting worse. Put another way, our honeymoon period of the last few decades is probably ending. Our planet is changing, causing more frequent and severe natural disasters. The fundamental principles of the economy and what it means to work and to live are rapidly changing in ways we’ve never experienced as humans.
In both of those examples, our institutions and governments are broken and are not addressing the problems — and though we’ll hopefully be fine in the end, it’s going to be a very painful process along the way.
People enjoy prepping for a variety of reasons. For some, it’s part of the responsibility of our right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Many parents feel it’s part of their job description.
Others feel selfless, that it’s part of their duty to be ready so they don’t burden their community by needing help, and so they can be ready to help their neighbors in need.
But prepping is also fun and rewarding. You spend time being active and outdoors, learning new skills that can help you in all areas of life, and challenging your brain to think about interesting scenarios (and even deep stuff like what it means to be an independent human.)
In all cases, you get the peace of mind from knowing that you are ready and will not be a helpless victim. In the unfortunate event something does happen, even a few hundred dollars of emergency preparedness supplies can make all the difference for you and your loved ones.
If this article doesn’t convince you to prepare, nothing will.
The 10,000 words in this guide, and the countless hours of experience and research that went into them, is to convince you of one profound, life-changing conclusion:
There are a ton of very real and very serious possible emergencies, and you are likely to go through at least one of them in your lifetime. Probably more. The smartest, most rational experts in the world are coming to the same conclusion — the next 100 years are probably going to suck.
The evidence is overwhelming in both size and clarity — to the point of being scary. It is impossible to document all the scenarios you might face and what the future might be.
This guide is just a sample and is our attempt to present rational, evidence-based reasons why you should prepare. When you’re ready, getting started prepping is easy.