We figured the billionaire bunkers would fail, but get this…

It’s happening early.

I’ve been following bunker stories ever since Douglas Rushkoff wrote about them. Soon after, someone sent me a 2017 article from The New Yorker that revealed the secret bunker culture of bankers and hedge fund managers. They really do get together over tapas and brag about their doomsday plans.

And then there’s the story of C. Wesley Morgan, a Kentucky bourbon baron who advertised the bunker under his mansion on Zillow. It attracted the attention of an ex-military dude who invaded his home. Morgan’s daughter died in the gunfight that ensued. The bunker is now an Airbnb.

Maybe you’ve heard of Vivos xPoint. It’s an old bunker site in South Dakota where the military used to store bombs. It’s home to hundreds of bunkers. About ten years ago, a real estate grifter named Robert Vicino bought the place and started advertising it as the safest haven on earth, somewhere the super rich could bug out during an extinction event, like nuclear war or a global famine.

Things haven’t gone so well.

It’s been getting some attention lately. According to recent news, a bunch of bunker bros have filed a class action lawsuit against Vicino. Why? Well, he promised them a doomsday utopia with a medical facility, a laundromat, a general store, a security force, even a gym. He didn’t build any of it. Instead, he took their money and required them to “improve” the bunkers by installing their own plumbing and utilities. Then he used predatory lease contracts to evict them.

He kept the upgraded bunkers.

And leased them again.

(Lol…)

The tragi-comedy of Vivos xPoint recently graced the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Canadian Prepper also did a beautiful takedown. When you put a $55,000 downpayment on a bunker at xPoint, here’s what you get.

Have a good laugh:

There’s not much going on at xPoint. No guilds. No orchards. No farms or gardens. No ranch. There’s not much in terms of lakes, rivers, or streams. It’s really just a bunch of bunkers out in the middle of nowhere. Look at the history, and you learn that the military built them for an entirely different purpose than survival. The high altitude and low humidity of South Dakota maximized the shelf life of bombs. They put the bomb depots in the middle of nowhere so they wouldn’t kill anyone if they accidentally exploded. The bunkers were designed to keep explosions on the inside, so they didn’t damage other depots.

The bunkers themselves don’t come with the modern infrastructure and air filtration systems to protect anyone from radiation. That would fall under the “improvements” that residents have to add themselves.

About the community:

According to the reports, residents have been getting into a lot of fights and feuds. They’ve been litigating each other. They’ve been harassing and threatening each other over things like failing septic systems. They’ve been pulling guns on each other. In one incident, a bunker bro even shot a contractor during a prolonged confrontation with the site management.

It’s exactly what you’d expect to happen when you put a bunch of entitled jerks together in a remote location. They don’t know how to cooperate. They got where they are by exploiting everyone and everything around them. Of course they weren’t going to make it out there. They never were.

The same goes for the rest of them.

By now, we’ve all heard about the bunkers. Stories have saturated the internet. The mainstream media can’t stop talking about them. Some of them are carved into mountainsides. Some are built into old missile silos. Some have actual drawbridges and lakes of fire built around them. Celebrities all have them now. So do all the tech billionaires and their friends.

None of them will make it. Many of us predicted these bunkers would fail at some point during the collapse of civilization. It’s just a bad idea to put a bunch of rich people together in a remote location on the premise that they’ll build a community. That’s not how they accumulated their wealth. They built their wealth by extracting it from us, and then flattering themselves.

What’s interesting is that they’re already failing.

It’s ahead of schedule.

Places like xPoint have already collapsed. The doomsday events they fantasized about haven’t even started happening yet, and they’re already pulling out their guns and trying to kill each other. Another bunker project failed a couple of years ago. Maybe you remember a piece in The Lever about Barrett Moore, a doomsday tycoon who tried to build a bunker community, conning hundreds of thousands of dollars out of rich people. He wound up drowning in lawsuits.

Bradley Garrett wrote an entire book on bunker culture called Bunker. He spent months touring all the bugouts and came to the conclusion they wouldn’t last six months inside these things. They were already joking about making dungeons and chaining up teenage girls in them.

Some of them were even fantasizing about going Rambo on nearby neighborhoods and putting everyone’s heads on pikes.

Sounds lovely.

There’s a definitive lesson here: Don’t envy the billionaires and their bunkers. Don’t envy their security teams. Don’t go around believing they know something the rest of us don’t. They know nothing that climate scientists and activists haven’t been screaming for decades. That’s all they know. And they know because they’re the ones who’ve been committing all the destruction.

It’s all liability dressed up as privileged. In almost every case, you’re better off where you are. You’re better off doing what you’re doing. It’s sad that the groups with the power and resources to undo some of this damage are, instead, choosing to build bunkers and weep into the arms of Davos prostitutes about how screwed we are. They’re not going to change.

So, there you have it, rather conclusive evidence that bunkers aren’t going to help anyone. Not only were they a terrible waste of resources in the first place, they’re already failing. They were always going to fail.

It’s just happening early.

The entire world is already dealing with killer heat waves. There’s no need for me to run through all the news stories. We’ve all seen them. It’s not just “a little hot.” These heat waves are killing people and destroying infrastructure.

How bad could it get?

Well, a 2023 study predicted that a heatwave accompanied by a blackout in major cities like Phoenix would send half the population to the ER. According to a separate analysis covered in The New York Times, two-thirds of North America already face “shortfalls in the electrical grid, particularly during periods of extreme heat when demand for air conditioning spikes, straining resources.” That was before the world’s billionaires started mass-building data centers.

Europeans are now facing the hottest summers in recorded history, in places that were never designed or built to see such temperatures.

Odds are, you or someone in your family will be living through something like this in the foreseeable future—an intense heatwave accompanied by a blackout, or at least a grid flickering as it buckles under energy demand.

So, how do you survive?

Here’s what I know.

Yes, you can survive

Melissa Norris and her family survived several days at 120F degrees without air conditioning. Their indoor air temperature topped out at 88F degrees. It wasn’t comfortable, but they made it. They explain what they did in this video, and it covers a range of simple strategies like blinds and blackout curtains, limiting stove use, and strategic use of fans at night to promote air exchange.

Frozen towels and sheets do the job

Melissa Norris is spot on with the advice about frozen towels. If you’ve heard this before, there’s a fancier term for it in emergency medicine. It’s called ice sheet cooling (ISC), and the military considers it a standard intervention in field medicine to treat heat-related illnesses and injury.

A 2023 study in The Journal of Emergency Medicine found ice sheets effective in treating heat stroke and preventing mortality, and it’s a good alternative to the “gold standard” of cold water immersion. If they’re reasonably effective in treating someone already suffering from heat stroke, then it stands to reason they’re even better at keeping you cool to prevent it in the first place.

A 2022 study in Military Medicine reached a similar conclusion. In this study, participants exercised in a heated chamber until they underwent “exertional hyperthermia,” and then they were treated with “bed sheets soaked in ice water… at the neck, chest, and groin with another sheet covering the body.”

So, get soaking.

Leverage your freezer if you can

It’s worth keeping this method in your playbook, because brownouts and grid failures will increasingly accompany heat waves as cities that aren’t prepared for the climate crisis struggle with thousands of residents blasting their AC all day. Air conditioners are a modern luxury that we probably can’t count on for the indefinite future, especially as grids start to flicker and fail. Even before grid failures become the norm, power bills will soar and price a lot of us out.

It’s difficult to keep an air conditioner running with solar power. I’ve done the math. A decent, affordable portable battery setup with a handful of solar panels can produce 750-1000 watts per hour. A window unit or portable AC would consume most of that, and probably all of it, depending on the size and the circumstances. Even a fully-fledged rooftop solar system would struggle to power a central AC unit during a heatwave. Central AC needs roughly 3-4 kWh to keep a house cool. If you can afford rooftop solar and you live in a good location, it’s doable.

If you don’t, it’s not.

But…

You can power a freezer with a few solar panels. Your average chest freezer uses half the electricity of a window unit, at 80-200 watts per hour. Depending on size, a freezer can even use a third or even less electricity.

Freezers are far more energy efficient because they cool air and then keep it insulated. So, freeze something and then put it next to your body’s hot spots to cool you down, around your neck or under your arms.

You can still try to run a portable AC with solar panels, but you can leverage an energy-efficient freezer as a backup.

It could save lives.

Take a bath

Just like ice, liquid water cools you down.

According to science, it takes 3200 times as much energy to heat water to the same temperature as air. It also transfers heat away from your body at a high rate. Water’s density also makes your body work harder to heat it up. This piece in The Conversation recommends water at 26 or 27C degrees (80F) for someone suffering heatstroke (to avoid cold shock), but you can go lower if you’re not having an emergency. Generally, your tap water comes out at 10-20C degrees (50-70F). So, just taking a cool bath or shower could save someone’s life.

If you can’t take a bath or shower, you can just submerge your hands or feet in a tub of water or wrap them in sheets. You can also use a mister.

They all work.

Turn off the lights and appliances

During a heatwave, you want to add to the problem as little as possible. According to HVAC experts, people don’t think about the significant amounts of heat they’re adding to their homes throughout the day with lights, electronics, and appliances, especially ones like dryers and stoves. Even a high-performance PC in a closed room can feel like you’ve got a heater running. This article also explains the way overlooked appliances and lightbulbs add heat to your home.

So in our dystopian, low-energy future, it’s going to make sense to use less electricity so you don’t cook yourself in your own home.

Not fun news, I know.

Use fans strategically

Fans can help with air flow, but they work better if you understand the basic principles of positive and negative air pressure. Simply parking yourself in front of one can actually speed up dehydration and heat illness. Above 35C degrees (95F), they start to pose more of a liability than anything.

It’s a little counterintuitive…

Just putting a fan in the window often doesn’t do enough. This article from Instructables explains how to create pressure systems to manage the air in your home depending on the time of day.

So, use fans to exchange air in your home.

For example:

If you want to cool one room, like a bedroom, then open a window at the other end of your home. Seal the other rooms.

Put a fan near but not in the far window opening to create a vortex, then open the bedroom window. That creates a windstream that replaces warm, stuffy air with fresh, cool air. Do this at night, and then keep your place sealed during the day to keep that cooler air inside, and the hotter air outside.

Let’s repeat that part:

Don’t try to do this in the middle of the day. Develop a system. Vent your house at strategic times, like at night and early morning.

It works.

Invest in good curtains

Sunlight heats rooms. It’s called heat gain. The more you can do to block out sunlight during a heatwave, the better. Even basic curtains can reduce heat gain by 33 percent. Window quilts do an even better job.

Make a zeer

Cultures around the world have been keeping goods cool with zeer pots, or pots within pots, for thousands of years. You can cool food, or you can cool water, and cool water can help you stay alive during a heat wave.

Drinking cool water lowers your core temperature.

This guy shows you how to make one.

So does this article.

The inside temperature of a zeer pot can be 20-30F degrees lower than the outside temperature, especially in drier climates. They can chill down to 40F degrees (4C), even during the summer. They still work in more humid environments, just not quite as well. So, that’s a powerful tool.

They’re simple and robust.

Make a terracotta cooler

According to a 2024 study in the Journal of Engineering Sciences, terracotta has resurfaced as a material for cooling as the world cooks. Research has found that terracotta coolers can lower indoor temperatures “up to 6-10C in arid and semi-arid regions,” or up to 18F degrees. They work best in areas with low humidity. Some companies like Team Solstice have even designed air conditioners with terracotta that use much less energy while lowering room temperatures to 22-27C (mid-upper 70s in farenheight). Other companies like CoolAnt have designed terracotta beehive structures to cool the air up to 15C (27F).

This video shows you how to make a “mud pot air cooler” that can cool air from 40C down to 15C and distribute the air with a simple DC fan.

Here’s an alternate design. Some versions use a water pump, but it’s not essential. You basically mount two small fans on a clay pot, fill it with water, and take advantage of terracotta’s natural cooling properties.

The terracotta option is going to work better under certain conditions than others, but it’s a good option to know about.

You can also scale it up.

Other long term options

Go downstairs, or into a basement if you have access to one. For the long term, it’s not a bad idea to find a home with some kind of underground level. It’s always going to be cooler. You can also grow a vine trellis outside your home to provide shade. Vines do a great job of blocking heat, and growing them on a trellis means you don’t have to worry about them damaging your home itself. Studies have shown that vines on a building can reduce inside temperatures by 3-4C degrees (6F) or more, when you cover 40-70 percent of the walls.

According to an article in Interesting Engineering, earth-sheltered homes offer a wide range of advantages for our dystopian future, especially when it comes to disasters and heat waves. Native Americans built quite a lot of these structures across the plains, further demonstrating how much better they understood this continent and how poorly adapted our lifestyles remain.

Also, improve your insulation.

Seal any windows you don’t plan on opening up. If you can afford it, upgrade them to reduce heat gain. Look at the R value (5-7 ideal). Also inspect your walls for gaps around power outlets or other areas where your living space could be bleeding cool air to the outside. The more seals, the better.

So, that’s what I’ve got.

To survive the heatwaves and grid failures of the future, the kind that’ll send half the populations of major cities to the ER, I would start implementing these strategies and helping other people do it. If you’re building community, share this information and help your friends ruggedize their homes. Think about setting up some cooling centers, even underground ones.

Other strategies exist, and I can’t cover them all in one article. These work. They’re some of the simplest, most immediate things you can do.

What are your heatwave survival strategies?

Let me know.

Someone recently told me:

You’ve got it all figured out. You have a left brain. You can do physics and engineering. Your ideas look so impressive, but they intimidate me. I can’t do any of that. I keep failing. Maybe I should give up. Maybe I’m just going to starve.

It’s funny, because that’s how I often feel when I read posts or watch videos from preppers and homesteaders further along than me.

I’ve got a few things to say about all this.

Let’s face an uncomfortable truth, shall we?

All of our prepping and homesteading plans amount to squat if we don’t have regular, reliable access to clean water for drinking and growing food. It’s also not going to matter much if we have no way to dispose of our pee and poop. I’m sorry if this sounds blunt or negative, but it’s reality.

I like reality.

We’ve been struggling with these fundamental problems for years, and they’re exactly the kind of problems swept under the rug by all the doomsday slop out there that presents perfectly organized root cellars, workshops full of clean tools, and blossoming food gardens. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone. We’re very much on the suburban homesteading bandwagon, growing food, composting kitchen scraps, and developing DIY plans for emergencies and disasters. But we have limited resources, and we have to manage our priorities. We still wouldn’t last a month on what we manage to grow, and that’s reality.

Like I said, I like reality.

For us, solving the water problem is a priority. It goes on the top of the list. Because we don’t want to invest huge amounts of time and money, only to wind up in a drought so bad we can’t even run a drip irrigation system. Given that the UN has officially declared a water bankruptcy, given that many parts of the world are now living through their worst droughts in history, given that our leaders are doing almost nothing about it, given the growing threat of data centers, it feels like a logical place to put our efforts. Water first.

I’ve grown increasingly fatigued with the doomsday slop that’s been taking over the internet, promising easy solutions wrapped in fear. So I’m going to tell everyone what has actually worked for us—and what hasn’t.

I think there’s a lot of untapped value in talking about what doesn’t work. We should be doing it more often.

Let’s go.

What hasn’t worked: dew harvesting

After months of trying to make it work, I’m finally pivoting away from dew harvesting. Not because I failed. Because I finally succeeded.

We found the right material. We ironed out the science. We built a prototype that reliably catches dew every night. So, what’s the problem? This: By the time we scaled up our concept and ran the math, it was going to cost thousands of dollars. It was going to take up 500-800 square feet… to collect a few gallons of dew, on an average night. If we had the budget, if we had the space, we could do it. But we don’t have either. So, when you see those doomsday slop videos promising dew harvesting at pennies on the dollar, don’t listen to them.

It’s mostly hype.

You need to know this so you don’t spend countless hours trying to make it work and then judging yourself. Physics doesn’t answer to our whims.

It only answers to itself.

Moving on…

What works: rain harvesting

Rain harvesters can actually help you in a drought.

We think of droughts as periods with no rain. But that’s wrong. Here’s what actually happens during a drought: Warmer air holds more moisture, and the “rain” gets trapped in the atmosphere. You go long periods without rain, and then it dumps down on you in violent storms. The parched ground can’t absorb the water, so it runs off. The problem compounds, and that’s why it takes so long to recover.

Rain harvesting helps with that.

When you harvest rain, you store some of the water that would normally run off. You’re not hoarding water. Plenty of it still reaches reservoirs and aquifers. Meanwhile, you’re watering crops and keeping the soil healthy. So, it’s actually a good idea to build one if you can.

Here’s the problems:

You need a very specific kind of roof to eliminate contaminants and toxins if you plan to use harvested rain for growing food and drinking. I’ve covered that in our illustrated guide. Most of us don’t have these roofs.

Further research has shown that you can use a shingled roof to some extent, but you have to be extremely careful filtering your water, and that’s the hard part. We looked into in-line hose filters as a solution, but they only work with city water pressure. They won’t work with gravity-fed systems. We’re currently looking into the feasibility of rigging other types of gravity-fed water filters to a barrel or IBC tote, but it’s slow going. Sometimes, we find something and…

It’s out of stock.

So.

We’ve troubleshooted and come up with alternatives, but none of them are foolproof. None of them work 100 percent of the time. None of them completely eliminates the risks of contaminated water.

But we’re working on it.

That’s the point.

What works: an atmospheric water generator

We’ve been running a commercial atmospheric water generator for about a year now. It’s an H2O Machine from here. It really does generate several gallons of drinkable water a day. We tested the water, and it’s safe.

You can search online and find a few different brands. I can’t speak to all the different models, but they all use the same tech and draw about the same amount of power. Paired with a beefy solar backup system, you’ve at least got water to sustain a small group over a long period of time.

Upsides: You’re not storing hundreds of gallons of water. You’re not managing complicated harvesting and storage systems. You plug it up. You follow the instructions, and you have water.

Downsides: Ours takes 72 hours to cycle when you first turn it on. So, you can’t just mothball it and then roll it out for emergencies. You turn it on, and leave it on. Fortunately, it’s a lot like an appliance. It’s not consuming huge amounts of power when it’s not actively generating water.

We use just enough water to cycle through the tank once a week. This keeps it in good working condition and prevents anything from growing in stagnant water or ruining the filters. For us, this makes the most sense.

It’s not going to water your garden.

If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars, this feels like a better investment than building a dew catcher. Sure, the dew catcher doesn’t use any electricity. But at 800 square feet for a few gallons, the AWG wins.

So, that’s our solution.

What works: A Dehumidifier

There’s a lot of debate about the utility of a dehumidifier. Some say that’s what an atmospheric water generator is, a glorified dehumidifier.

We tried a new dehumidifier. We tested the water, and it was clean. But we’re going to do a more extensive test before recommending that. For the money and space, it’s vastly more efficient than anything else.

A solid water filter like Boroux or GSR’s Guardian, or Grayl, will reduce the risk of metal contamination. These companies have said that while it technically works, they can’t recommend it as anything other than a last resort.

Yes, it requires power.

It’s risky.

What works: composting toilet

Some people are so sure they’ll always have a working toilet. Well, maybe. Then again, there’s no harm in having a backup. You don’t want to wait until there’s actually a problem before coming up with a solution.

So, we adapted a cheap, portable composting toilet design for a long-term emergency situation. It works. Here’s the design.

We’re still fine-tuning aspects of it.

But it works.

Ignore the doomsday slop

Here’s one of the most important things I’ve learned over the last few years, trying to prep for various disasters and emergencies.

Ignore the doomsday slop.

Doomsday slop promises dew harvesting for pennies on the dollar. It shows you a root cellar full of vegetables while downplaying or completely hiding all the time and money invested in building the thing. It willfully overlooks how most of our systems still rely on some kind of functional grid and a network of supply chains while touting itself as “self-reliant.” It pushes batteries and generators that cost thousands of dollars. It ignores all the backend deals these influencers use to get their stuff for free, because their job is to market it to you, regardless of whether it really works, regardless of whether you actually need it.

In the real world, prepping is hard. Homesteading is hard. Survival is hard. You have to budget your resources. You have to drive to the hardware store and get the stuff. You have to endure the trial and error.

You have to do it when you’re tired.

You have to expect failure.

You have to keep going.

Sometimes, it feels like the homesteaders and market gardeners look down on the rest of us who don’t already have 20 acres and a greenhouse. It’s a little irritating when they go on and on about how “anyone can do it,” because when we try and then fail, it makes us feel like losers. It feels a little condescending when they lead us to believe composting kitchen scraps will save humanity. Look, we’re composting the kitchen scraps. We’ve done it for years now.

But:

If someone built their homestead 20 years ago, they were doing it in a vastly different landscape. Land was cheaper. Materials were cheaper. Your money went further. You could hold down a simple job to supplement your garden hustle. In most places, you had a reliable grid to fall back on when your crops failed or something broke. In fact, many of the original homesteaders actually worked seasonal jobs for part of the year to pay for their supplies. Nobody tells you that.

We’re dealing with a completely different picture. We’re trying to build in an era defined by resource scarcity, buckling supply chains, unprecedented political instability, endless war, historic inequality, and endless inflation. No, it was never easy. But it’s harder than ever now. I can’t tell you how many times, just over the last couple of weeks, I’ve sighed when something I needed was out of stock or on back order—or it cost double what it would have just a few years ago.

It’s really, really frustrating.

This doesn’t mean we give up. But I think it’s important to be honest about the challenges and obstacles we face now.

That’s why I’m trying to be honest about my trials and failures. My warka tower failed. My next design worked, but it’s not scalable. Fortunately, I’ve already got plans to repurpose all the parts. I’m moving on to the next idea. We’ve got a couple of things in place that work, and it’s better than nothing.

It’s important to talk about the failures along with the successes. To me, that’s encouraging. Not the doomsday slop where everyone pretends they’ve already got it figured out and everything works the first time.

In the real world, sometimes you come up with the perfect idea, but it costs too much to make or it takes up too much space. The materials you need are out of stock. Or a tariff has made them expensive overnight.

That’s prepping in the real world.

It’s messy.

I love it.

Recently, Lex Luthor’s irl twin Jeff Bezos showed up at a tech conference in Paris, where he supposedly declared that humans were drinking too much water—and that it was slowing down AI’s evolution.

The internet filled up with justifiable outrage. Everyone had something to say about his psychopathic disregard for humanity. Full disclosure, I reposted some of the memes on X. (Yeah, I rejoined the platform under my old name.) My spouse and I had a nice long bitch fest about Bezos while making dinner and talking about our dew harvester plans (update on that in a minute).

There was just one little problem. There’s no record of Bezos ever making those comments about AI and human water consumption.

Just as outrage over Bezos was abating, new outrage erupted over Israel’s violation of the peace deal with Iran, prompting another Hormuz closure and another spate of viral videos about how screwed we are.

Honestly, it’s so boring…

I’m not writing this to exonerate Bezos or shame anyone for spreading misinformation. I’m writing this for a different reason.

The reason:

Hopefully, we can all agree that spending hours fuming over something that someone didn’t even say is a waste of our time. So is spending hours wondering if or when we’re going to have a supply chain collapse or a famine. It does nothing. It doesn’t stop data centers. It doesn’t conserve water. It doesn’t prepare anyone for the droughts that are actively drying up the nation’s crops and water sources. And if you can’t even trust what’s real online anymore, why give it so much energy?

I’ve noticed something in myself and others over the last several months, and it’s something new. It’s a shift. It’s a new approach. We’re not ignoring the news. We’re not living in a fantasy world. We’re not numb. We’re not decencitized. We’re not selling hopium or oblivious ignorance.

We’re just processing the doom faster.

We’re acclimated.

We’re getting right to the do something part. These days, I don’t have to spend days convincing my spouse to get on board with a rain harvesting project. I don’t have to spend all night reading about droughts to convince myself it’s a thing. He sees the droughts now. He’s worried. He wants one.

I don’t have to pitch it anymore.

So, my bandwidth no longer goes toward trying to convince my family we have a problem. I don’t need quite as much doom to validate my thoughts and feelings about the state of the world. I just need to know what’s going on, and that’s it. We’re in the design stage. It makes a big difference to have someone who’s actually helping you think through concepts instead of constantly doubting and second-guessing your entire worldview. A very big difference…

Ironically, it was nothing I said or did that finally got through to them. It was just reality. The reality of our doom has become so apparent, so self-evident, that at least some people are finally starting to wake up a little.

(I know, not everyone…)

Exhibit A:

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a dew harvester design for months. I’ve failed a few times. Last night, I finally started moving in the right direction, with a design that sits 3 feet off the lawn and harnesses plant transpiration. I’ve changed materials to sanded coroplast and silicone-coated aluminum (AMS panels) backed with xps foam. Instead of a bulky wooden frame or a flimsy PVC one, I’m using steel construction pipes that fit together with an allen wrench. Based on my trial runs, my prototype is going catch a gallon of dew a night, even in low-average humidity. It’s going to double as a rain harvester. We’re going to run the gutter into 30-gallon Aquatanks, daisychained with PVC.

I’m probably never going to build something as big as this massive dew and rain harvester in Texas, which spans 2,674 feet. But at least I know about the project. I know someone else out there is doing.

Soon, we’re going to make a permanent ground install that runs along the back of our yard. We’re also working through a hinged model that can fold out from the side of a deck or a house and rest on two legs.

So, it’s working.

This is what we’ve come up with, because we can’t completely redo our roof. We can’t install a super-expensive rain harvesting system. We engineered our way through problems rather than letting them stop us.

What else?

A couple of families in our area have started asking us for prepping advice. We’re sharing our plans with them. We’re in the early stages of converting our garage (now that we have one) into a workshop and temporary disaster shelter. We can’t save everyone. But we can help someone.

Slowly and surely, community is happening. Not because we forced it. We’re building it, and we’re attracting the right people to us.

These days, I’d rather obsess over dew harvester designs than sit on my phone, scrolling hate posts about something someone didn’t even say. I already have enough reasons to despise Jeff Bezos. I already know what he thinks about humanity. I don’t need to make up new quotes for him.

Do I regret my years of doomscrolling?

No…

Five years ago, doomscrolling wasn’t a sign of mental illness. It wasn’t a condition that needed treatment. It was a logical, intuitive response to a world where threats suddenly outnumbered hopes. We were never just scrolling doom for its own sake. We were looking for information. We were looking for like minds and souls. We were looking for friends and allies.

Yes, it was comforting to scroll through doom—but not because we were addicted to bad news. We were relieved and soothed to find other people who felt the same way, who weren’t scared to express their emotions.

Over time, that emotional venting evolved into tangible solutions. It’s where we learned about HOCl steam, a “promising respiratory antiseptic” that changed our lives and helped us reclaim a little bit of the “normal” in a world where almost nobody takes the threat of airborne diseases seriously, unless they’re briefly freaking out over headlines about Ebola or Hantavirus.

In other words, we were looking for answers.

We started finding them.

We found real answers, not the “touch grass” nonsense that got served to us during the Barbenheimer summers of yore.

The doomscrolling was a step on a path, a means to an end. The end was understanding science and public health. It was developing tools and mindsets. It was making connections. We have those now, so we don’t need to scroll for the doom as much. The bad news is there, right in front of us.

We’re done dooming.

Now we’re doing.

Feels good.

Five years ago, it hit me. Despite attaining a PhD, despite earning tenure, despite winning all kinds of research and teaching awards…

I didn’t know how to do anything.

Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Zero.

Several years ago, our air conditioner shut off. I called an HVAC service. They sent someone out. They charged us about a hundred bucks.

All they had to do was… flip a circuit breaker.

That’s all.

It was just a little embarrassing. What else? I didn’t know how to fix a toilet. I didn’t know how to wire an appliance. I didn’t know how to grow a tomato. I didn’t know how to build a computer. I didn’t know how to do, well, anything. I had two skills: I could write a viral article, and I could write a long, boring one for an academic journal. Honestly, I barely knew how to change a tire.

It was a little ironic that the book I enjoyed teaching most wasn’t a novel. It was The Mind at Work, by Mike Rose, a book that uncovered the overlooked intellectual demands of blue-collar jobs. My developmental students loved it. (Well, most of them.) While my colleagues went around bragging about their degrees and demanding everyone address them as “Doctor,” my students called me by my first name. I lived in quiet awe of the plumbers who came out to our house to install a sink or a water heater. Part of me wanted to be more like them.

I’m not sure when exactly it occurred to me that my decades of book learning were about to become useless. Living through pandemics, wars, spiraling inflation, a boom in artificial intelligence, and other disasters certainly helped my awareness along. More and more, with every service call, with every visit from a plumber or electrician, my helplessness felt more and more like a death sentence.

I was going to have to confront it.

More than any prediction of deadly disease or famine, more than any fear of starving or going without water, what I really feared was the helplessness. That’s what kept me up at night, my lack of real-world, practical skills.

I didn’t know how to do anything.

If the apocalypse erupted, if civilization collapsed, or we just had a week without power, I wouldn’t know what to do. I would feel like an idiot. I would contribute nothing to my community. I would have zero leverage with bandits.

But that was five years ago.

What changed?

Everything.

Two years ago, I quit my job as a professor. Deep down, beneath all the other reasons, there’s the core reason. I didn’t want to waste another minute of my life writing academic articles that nobody, not even the peer reviewers, really wanted to read. I didn’t want to spend another minute writing reports for deans who would rather go to wine tastings in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t want to spend another Friday stuck in an endless department meeting, talking about problems nobody was ever going to do anything about. I didn’t want to spend another weekend grading papers that students didn’t want to write, and I didn’t want to read. Not because they were bad papers. Because there were other things we needed to be doing. There were other things my students needed to be learning.

How to do things.

Today, I passed the final exam for an electrical wiring course that was designed to take a year, with a 99 percent. I finished the course in a few months. I also finished a 200-page graphic novel that I made with Blender, one of the hardest programs out there. Oh, and I made a 200-page survival guide.

My head feels like it’s going to melt. I gave myself a case of “mouse shoulder” that’s going to take a few weeks to heal.

(I’m going to pace myself a little going forward…)

But I did it.

I’m not done by any means. I’ve got a lot more to learn. But: Now, I know how to build a computer. I know how to grow a tomato. I know how to rig up a drip irrigation system. I know how to change a tire. I know how to fix a toilet. I know how to wire appliances. I know how to fit pipes. I know how to install a receptacle. A few weeks ago, I installed a Level 2 charger for our EV, saving us about a thousand bucks. When we met with plumbers to talk about a permanent composting toilet, I could offer to design parts for them with 3D software. I could actually have conversations with them. One of them kept asking:

“What do you do for a living again?”

“I’m a… writer.”

“Ah.”

My experience might feel familiar to others out there, those of us who grew up in the suburbs in the 90s, with busy parents. It’s strange how fast generational knowledge can evaporate. My dad grew up in farm country, getting chased by bulls, using out houses, hunting ducks on rickety little boats. He knew how to fix just about anything in our house. When he didn’t, he had friends who could show him what to do. My grandpa was a car mechanic. He even knew how to fix a tank. My other grandparents knew how to grow vegetables and skin fish. For various reasons I won’t bore you with, these skills never made it to me.

I’ll just bore you with this reason:

Millennials like me were sold hard on book learning and fancy degrees. Everyone around us, including the television, assured us that we would do just fine as long as we studied hard and made good grades.

Everything would turn out okay.

My high school didn’t even have a vocational program. There was no shop class. There was no home economics.

Not even a chemistry lab.

Instead of learning how to replace a car battery, I learned how to play the piano and the cello. I learned how to run a mile in five minutes.

I learned how to operate a cash register.

I learned how to take tests.

Now, everything has changed. The skills that were going to guarantee us long, lucrative careers have turned out to be complete liabilities.

Now it’s the ones who didn’t go to college that look smart. The ones who went to trade school, the ones who learned a vocation, they’re the ones least likely to be automated out of a job. They’ll be the last ones replaced.

My brother wasn’t like me. Although we both hated school, he hated it even more. He refused to cooperate. He barely graduated high school. He never went to college. He studied electrical wiring at a tech school. Then he sort of drifted for a while, and now he works on cars for a living. Out of all my friends, with all of our fancy degrees and awards, he’s the one with the best career prospects.

My dad often said he wished my brother were more like me. Now I wish I were more like my bother. If I had it all to do over again, I’m not sure I would’ve gone into teaching. I’m not sure I would’ve subjected myself to the endless hours of studying for exams and writing a dissertation.

After all, I was always going to wind up here.

If you’re someone who pays attention to the climate news, if you’ve been following the trajectory of AI, then you don’t need me to predict the future for you. It’s pretty clear where things are headed. While this or that viral article will tell you all the reasons why you should fill your house with canned food, there’s something even more important, and it’s a lot harder.

Learn how to do something.

It’s the most important thing you can do. Learn how to do something that will serve you in the future. Learn something that will make you harder to replace with a robot. Learn how to do something that will help your friends and family. Learn something that you can use to trade goods and services.

You don’t have to learn it in one day. You don’t have to learn it in a month. You don’t even have to learn how to do it well. Not at first. Learn how to do it badly. Learn how to make mistakes. Learn how to get frustrated. Learn how to give up and then come back to it a few days later.

There’s another good reason you should learn how to do something: The technofeudalist overlords don’t want you to learn how to do anything. Not anymore. They want you to rely on their robots. They want you to keep delegating your life to them. They want you to be helpless. When you’re helpless, when you don’t know how to do anything, you’re easier to control.

There’s one more reason:

When you learn how to do something, you gain more than a skill. You gain confidence. You gain a sense of self-worth. You gain a little peace of mind. You’re not worthless. You’re not helpless. When disaster hits you, you’ll be able to figure things out. You’ll be able to keep learning how to do things.

You don’t have to learn how to do everything.

Just learn how to do one thing.

Go from there.

The richest man on earth is now worth $1 trillion. We’re talking about a guy who stinks at coding, despite constantly bragging about it, a guy who pays gamers to level up his characters for him. Think about that for a minute. The richest guy on the planet doesn’t even truly enjoy games. He doesn’t seem to understand that leveling up your character is part of the fun. That’s the problem with this brand of guy, the kind that ultimately has to amass $1 trillion in order to feel any sense of self-worth. Elon Musk hates himself. You can tell. If it takes a trillion dollars to fill you up, to make you feel good about yourself, you’ve got massive problems. Unfortunately, instead of dealing with them, he inflicts them on us.

Imagine hating this planet so much that you devote your entire life to trying to escape it, to go live on a dead red one. Imagine hating people so much that you want to replace them all with robots.

That’s our billionaires.

So far, nothing we’ve tried has managed to get rid of these parasites. Nothing is working. We can’t seem to build a team.

We seem to be stuck in a loop where we constantly fight each other, over the most trivial things, while the parasites have an odd way of banding together in order to protect their own interests. Isn’t that weird? Bezos. Altman. Gates. Thiel. Karp. Zuck. Trump. Vance. They can barely stand each other, and yet they seem to find ways to cooperate to further their own collective goals.

And so, in this moment, we see a lot of people desperate to find something to hope for, and very quick to judge anyone who doesn’t offer it. Personally, I have a very troubled relationship with hope. I’m suspicious of it. I’m suspicious of the word. I’d rather talk about reality. That’s my calling.

One day, I got curious about the word hope. It’s such a polarizing idea. It inspires some of us, and it makes others cringe.

I wanted to know why.

So I looked it up.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ancient philosophers defined hope “mostly as an attitude to reality that [was] based on insufficient insight into what is true or good.” That definition hits you in the face. It’s not how most people in the world today define that word. But it points to why many of us cringe when we hear it, especially when it’s used to dismiss us.

Hope makes an appearance in Greek mythology. Most people probably know the myth of Pandora, but they don’t know the full story. They know the gods made her. They know she was the first woman. They know she was sent to earth as a punishment (sigh). They know about the box, even though it’s actually a jar. They know she opens the jar out of curiosity, letting loose evil spirits and diseases—along with hardship and sorrow. But they forget about hope.

Hope doesn’t escape.

Once Pandora realizes that the jar contains evil, she seals it shut. She traps the last evil inside the jar, and that’s hope.

Alone there, Elpis, in her indestructible home,
remained within, beneath the lip, nor by the door
escaped, because the vessel’s lid had stopped her first,
by will of aegis-bearing, cloud-compelling Zeus.
Among the people wander countless miseries;
the earth is full of evils, and the sea is full;
diseases come by day to people, and by night,
spontaneous, rushing, bringing mortals evil things
in silence, since contriving Zeus removed their voice.
And thus from Zeus’s mind there can be no escape.

—Hesiod, Works and Days, 700 B.C.

Of course, scholars have debated the word elpis (hope) for centuries. They’ve suggested it might not be hope so much as “expectation” or “awareness.” In that case, the myth makes more sense. Hope isn’t really elpis itself. It’s the absence of elpis or awareness, meaning that if everyone knew the full implications of opening the jar, they would all give up and just sit around waiting to die.

Instead, hope (or the absence of elpis) keeps everyone living in varying degrees of stubborn defiance or blissful ignorance of all the evils in the world. And that sounds pretty much like the situation today, doesn’t it?

When you’re going up against a trillionaire…

Where do you find hope?

Hesiod’s original myth leaves the meaning of hope ambiguous, and it’s probably on purpose. On the one hand, the ancient Greeks saw hope as essential to coping with the world’s evils. On the other hand, they also saw hope as a temptation and a curse. Hope could lead to false expectations. It could nurture passive acceptance and complacency. It wasn’t inherently good.

The Stoics also regarded hope with suspicion. As the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, hope always accompanies fear. He described the two as “bound up with one another… like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to.” Hope by itself didn’t make things better. For Seneca, both fear and hope “belong to a mind in suspense… Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

That’s another interesting definition of hope: the act of projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

Creating a mind in suspense…

Nietzsche believed hope “prolongs the torments” of humanity, because it distracts us from the present with promises of future salvation.

There’s a lot of truth to that notion.

By the medieval era, Christian theological approaches to hope focused largely on enduring the world’s evils instead of changing them. Hope was more about patience and tolerance than activism. You just had to get through this life so you could reunite with your god in heaven, and then you could live forever in eternal happiness. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine still paid some attention to action, but it rarely got put into practice in ways we would recognize.

That’s the kind of hope that Nietchze inherited.

That’s why he was so harsh.

We see it a lot today.

Unfortunately, the passive version of hope has come to dominate our discourse. Everyone throws that word around, without really stopping to think about its history or its complicated meaning. Often, someone uses that word to put themselves in a position of authority over us. They use that word to judge us. They use that word to get us to shut up when we’re talking about things they don’t want to think about. In other words, it’s a silencing move.

Authoritarians often use hope and vague promises about future utopias to dismiss criticism and silence dissent. They use it to reject solutions that call for too much sacrifice or inconvenience. They use it to pacify resistance. If you can channel everyone’s energy and emotions into the passive version of hope, then you can defuse actions that threaten your power.

And your wealth.

Why else would these billionaires talk about colonizing space and unleashing boundless productivity with robots, while building bunkers to hide from the world they control? They’re floating false hope and empty promises. Deep down, maybe they don’t even believe their own promises.

We’ve seen how these authoritarians weaponize hope in order to shut down hard conversations about the future. They use hope to advance false solutions to problems, ones that aren’t even designed to work, like carbon capture or aerosol injection. They call solutions they don’t like “pessimistic.” They don’t want solutions that work. They want solutions that sound good.

That’s their version of hope.

It’s been effective.

Daoism over doomism

Next, I got interested in hope described in other cultures. That’s where I ran into Confucianism and Daoism. In these philosophies, hope becomes a responsibility, not a passive emotion or an expectation of eternal happiness. In Confucianism, you have to cultivate your best self to help bring about balance and harmony. That’s the ultimate goal. Hope isn’t personal. It’s a group project.

It’s not about how things turn out for you as an individual. It’s social and communal. Your hopes have to align with the greater good.

Hope isn’t an escape hatch from struggle.

Daoism treats hope as an expectation or anticipation for nature to restore balance and order to the world. For Daoists, it’s mostly about getting out of the way. There’s really no room for your own personal wishes and desires. Pursuing those tends to put you at odds with nature, and it leads to bad things.

If you just want to stand back and let industrial civilization collapse, then maybe you’re not a doomer. You’re a Daoist. The same goes for “fighting fascism.” I’ve only started reading through the Tao Te Ching, but it has some interesting things to say about oppression. You’re never going to beat fascists in a direct confrontation—not unless you have an army. (We don’t.)

Instead, you have to outlast them.

Daoist hope isn’t about getting back to brunch in 2029. It’s not about stopping the climate crisis or preserving our way of life.

A Daoist doesn’t hope for everything to turn out the way they want. They hope for things to turn out the way they should, even if that means they don’t turn out so great for us personally. You focus on freeing yourself of the personal, selfish desires that make the natural order so… hard to deal with.

There’s a difference.

As Daoists might say, we’ve already unleashed the destructive forces that are eventually going to wipe out industrial civilization, maybe even within our lifetimes. If that’s the case, then it’s arguably a good thing.

Palantir doesn’t stand a chance against what the planet has in store for us. The forces we’re talking about make Musk look like an ant. So if you doubt our ability to overthrow the fascists, rest assured that nature will finish the job. To take comfort in that, you have to let go of the outcome you envisioned.

You have to let go of brunch ‘29.

Of all the approaches to hope I’ve seen, Daoism resonates the most with me. The more money you amass, the more data centers you build, the more killbots you make, the more stuff you’re just giving nature to blow apart.

So, what do I hope for?

At this point, my hopes don’t rest in elections. They don’t rest in activism. We might continue to engage in all of these things. But a Daoist would say you have to let go of your emotional attachment to the outcomes. Do these things because you believe they’re the right thing to do, not because you think they’ll bring back your carefree weekend brunch. Some of us never had that anyway.

I’m hopeful that as the world crashes through tipping points, as ocean currents deflate, as glaciers melt, as land bakes, as the earth unleashes its full power of destruction against us, that some version of humanity will manage to hang on and build something from the rubble of this civilization. It’s iffy. There’s a growing chance that humans will end all life on earth, but that’s where I choose to be hopeful. Not brunch ‘29, but in preserving life on the planet.

Elon Musk won’t be the last trillionaire.

So…

If you’re looking for hope, you don’t have to find it in promises you don’t believe in. Not tonight. And if you’re just looking for comfort, you don’t even need hope. Just learn to let go of the outcomes you wanted, and see the world the way it is. See how small the trillionaire is, and understand that he’s even more miserable, even more doomed, than the rest of us. Everything here has its own beauty, even the violent storms. The guy who pays gamers to level up his character, the guy who spent the best years of his life selling daydreams about Mars, will never sit still and enjoy watching the lightning for an afternoon. Not even one. You can. In that sense, you have more wealth than he’ll ever have in a thousand lifetimes.

That’s not just a platitude to make you feel better. That’s the kind of truth that doesn’t care how you feel about it.

I hope the trillionaires die in their bunkers before they can finish destroying all life on the planet. Given their trajectory, that seems likely. You can’t live on a scorched planet with killbots and mercenaries. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. Nature will make it all worthless. It will restore balance.

I hope life outlasts them.

That’s my hope.

So…….

Remember back in early May, when a Substack newcomer penned the doomiest essay of all time, predicting a global famine by early July?

That post went viral, inspiring discussion threads all over the internet packed with panicked Americans. Everyone was asking if they should take the author’s advice and stop paying their rent, abandon their financial responsibilities, and start forming “communities,” even though they had no idea where to start. As one redditor posted, “Is there gonna be a famine in America? I genuinely can’t sleep right now bro.” For months, we’ve seen active debates across the web, everyone trying to decide how bad it’s going to get. Should they brace for a total collapse of the financial system? Was money going to become worthless overnight? Would local courts and eviction hearings grind to a halt?

In the viral author’s own words:

If you can hear me, your life depends on what is in this article. I am not being dramatic. I am not overstating this. I am telling you that the data says the United States of America will run out of usable oil by July 4, 2026. Europe will run out this month. The food system that feeds you runs on diesel. Diesel runs out first. Read this. Understand it. Act on it today. Not tomorrow. Today.

This is not a probability assessment. This is a warning. And the difference between a warning you act on and a warning you dismiss is measured in whether your family eats in August.

Stop what you are doing and start acquiring the things that will keep you and your family alive.

And hear me on this: stop treating your debt as your priority. Your credit card payment is not your priority. Your mortgage payment is not your priority. Your priority is physical survival. Food. Water. Fuel. Shelter. Community. Every dollar you spend servicing debt to financial institutions is a dollar you do not have for the things that will keep your family alive.

In a systemic collapse, the institutions holding your debt will become insolvent. The currency you are using to pay them may become worthless. The enforcement mechanisms that collect on debts require a functioning legal system, and a functioning legal system requires a functioning society. When the diesel runs out and the shelves empty, the society you know stops functioning. Use every available resource to acquire what you need to survive the next months. Redirect what you have toward survival, not toward keeping a credit score alive in a system that is collapsing. You can settle debts in a depreciated currency later, if the creditor still exists to collect them.

Well, you can relax for now. There’s not going to be a famine, not as originally described. Since May, the author has steadily walked back his original claims. Very recently, he issued what amounts to a full retraction:

“The tanks may not go dry in July as I predicted.” Apparently, the author didn’t account for demand destruction in his original analysis. Honestly, I’m not sure he knows what demand destruction is, but that’s what he describes. There’s a dozen reasons why the original predictions of tank bottoms were off. Here’s the important point: No, everything’s not going to be just fine, but you were never going to starve to death this summer. We still have a lot of problems to deal with, but that notion doesn’t lend itself to clickbait.

So, no tank bottoms. No famine (this summer). No supply shock. No currency collapse. Just more inflation. Just more unemployment. Just more disruptions and supply rattles. Meanwhile, you are entirely expected to continue paying your rent, your mortgage, your bills. Even if you formed an off-grid commune last week, you’ll still pay property taxes.

Count on it.

The legal systems and enforcement mechanisms are all still functioning. Your mortgage and your debt were your responsibility and your priority this whole time. It was never going away. It will never go away, barring extinction-level events, in which case, your food stash won’t help much anyway…

The retraction may never get half as much attention as the original prediction, so I want to amplify it. People who were getting ready to blow up their lives with the irresponsible advice laid out there should understand that there’s a better, calmer, more systematic way to get ready for these kinds of events. They’re coming, but you can’t approach them with the mindset you saw in that excerpt. That’s a highly flawed way to make it through the next decade.

So, if there’s not going to be a famine, does that mean you stop preparing? No. Now is the best time to prepare. Not for a complete collapse of legal and financial systems. Not for money to become worthless. Not for your rent or mortgage to disappear. Not for some Hollywood-infused hallucination.

We’re going to go through something like this every year, and you need to adapt. You must find a way to sleep, even under the threat of famine.

I’ll try to help with that.

Heed the famine follies

Let’s address the most dangerous notions, that somehow government systems will collapse or evaporate during a famine or a similar crisis, and that money will become worthless to the point that your debts dissolve. It’s a common talking point among preppers that gets repeated a lot. It’s simply not true. That hasn’t always happened during previous collapses. Your money may no longer buy you a loaf of bread, but I wouldn’t count on your debt going away.

It’s naive, even wishful thinking.

You should very much anticipate a government to remain active during any kind of crisis, and for it to get in your way.

A famine didn’t keep Stalin from executing Ukrainians over allegations of food hoarding and cannibalism. It didn’t stop Mao Zedong from guarding silos full of grain, letting peasants starve at the gates. It didn’t alleviate the Irish from their jobs. The British government even forced them to work on construction projects in exchange for meager food rations. Starving men, women, and children built what are now called “famine roads,” paths that lead nowhere, just because the crown thought it would corrupt their souls to “give” them food to eat.

On top of the “famine roads,” wealthy philanthropists also hired starving families to construct fake little castles, churches, monuments, and even ruins that served no real purpose. They’re called “famine follies.” Nobody would give you food if you were starving. You still had to earn it, even during a famine. Either the government or some wealthy individual commissioned these things.

You’ll find plenty of other examples in the history books. Power structures don’t evaporate. If anything, they resort to increasingly oppressive and even ridiculous measures in order to maintain power.

And so, a famine won’t stop your credit card company from seizing your assets if you fall behind on your payments. As the famine follies reveal, it doesn’t even matter if money becomes completely worthless.

They’ll make you pay anyway, because capitalism.

The cruelty is the point.

So, how does it feel to know that even during the Irish famine, 1845-1852, seven long years, the Irish were still expected to show up for work, often to do completely pointless yet utterly grueling labor for starvation wages?

What you should be concerned about

If that viral article was your first initiation to collapse and emergency preparedness, there’s a silver lining here. You’re awake now.

Don’t lapse back into complacency.

Now is the time to pay attention to the world of problems that the original author either didn’t mention, or barely touched on.

For example:

At least 60-70 percent of farmers across the U.S. have reported fertilizer shortages. They can’t get enough to plant all their crops. That’s a real number, not a bunch of AI hallucinations. How is that going to show up in supply chains this fall? Ah, we’re still not sure. But we know it’s not going to be good. That alone gives you enough reason to learn how to build a bulk food storage system and start growing your own, something you can do even if you live in a big city. (Scroll down...)

But you can’t pretend a famine will dissolve your debts.

Or free you from your lousy job.

Even if it should.

Here’s how you don’t prepare

There’s a problem with trying to talk about collapse in terms of absolutes: You can’t. When you try, it often generates only fear.

For example:

In 2022, the Vance family thought a full collapse of civilization was imminent. Scarred by the pandemic, followed by a major war and global supply shock, they wanted to escape modern life. They declined a family member’s offer to try living off the grid in a mountain cabin. Instead, they took their 14-year-old boy and vanished into the wilderness. Months later, authorities recovered their malnourished, mummified bodies. None of them had any real experience living outdoors, foraging, growing food, or even camping. They thought they could wing it.

The Vance family’s tragic end resonates with me, and perhaps you, for a simple reason. Many of us have wanted to vanish into the woods over the last several years. The year 2022 was especially rough. Many of us were starting to realize, in our bones, that things weren’t going to get better.

Nobody was coming to save us.

We’ve scrolled all the doom. We’ve clicked all the clickbait about oncoming famines and black swan events. We’ve dreamed about life off the grid. Collapse trolls have unsubscribed from my newsletter and called me names because I dared to suggest staying on the grid, but they don’t really understand.

Nobody believes you should just stay on the grid forever. You should stay, until you have a plan ready. It needs to be executable.

Don’t be in a rush to escape. Take this valuable time to develop skills and build knowledge. As I wrote a few months ago, if you can’t leave the grid, become the grid. Learn how to strip wires and install outlets. Learn how to hook up your own solar panels. Learn to grow. Learn to sew. Learn how to repair bicycles. Take a course in emergency medicine. It’s a gradual process. You often have to juggle it with your other responsibilities. There’s probably never going to be an event or a situation that allows you to devote 100 percent of your attention to preparing for a famine. Look at me. If I could do it, I would. I wouldn’t be here writing a newsletter. I would already be in my cabin in the woods, living the collapse life.

Instead of disappearing into the woods, consider moving into a career that helps you prepare. Start training to become a nurse or a paramedic. Become a plumber or an electrician. Learn carpentry. Learn risk assessment.

Make collapse your job.

These days, I’m stripping my own wires and wiring my own devices. I’m halfway through a course on residential electrical systems. It’s going to be a while before I’m a licensed electrician, but I’m already on the way to knowing how to maintain our solar panels if the need ever arises. Power is power. Power to run grow lights indoors. Power to run hydroponic and aquaponic systems. Power to run water pumps. Power to run medical equipment for vulnerable family and neighbors. Power to run micro laboratories to manufacture medicine.

You don’t learn this by sitting around trying to predict when a famine will hit and then revising your predictions over and over.

Not everyone can move away to a farm.

So what?

Have you ever heard of Ron Finley?

For years now, he’s been showing city dwellers how to grow gardens in urban food deserts. He started regenerative agriculture in the heart of downtown L.A. When the city tried to stop him, he took them on and won.

So, don’t tell me you’re doomed because you live in a city. Don’t tell me you can’t do anything to prepare for a supply chain shock.

You can.

Ron Finely probably wouldn’t call himself a prepper, but he offers a vision of how communities would function in a collapse.

Aren’t you worried someone’s going to take your food?

No, that’s why it’s on the street!

Later:

If kids grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes.

If they grow kale, they eat kale.

And for the win:

Don’t call me if you want to sit around in some cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit. If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit.

You can spend all your time in a cushy chair revising expectations for when this or that catastrophe is going to hit, or you can spend your time getting ready for the shitstorm you know is coming sooner or later.

The shitstorm you’re already in…

What really matters

What matters is what you have ready when the time comes, whenever it does. That’s why some of us are already planting some shit. We already have our atmospheric water generators humming. We already have the dehumidifiers with water filters ready to go. We know what to do when another deadly virus starts spreading everywhere. Some of us never stopped doing it.

I’ve spent years getting ready for all kinds of disasters. Not because I sat around trying to predict them with absolute certainty. They simply started happening to me. We got hit by an F3 tornado in the middle of a pandemic. We got stuck in a brushfire on the way home from school. My in-laws were living in Asheville when a hurricane flooded the mountains. We lived through the aftermath of Helene. My friends across town got their roofs blown off.

That’s why I’m learning, and I put it all in a guide.

I’m still working on it.

By the way, did you hear a vet caught bird flu from a cat last month? Bird flu has learned how to jump from pets to their owners. Some of us predicted that years ago, and now it’s quietly happening, but nobody cares yet. They will. Bird flu is a great example of how a prepper’s mind actually operates. You make your preparations, and they become part of the background tapestry of your life. By the time the actual disaster drops, you probably won’t even be thinking about it.

But when it happens, you’ll be ready.

That’s why I love the Ron Finley approach so much. If you start building that now, even without the threat of immediate famine, then it’s going to be ready for you. Ron Finley isn’t talking about growing taters on your windowsill. He’s talking about taking over all the abandoned lots of a city and converting them into food gardens that everyone has access to, and everyone helps sustain.

As he says:

That’s the funny thing about sustainability.

You have to sustain it.

It might sound naive, overly optimistic, or utopian to talk about converting unused city land into food gardens. It might sound unrealistic to talk about riding bicycles out in the country or making a composting toilet with a five-gallon bucket and a piece of foam. Here’s the blunt part: What else are you going to do? Are you going to keep doomscrolling? Are you going to keep leaving snarky comments on homesteading videos, reminding them that, no, most of us don’t own 20 acres in the country? Are you going to keep falling for articles that predict a famine in 60 days, and desperately cramming MREs under your mattress?

It’s your call.

Here’s the hard part

It would be easy, at least by comparison, if you could just take the advice from that viral article and abandon all your responsibilities, just make prepping for a famine your sole purpose, your only priority, but that’s not it.

That’s not how it works.

You’re going to have to plan for a slow collapse, develop your skills, and form your communities, while continuing to participate in a ruthless economy that expects you to pay all your bills on time, famine or no famine, pandemic or no pandemic, hurricane or no hurricane, food or no food, utilities or no utilities. You’re also going to have to fight data centers and deal with local politicians, as well as corrupt local institutions. You’re going to have to fail and try again.

Learn how to talk to your friends and family about these threats without activating their defense mechanisms and triggering their denial.

That’s what I’m working on.

At some point, a disaster will finally exceed our resilience. It won’t matter how much we prepped. It won’t matter what communities we built. We’ll die. Prepping also means accepting mortality. Does that make all your efforts worthless? That’s a question only you can answer. Some of us will want to fight for every day of life we can. Others will want a graceful, dignified exit from the struggle. For them, it’s enough to simply see their end and have time to accept it. We now live in an age when anything can happen. All bets are off.

Remember the famine follies of Ireland. Maybe they’re not pointless. Maybe they’re living testaments to what we can expect, monuments to the inane attempts the current ruling class will resort to in order to retain the illusion of power, and the illusion of wealth, even as it all crumbles.

As for the summer famine…

That appears to be…

Canceled.

It’s hard to write a post about nothing.

I’m going to try.

A long time ago, I read entire books about silence and nothing. At some point, I came across the research on how our brains process silence. Our brains treat silence like sound. So, silence isn’t nothing. Neither is nothing.

Right now, it’s exactly what many of us need.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of vapid noise hitting me from all directions for the past few weeks. Everyone has an opinion and a prediction, but 99 percent of them no longer connect with reality. The algorithms hit me with everything from “we’re going to starve in 8 weeks” to “Trump is totally going to resign in six months” to “buy a gun for democracy.”

And… I’ve had enough.

No, I’m not going to go buy a firearm and join the fictitious armed revolution. I’m not going to cheer any politician’s latest bid for attention. Honestly, I don’t feel like protesting anything at the moment. I don’t feel like getting involved with any movements. I don’t feel like endorsing anyone’s side in an argument. I’m glad to hear that data centers are falling behind schedule and getting canceled, and this or that politician is finally getting some stuff done.

I don’t feel like forwarding someone else’s cause.

Right now feels like a time for reflection, because whew boy, did all the talking heads just recently get a bunch of stuff wrong, or what? The bad predictions and fruits of false hope have really been piling up lately.

The stench is…

So, it’s refreshing not to have any new opinions on anything for once. At the moment, I have no new predictions. I have no new warnings. I have nothing to prove that we haven’t gone over a dozen times. Based on what I’m reading, neither does anyone else. They’re simply regurgitating.

What we have in front of us is enough.

It feels like the world needs to be quiet right now, but it’s not. It’s loud. To paraphrase David Byrne, everyone’s talking a lot—but they’re not saying anything. They’re not listening. They’re just pouring thoughts into a landfill.

There’s a moment that feels like this:

You’ve already expressed your opinion. You’ve already explained your research. You already cited your sources. You already tried to convince the world, and the world rejected all your solutions to all the problems.

Now, here you are.

Silent.

That’s a great time for silence. It’s a great time to stop trying so hard. It’s a great time not to do anything. Nothing is a great space to fill.

Currently, I’m trying to organize our garage to make room for more garden planning, more seed saving, more survival projects. I’m finally getting rid of the last things from my old office at my old job as a professor.

It occurred to me what I’m doing.

I’m making nothing.

I’m emptying.

Sometimes, you have to empty before you can fill. You have to create the nothing before you create the something.

The world often expresses discomfort, even fear at the idea of nothing. Studies show that the average person would rather shock themselves than spend 15 minutes in solitude. They would rather babble and gossip than sit in quiet reflection. We constantly occupy ourselves. We fill our heads, even if it’s with garbage. We mistake clutter for substance. That’s how scared we are of nothing.

But nothing isn’t a void. Empty can be good.

So can meaningless.

Maybe we have far too much meaning in the world already. Maybe we should stop and simply look at or be with parts of the world before we try to ascribe meaning to them. Maybe we should stop asking what every single event “means.” From my perspective, this endeavor seems to be driving us crazy.

Can’t things just happen?

Can’t they just exist?

If we would just focus on that part, without all the need to make noise and find meaning in everything, we might finally find the peace we’re so desperately searching for. It’s right in front of us, and we can just take it.

You don’t need to say anything. You don’t need to join anything. You don’t need to save anything. You don’t need to predict anything. If you just want to lie or sit somewhere and stare for a while, or you just want to go for a long walk, or you just want to clean out your closet… You can just do that.

You don’t need to prove anything.

Not right now.

A ton of articles out there tell you what to stock up on.

Many of them will tell you why.

They don’t tell you how.

Over the years, I’ve watched a few people build panic stockpiles based on lists of items that “will run out soon.” The items sit in the back of their pantry for years, and then they wind up throwing them out.

That helps nobody.

As I’ve said before, there’s nothing wrong with maintaining a strategic stockpile of food and supplies. The Amish and the Mormons have been doing it for generations. But they don’t simply rush out to stores and fill their carts with perishable foodstuffs based on fears generated by the latest headlines. For them, it’s a mindset. It’s a habit. It’s a lifestyle. It’s just what they do.

In a recent article, I pushed back on the idea of “stocking up” and presented a different approach that focused more on utilizing what was right in front of you, learning to do without some items, and putting our energy into localizing production of things like medicine, where it’s just not feasible to “stock up” for more than a year—and even that’s often difficult. That article stopped several times to make clear that we’re not rejecting the idea of keeping extra food and supplies on hand. Neither are we under the impression that we can survive by exclusively dining out on weeds. But “stocking up” is often not sufficient. When we focus on that exclusively, it ignores all the other things we could be doing.

But if and when you decide to build a food reserve, there’s ways that work and ways that don’t. There’s sustainable ways, and wasteful ones.

We might have a difference of opinion about what’s going to hit us and when. But most of us reading these kinds of articles agree, it’s wise to keep a deep pantry. As of now, in early June, the shelves aren’t empty. The trucks are still driving. You still have time to execute a plan. That’s the thing:

“Stocking up” isn’t a plan.

I’ve covered bulk food in my guide, but it’s worth revisiting under the circumstances. Years ago, I remember watching a documentary on preppers who stockpiled canned food. Every few years, they threw out the expired cans and bought new ones. This would be an example of an expensive, wasteful way to prep. I remember reading a handful of articles about people who filled their pantries with canned beans at the beginning of the pandemic, didn’t eat them, and then threw them away. I also remember reading at least one viral thread about a prepper couple who spent hundreds of dollars on canned chili and survival food, but then wound up in the Texas ice storm with no way to prepare it, not even a can opener.

Don’t be like them.

Simplify your diet, permanently

Food storage gets less complicated when you don’t have a problem eating black bean soup and dried tomatoes every day for weeks, even months. Americans have gotten a bit spoiled. They’re used to rotisseried chickens and sushi on demand. I haven’t picked up a rotisseried chicken in ten years.

I’m doing okay…

This suggestion falls into the broader category of John Michael Greer’s popular adage, “Collapse now and avoid the rush.” The sooner you can simplify your diet, the easier time you’re going to have stocking up.

First off, I would recommend adapting your diet to foods with a long shelf life to the extent you can. Over the last several years, we’ve cut out meat, dairy, and eggs completely. They’re not sustainable on any scale. So when egg prices go up, or beef goes up, we see it as a bellwether, but we’re not freaking out—and that’s a good thing. My spouse likes tofu, and they’re currently learning how to make their own. It’s easier to store soy beans than soy products.

My daughter likes frozen veggie nuggets, but she’s fine eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and apple sauce. It’s not difficult to stock up and rotate through those items. We focus on dry goods: Beans, lentils, quinoa, oats, rice, pasta, wheat berries. We can grind our own flour with a stone mill, and we’re going to start doing that more often. We keep rather deep stocks of these items. It’s not super difficult or expensive. On top of that, we donate to local food banks. In fact, we’ve given thousands of dollars to them over the years. We also finally have a family or two we feel comfortable enough telling about our stocks, and we’re sharing.

We also stock dehydrated lentils, beans, and chickpeas that cook up fast during an emergency, if we lose power. You can heat water to a boil with tea candles and a small folding stove in about 15-20 minutes.

Figure out where you’re going to put it

Next, you need a place to store your food. As I’ve explained in my guide, you can convert part of your house to storage. You can convert a closet or part of a basement. Avoid garages, sheds, and attics. They get hot.

Put up shelves.

Before you put up your shelves, measure the kinds of items you’re going to store. Make sure you’re putting enough space between the shelves. Nothing would stink more than to put up a bunch of shelves, and then realize none of them will actually fit what you need to put there.

Calculate how much food you’ll need

You can find plenty of food calculators online. They’ll tell you what to stock for how long, based on the number of people in your family.

You can adjust it for your diet.

Nutritionists have noted that most foods will start to lose vitamins after a couple of years in storage, but they retain protein, carbs, and fiber. Most of us just won’t have space to store food for longer than 6-12 months, especially if you’ve got a bigger family. 6-12 months: That’s considered a good goal for preppers. If you have more space and the resources to store more, that’s great.

Figure out where to get your food

Many of us would rather not hoard food from local stores. Instead, focus on retailers that offer bulk foods, even if they’re online. You can try Harmony House, Wheatland Seed, Palouse Brand, Country Life Natural Foods, North Bay Trading, and similar outlets. I would avoid too many emergency food buckets.

If you’re extroverted, you can try farmers’ markets. I’d suggest telling people you’re interested in bulk foods. Skip the whole “we’re going to have a famine” bit. Focus on sustainability and self-reliance. They’ll understand.

We also found a couple of local stores that let us order foods in bulk and either have them shipped directly, or we can pick them up. That way, we’re not depleting shelves and contributing to the panic.

We’re just preparing.

Develop a rotation system

You’ll want to store dry goods in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, inside 4-5 gallon buckets. You’ll either want a bucket opening tool, or just buy buckets with gamma seal lids that are easy to open and close.

You’ll also want a container system, so you can transfer food from big containers into smaller, usable ones. We keep a lot of our dry goods in big steel canisters with scoops, and we scoop into mason jars as needed.

You can save a lot of freezer space by transferring frozen foods into mylar bags. We started doing that, and it doubles our capacity.

We don’t keep a lot of frozen or packaged food, because it’s more of a liability if the power goes out. We keep my kid’s food in a chest freezer, connected to a backup power source. That’s about it.

Make sure you have ways to cook your food

You also need a way to cook your food.

This is one reason why we keep dehydrated goods—not just dry goods. It’s easier to cook dehydrated food during an emergency. You can buy dehydrated beans and lentils, etc, without having to break your budget on expensive freeze-dried pouches or food buckets. It’s cheaper, and it’s healthier.

What else?

Tea candle stoves, camping stoves, candles, fuel tablets, and plenty of matches and ferro rods. We also have a couple of solar cookers, and we know how to make a decent one with foil tape and boxes, or even an old satellite dish. We don’t use propane stoves. Propane goes fast, and it takes up a lot of space. It’s also flammable. I’m not a fan of keeping large amounts of highly flammable, pressurized containers in my house. But if you want to, that’s your call.

Start small

You don’t have to build a famine-proof pantry overnight. Start small, with a few items you know you’ll need. Make the space. Go from there.

Often, it’s not about what you store.

It’s how.

I don’t want knowledge.
I want certainty.

—David Bowie, Earthlings on Fire

When I was a kid, my first introduction to David Bowie was the album Earthlings on Fire. I listened to it every night when my mom was having her first schizophrenic episodes. It was so weird, it made me feel normal.

The lyrics from “Earthlings on Fire” have stayed with me over the years. Eventually, I learned that Bowie was alluding to British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who once wrote “What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.” I didn’t really understand that observation. But now, I get it.

Boy, do I get it.

You?

That line explains so much about what’s happening now. All the strange behavior, all the bizarre positions and hot takes, all the hills people are choosing to die on, all the arguments over trifles, it’s all because so many of our friends and families aren’t seeking the knowledge that would save us. They’re seeking the certainty that makes coping easier, even if it makes things worse.

It’s also gotten very fashionable to try and predict things.

Recently, there was another round of speculation about Donald Trump’s health. A handful of writers and journalists started to insist that he’d died (again) and that the government was trying to cover it up, only for Trump to emerge back into public life the other day. We’ve been through this a few times.

This time, I was struck not by the possibility of Trump’s death, but by the certainty of the writers who turned out to be wrong. They just wouldn’t let it go. And it’s not just them. Everywhere you look, a growing number of people in every political party and ideology are increasingly certain about their beliefs, hungry for arguments, and completely unwilling to consider the possibility that they’re wrong. It’s almost like the more chaos we endure, the more stubborn everyone gets.

Have you ever heard of Scott Galloway?

A marketing professor with a reputation for predicting things and telling the rest of us how to live, Galloway enjoys a net worth of $100 million. Back in 2023, he predicted that Donald Trump would withdraw from the 2024 election as part of a plea deal, citing all kinds of evidence and presenting his call as fairly certain.

We know the rest…

It’s interesting how the same handful of “experts” continue to dominate our feeds with their increasingly conspiratorial headlines and lousy predictions. A few years ago, they were the ones bashing doomers and telling everyone to be cautious before running with sensational headlines.

Now they’re the ones doing it.

They’re still making the same mistakes, though.

A few years ago, someone told me about dragon king theory. Introduced by Didier Sornette about two decades ago, dragon king theory describes events like black swans, with one important difference. You can predict dragon king events to some extent. You have to pay attention to the outliers.

99 percent of experts out there dismiss anomalies and outliers because they assume they know how systems operate, but those small factors often reveal patterns or principles that explain why an unlikely event can happen, something big, without apparent warning. It’s not that the warnings weren’t there.

They were just subtle.

Dragon king events are becoming the norm now. So many of our beloved podcast hosts and opinion columnists are trying to understand this world with outdated paradigms. They still don’t get it. The record floods, the storms, the wars, the surprise upheavals in politics, the fact that the Epstein files didn’t spark a revolution, and so on, all these things that were confidently predicted didn’t go the way anyone said they would, because they’re not looking at reality. They’re looking at a version of the world they want to be true.

They’re clinging to certainty, not truth.

It’s strange.

We live in a time of prediction markets, where you can bet on everything from basketball games to wars. Everyone wants to know what oil and gas prices will do. Everyone wants to know how a crypto will perform. We’ve got endless online grifters running around acting like prophets. As the world becomes more and more unpredictable, everyone seems to crave more certainty.

People who offer certainty are enjoying more popularity than ever.

Even if they’re wrong…

I’ve been digging through social psychology again, and it confirms this behavior. Humans value certainty over objective truth. The less they know, the more confident they feel about their opinions. They don’t want to read more or learn more, because that introduces complexity and ambiguity.

It’s the opposite of certainty.

So it makes sense that as the world unravels, people will seek certainty over nuance. Haven’t you noticed it? They don’t want to consider three or four points of view. They don’t want to hear the both/and arguments.

They want either/or.

They don’t want to acknowledge that three things can be true. They don’t want to stop and examine their assumptions. They want to make up their minds, and they want to proceed on that. If you complicate their narrative, they’re going to lash out at you. They’re going to feel threatened.

They’re going to attack.

It doesn’t help that our minds often conflate being wrong with physical pain. Put it all together, and you have a recipe for the current mess. People will accept a bad prediction over a nuanced one. They’ll seek a bad explanation over an honest one, especially if it lets them preserve their ego.

They want certainty, not knowledge.

That’s a bad recipe for the 2020s and 2030s. One thing we know for sure is that the world is going to become more unpredictable.

The billionaires and their puppet politicians are going to act with increasing indifference toward all the old principles that govern the world. More and more, they’re going to act out of motives that only make sense to other psychopaths, or the motives will be entirely hidden from us.

It won’t stop an army of podcast hosts from trying to predict what’s going to happen next, and an audience increasingly convinced that they know better than everyone else what’s going on and what we should do.

These days, it feels like overconfidence is the new currency. It doesn’t matter how right you are. It only matters how confidently you say it.

How certain…

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself going through a strange transformation. Yeah, all the threats remain real. Pandemics. Famines. Ferocious storms. You name it. But my family has found peace and even comfort in focusing on preparations, and not just the kind you can buy, but actually learning skills. For the last several months, I’ve been building things, planting things, stripping wire, and making plans. When you do that, then your worldview changes.

In a world that craves certainty, I’m choosing knowledge.

Honestly, I’m not sure what’s going to happen later this year. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the 2030s. I know what I’ve read. I know what’s likely. I know what I can learn and what I can make to prepare.

That feels like enough.

I’ve made some predictions that turned out to be true, and I’ve made some that weren’t true. I don’t regret preparing, because it was always a path to knowledge. It wasn’t sitting around trying to predict the date of some politician’s death or what month famine will arrive at our door. You can’t predict things like that. All you can do is stay informed and keep learning.

The most important thing right now is to avoid certainty. Avoid groupthink. Question yourself. Consider multiple viewpoints.

Resist the urge to make up your mind.

Listen.

I’m choosing to be okay with uncertainty because I’ve got knowledge. It alleviates the need to predict things or speak with beaming confidence. It helps you plan for multiple realities. It helps you sleep at night. In my experience, the certainty doesn’t solve anything. It only makes you more anxious. It only makes you angrier. It only makes you more scared, not less.

You want knowledge.
Not certainty.

When you’re trying to learn about survival, you hear this a lot:

Cities will become death traps.

It’s not helpful.

We have to face an unpleasant truth, that 300 million Americans aren’t going to move out to the country. If we all did that, it would collapse rural ecosystems. 300 million people and counting can’t homestead. From there, conversations mutate into platitudes about building community and the fate of the lone wolf. I’ve got a few things to say about all this. I’ll keep it interesting.

Let’s talk about community.

It’s probably the core aspect of surviving in a city. Everything else depends on your ability to cooperate with your neighbors. Growing food. Obtaining water. Quelling violence and unrest. And so on. In a city, other people not knowing how to survive will absolutely have an impact on you. Their problems will become your problems. Forget the warm, gooey emotional stuff. Maybe your neighbors will never come running to your defense in the middle of the night. Still, you want to do everything in your power to prevent them from becoming a threat and a liability. And if you happen to be a good person, something inside you just can’t stand to watch suffering. Some of us already have plenty of experience on that front.

We know it’s not easy.

In fact, some of us who’ve actually managed communities might want to run screaming from that word, because we’ve been there. It’s rough. I’ve never managed a commune, but I used to run an entire program that oversaw dozens of teachers and hundreds of students. I’m learning how to grow potatoes, but I already know how to manage people. It’s not fun. I kind of hate it, and I’ve wanted a break from it.

For a few years, I even trained and supervised AP English teachers all over the state. I planned conferences, workshops, and festivals. I drove around and observed classrooms and offered constructive feedback to adults who weren’t always receptive, and often mistook me for a subordinate.

I scheduled all the classes. I wrote all the reports. I managed all the interpersonal conflicts. I oversaw the discipline issues.

I attended all the endless meetings.

It was a lot.

During the summers, I helped run academic camps with dozens of staff and hundreds of kids. I started out as an RA and worked my way up to a site supervisor. In my 20s, I was putting other people’s kids to bed, taking them to the hospital, dealing with their nightmares and anxiety attacks, planning activities for them, and controlling my anger when they told me off.

I had to manage athletes with affluenza who were twice my size, who sometimes threatened to “whip” me for my attitude.

Then said they were “joking.”

I’ve dealt with men in their 30s throwing tantrums in their own classrooms and bullying their own students, then quitting halfway through the semester. I’ve calmed down vice chancellors screaming profanities at their own interns. I’ve talked down potential school shooters with real mental health problems and real guns. I’ve put my own life on the line, because I didn’t have a choice. I’ve wrangled with bureaucrats over paperwork. I’ve comforted students who were dealing with homelessness, terminal illness, dying parents, extreme abuse, suicide, you name it. I’ll never forget the day one of my teachers came into my office, closed the door, and told me one of her students had exposed himself to her.

So, I get it.

Even when I was a kid, my mom didn’t take care of me. I took care of her. I took care of my brother. Toward the end of high school, I was doing the cooking and cleaning. I was buying the groceries. I was doing the laundry. I cleaned up after my mom’s bathroom accidents. I took her to the hospital when she fell down and cut herself. When she got lost, I drove her home. When she forgot to pick me up from track practice, I backpacked the three miles.

Then I started dinner.

When she said I was an alien clone and tried to kill me, I didn’t get to run away from that. I had to stay. Not because it felt good. Not because I got points for building community. That’s just how we survived.

When someone starts talking about the virtues of community, it’s easy to tell if they’ve mainly stood on the receiving end—not the giving. They have no idea what it takes to run one. They have no idea how many nights and weekends you give up, and how much of yourself you sacrifice for it.

For some of us, community often means other people standing around complaining while you do half the work. It’s people promising to do things and then backing out at the last minute. It’s people not showing up. Or it’s the wrong people showing up and getting in the way, slowing everything down. It’s listening to the ones who did nothing tell you how to do everything better next time.

If you’ve been here, then you might smirk a little when someone else warns you about being the lone wolf. Are you kidding me?

You mean I don’t have to worry about everyone?

I can just take care of myself?

Sounds kinda nice.

I’ve been trying out the whole lone wolf thing, and I gotta tell ya. It’s been refreshing. I’ve enjoyed it. I like not having to solve everyone’s problems and deal with all their bullshit. Part of me wishes it could go on forever. So when someone starts talking about how I can’t survive without community, I think what they mean is they wouldn’t survive without people like us.

Anyway:

That’s the life that awaits anyone who wants to build a community. Those of us who’ve been responsible for communities in the past aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of doing it during an apocalypse. We’ve already seen people at their best and their worst, and the worst is a lot to handle. We know how it’s going to go. Collapse is a group project where you’ll get stuck doing a lot of the work, mainly so that your neighbor doesn’t bash you over the head for your carrots one day or start leaving big poops in the middle of your yard.

That’s why you’re going to build the community. Not because you want to. Not because it’s going to feel good. But for simple, practical reasons. To keep those around you from getting you killed.

That’s why.

For months now, I’ve wondered why it irritates me so much to hear the word “community” thrown around with such a casual tone. I’ve wondered why a big part of me is so reluctant to engage in community building.

Well, that’s why.

For many of us, the ones who’ve run the communities in the past, we know how much of ourselves we have to give in order to make them functional. Maybe you understand all this, and it’s why you’re in no hurry to start doing that just yet, even though you also understand that it’s going to be imperative.

I didn’t have the option of not taking care of my mom. If I didn’t, she would literally just lie on the couch until you could smell her from the driveway. She would sit and smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and eat candy. She would crap on the carpet. She would fall in the bathroom and start to bleed out. It was hard to love someone who constantly berates you and threatens to kill you, but for me it was a crash course in a fundamental truth. Your well-being is bound up with the well-being of others, no matter what you think about them, no matter how much you want to get away from the responsibility. It’s there, always.

You have to take care of the people around you, even if you don’t want to, even if you don’t love them, even if you don’t like them very much.

That’s the hard side of community.

Building a community and taking on a lot of the work yourself might be the only way you preserve some sense of order and calm in your corner of the world. It’s how you’re going to keep yourself alive.

Why on earth would you build a community?

That’s why.

I almost can’t believe I wrote this, but I did.

It’s been a long time coming.

Every day, the internet dumps another bucket of survival slop on our heads. Lists of items we should buy before stores run out. Things we should start growing now. Various ways that billionaires are going to kill us off.

There’s something missing from it all.

We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first:

If you’re worried about starving, do you know what foods could feed most Americans that already grow in their back yards (if they would just stop dousing them in chemicals)? I’ve got a whole section on that here.

So, while everyone else is sprinting through stores and bodyslamming each other over the last pack of beef jerky, you can just walk into your yard and pick dandelions. Just let them grow. You can just transplant some kudzu stems and then do the bare minimum to keep them from dying.

If you live in the south, you know what’ll happen. Your neighbors will hate you, but civilization is going to collapse anyway, right? They’re all going to starve in a few weeks, so what does it matter? Let the kudzu grow.

Eat it.

Just don’t tell them that the ugly invasive vine taking over the subdivision is actually a super food. Or, if you want to build community, tell them that you just did everyone a big favor by rewilding the place.

Does that sound absurd?

It’s interesting, because what I find absurd are all the articles telling us to spend money we don’t have on more stuff, because the stuff is going to get more expensive, but they leave out the fact that it’s never going to get cheaper again, and maybe you don’t actually need some of that stuff…?

We don’t have to kill ourselves with homesteading. We could grow potatoes and beans, cultivate weeds, and that would just about do it. Yes, an experienced gardener will grow a wider variety, but you can just start there.

It’s fine.

There’s an idea here, and it runs against the American groupthink. Instead of thinking about all you have to buy, all you have to do, all you have to prepare, stop and take a step back. Think about what you could not do, what you could not buy, what you could make easier, just by adjusting your perspective.

Consider that dandelions and kudzu both pack more nutrients than most other greens we’re taught to see as “food.” I’m not saying don’t grow kale or spinach. I’m just saying, maybe you don’t have to do that.

Maybe learn to like weeds.

Isn’t that easier than clicking on all these articles about oncoming famines, and then feeling guilty for not starting your edible garden? If you didn’t mow your lawn this month, then odds are you have food.

I’m speaking in hyperbole, but you get the idea. If civilization is going to break down, if the rule of law is going to evaporate, then the first thing on my list isn’t going out and buying guns or stocking up on food. It’s not even planting a bunch of potatoes, although that’s a logical #2. It’s weeds. It’s planting weeds and ugly plants everywhere I can, plants that don’t require a lot of maintenance, plants that are, in fact, hard to kill, plants that 99 percent of everyone around me would never consider edible, unless I told them. Now, that’s a collapse plan. It makes as much sense as any other collapse plan I’ve seen out there.

And yes, of course, stock up on items. But also…

Consider not stocking up as the default move.

Start thinking about the day you simply won’t be able to get that thing anymore. Again, you’d be stunned at what plants have medicinal applications, backed by peer-reviewed research. I’m not going to list them all here, but they’re covered in the guide, and that’s just a starting point.

Every day, a dozen articles slide across my feed warning me about oncoming supply shocks. It happened during the early days of the war in Ukraine, and it happened during the bird flu crisis. It happened with tariffs.

Not one of them has asked the key question:

How do you live without that thing?

How do you live without beef? How do you live without eggs? How do you live without wheat? How do you live without milk?

How do you live without coffee?

That’s the real question.

Some things you can’t live without, but there’s another way to get them that doesn’t feed the machine. For example, the Open Insulin Foundation has been working on an open-source formula for years.

Maybe instead of trotting out “stock up on prescription meds” every time we get scared about supply chain shocks, we could actually make open-source insulin happen. Imagine if communities could produce their own insulin or blood pressure medication. Imagine localizing those supply chains.

Now, that’s community.

That’s prepping.

Instead, what do all the prepping channels promote? They plug Jase Medical, a company that will build you a personal stash of prescription meds. I’m not bashing them, but look, it’s a stopgap. That medication will run out. It will expire. The real solution to supply chain shocks, when it comes to medications like insulin, is to localize production and make it open source. I’ve seen practically every pro prepper plug Jase. I haven’t seen any talk about the Open Insulin Project.

Have you?

In 2009, Andrew Szasz came up with the idea of “inverted quarantine” to describe an attitude that’s now endemic to Americans and their response to disasters. His book Shopping Our Way to Safety focuses mostly on how corporations market protection to us through organic, greenwashed products. Instead of solving the problems that put us in danger, Americans and westerners in general try to buy their way out of them, insulating themselves from the world as it collapses. That attitude has taken an especially toxic turn among billionaires, like the ones Douglas Rushkoff described, who think they’ll sit out the apocalypse in bunkers with mercenaries, drones, and shock collars for their private guards.

Forget the Strait of Hormuz for a moment. Forget Ebola. For those who’ve paid attention in class, we’re just living the preface to the dystopian novels. We’re somewhere in the middle preface now, where the fascists take over, and the world devolves into constant warfare.

Simply stocking up on emergency food buckets and antibiotics won’t cut it. If you’re anything like me, you’ve done some deep dives into the notion of long-term food storage, and you learned something.

Guess what?

Yeah, dry goods like beans and pasta can last a decade or longer when they’re sealed and stored. They’ll stay safe to eat, but they still lose nutrition. The carbs and protein don’t degrade, but the vitamins do. The companies that sell the emergency food buckets don’t tell you that. Do they?

Once you’ve gotten the “stock up” out of your system, realize something. You’re not going to shop your way to safety.

We’re always going to be prepping for disasters, but that’s no longer sufficient to keep us safe. Not really. In some ways, it never was.

I don’t want to live in a bunker with years of stockpiled meds that go bad in a few years. I don’t want a slab of concrete filled with food buckets. I want to live in a world where a local nonprofit makes insulin and blood pressure medication for my neighbors in a high school science lab. I want to eat dandelions from my yard. I want to go for a walk through my neighborhood picking weeds for salad, without worrying what’s been sprayed on them. For me, that’s prepping.

That’s the super skill.

That’s survival.

If you haven’t heard of Bryan Johnson yet, he’s worth checking out as an example of everything that’s wrong with the world. A tech entrepreneur worth $300 million, he decided that instead of using his wealth to make the world a better place, he’s going on a different journey. He’s going to become immortal. At one point, he harvested a liter of his son’s blood for a plasma therapy.

Johnson is in his late 40s.

Now, let’s talk about looksmaxing—an internet subculture that’s gotten a lot of attention lately. The extreme version of it refers to unhinged and sometimes illegal pursuits to enhance your physical appearance. Most of the leaders in this little movement are in their 20s and 30s. They’re zoomers.

And now finally, let’s talk about Ronald Reagan, the man who kick-started many of the world’s current problems and initiated our descent into the current dystopian hellscape. He belongs to “the greatest generation.”

Millennials like me often feel like we got one of the rawest deals in history. Many of us graduated from college and entered the workforce during the Great Recession. Just as we were finally getting our feet under us, a pandemic came along and pulled the rug out. We’ve been in freefall ever since. For the last few years, the statistics have been landing hard. Many of us will never own a home. If we do, we’ll live in constant fear of losing it and winding up homeless, no matter how hard we work. We don’t expect to ever retire. We don’t expect to ever have affordable healthcare. From life expectancy to trust in public institutions, all the numbers are going in the wrong direction. Every day, we wake up to stories shaming us.

Many younger people are deeply angry, filled with despair, and looking for someone to blame. The mainstream media knows this, and so they churn out a steady stream of articles that target our online spaces, talking about how older generations (boomers in particular) are hoarding our wealth.

And yet, who is actually hoarding our wealth?

It includes members of our own generation.

We have the Kardashians. We have Mark Zuckerberg. We have Sam Altman. All those tech bros out there pushing data centers and artificial intelligence? Quite a few of them come from our own beleaguered generation.

They’re millennials.

Every generation has its own greedy individuals, its outlier movements, and its contributions to the bleak state of the world. And every generation probably feels like they’ve had it the hardest.

Every so often, we go through a cycle. The internet fills our feeds with stories trashing us for not living within our means and daring to talk about our struggles. Last week, the algorithms showed me a handful of stories telling me that my problem isn’t capitalism, it’s my attitude. I should just sell everything and move into a 600-square-foot house on the plains. It was written by someone who has never lived on the plains. Meanwhile, I have. Yeah, it’s a lot cheaper out there. There’s also a lot of reason why some of us eventually choose to leave.

Here’s the really interesting part:

While the algorithms were getting me worked up over my alleged avocado toast and Starbucks habit, something else was happening to many of my senior colleagues. The algorithms were filling up their feeds with a very different set of stories blaming them for the world’s problems and accusing them of hoarding wealth. They got very justifiably upset, because guess what?

Most of them aren’t rich.

Many of them are simply doing okay, but we live in a world where doing okay looks like immense privilege to someone who isn’t doing okay.

We live on the edge of a sword. If we don’t talk about our struggles, everyone assumes we don’t have any. If we ever open up and admit that life is hard, well, nobody wants to hear that either. They tell you to “buck up.”

You just can’t win.

You’ve got to wonder who it serves to keep every generation at each other’s throats, constantly pointing fingers over the world’s problems. Perhaps it benefits the tech bros and their families. We’ll never unify against them as long as we’re busy trolling each other and getting offended.

Researchers have been documenting this effect for years. A recent article in the Journal of Public Economics puts it right out there:

Algorithms care about engagement.

Not truth.

They describe a “feedback loop between user behavior and ranking visibility.” In other words, algorithms don’t make decisions based on the quality or depth of an article. How could they? Algorithms are best at tracking clicks. Platforms have tried to make them do otherwise, but that leads you into a really messy debate over personal opinions about quality, and it reintroduces gatekeepers. I’ve watched a long line of CEOs try to escape the algorithms, only to end up promoting a version of what they said they were against. So, there’s no magic answer.

Algorithms will continue to serve up what we like. If you could talk to an algorithm, I bet it would tell you it’s awfully confused. Because humans often treat things they hate the same way they treat things they like. The algorithms want to make us happy, but we often engage in behavior that makes us unhappy, and algorithms can’t tell the difference. The tech lords in charge of the algorithms don’t care about this problem. For them, engagement is engagement, and engagement is money. We’re a very confusing species—and highly profitable.

So, algorithms think you and I want to sit around reading stories that trigger our emotions. Why would they think that?

Because we engage with it.

Lately, I’ve felt and observed this phenomenon firsthand. I know it’s true. We just got served up a big batch of “generation war” stories.

Older generations admitted that these stories make them want to give up, to stop trying to help anyone younger than them because they won’t express any acknowledgment or gratitude whatsoever. They’ll just keep fuming. I’ve felt that same sense of futility reading the articles that cast aside my lifetime of dedication to education and frame my problems as personal failures.

That’s the point.

This cycle of strife seems to erupt before major elections, almost on cue. That would make sense. After all, the super rich certainly still care about elections enough to try and influence or rig them, if only to make it easier to maintain the illusion of democracy a little longer. Maybe you could write that off as a conspiracy theory several years ago, but now? The billionaires own all the newspapers. They own all the social media platforms. It makes perfect sense. Maybe they don’t even fully realize what they’re doing, but they’re still doing it.

Now would be the time to start pushing out a bunch of misleading, sensational clickbait articles that infuriate anyone who might be trying to build coalitions. It gives them plenty of time to go viral, to sink in, to resonate, to harden stereotypes and reinforce divides between groups.

We often talk about the tendency of these articles to oversimplify issues and advance stereotypes. What if these aren’t accidental shortcomings?

What if they were the goal?

Let’s be clear, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t sitting around talking about all this while stroking hairless cats and daydreaming about doomsday lasers. They don’t have to. They’ve simply built a system that rewards content creators for generating controversies and running every idea through a bullhorn or a slop engine to make sure it’s legible to algorithms. As readers, we fall into this trap and share the articles that either validate our righteous indignation or feed our rage. This behavior stacks, and it produces the intended result.

Instead of helping each other, we fight.

We fight and fight.

Here’s a feeling you probably know:

Well, eff them. If all I’m going to get is trashed for my privilege, lectured about my naivety, and told I’m the one making the world worse, maybe I’ll just quit trying altogether. Maybe I’ll just do nothing and see how they like that. I won’t cooperate with them. I won’t support them. I’ll do nothing. I’ll just let the fascists win, and we’ll suffer in this dystopia together. We’ll see how they like that.

The super rich folks who control the algorithms love it when you feel this way, regardless of what they say in Entrepreneur or Inc. They want parents against their children. They want children against their parents. They want men against women and vice versa. They want optimists against doomers.

It’s hard to build actual unity when, so often, the word “unity” is simply code for strongarming someone into adopting their beliefs and voting for the things they want. I’m not talking about that kind of unity.

I’m trying to talk about the real thing.

Maybe it looks like this: You vote if you want, but you don’t judge anyone else for what they do with their vote. You just encourage everyone to make a decision about what to do with their vote. That would be a good start. That sounds like a good example of a unifying statement.

It’s hard.

In fact, there’s probably nothing harder than putting aside your anger or your need for validation, especially if you were right about something and nobody listened to you. Boy, have I been there. It’s an awful feeling. It really sucks to find yourself drowning in evidence that you got it 90 percent right, but it doesn’t matter, because admitting you were right would cost everyone else too much self-esteem. I’ve learned something firsthand over the last couple of years, and I’m still processing it.

Being right about something actually makes people like you less.

That goes double if you were right about something big, and everyone else vehemently disagreed with you. My own experiences confirm what psychology says. Our need for that validation often drives even the smartest of us to abandon that little nugget of truth and strive for the validation anyway.

It backfires.

By the way: There’s a big difference between someone who was wrong and someone who lied. You can forgive someone who was wrong. You don’t have to, but you can. It’s not so simple for someone who lied. Neither is it that simple for someone who tried to hurt you. They have to prove they can be trusted first. But that’s a different article. Here, we’re talking about people who just screwed up.

Anyway…

The algorithms elevate this deep desire to be right, even though it only ever seems to ingratiate us with the ones who already agreed while alienating everyone else. They push the most confident stories. They show us the articles written with certainty, not the ones with hedges and qualifications.

The algorithms know you like this. They know you like to feel validated, and they sense that you don’t get enough of it in your “real” life. So it showers you with validation online. They want all of us to feel validated, at the expense of each other and the larger truths. In the end, the internet often winds up amplifying the worst of us. It’s ironic that the tool that was supposed to make connection easier has also fueled so much division and strife, but that’s how it works.

So, when these stories come across your feed, I’m not telling you to ignore them. I’m not even telling you not to share them. I mean, come on. I live in the real world. I know you’re going to share them.

We all like to sound off. It’s even good for us.

But…

While you’re complaining about that poorly written, divisive, overly simplistic article that bashes you for your avocado toast or blames you for hoarding wealth, you might want to remember the bigger truth. This article was written and shared explicitly to make you feel indignant while validating someone else. Or it was written to validate you while making someone else indignant.

As psychologists have shown us, our own brains often struggle to distinguish between wholesome joy and righteous anger. They produce the same chemicals. So, how could we possibly expect an algorithm to get it?

So when you respond to the article, which is your right, and fills a need deeply rooted in your psyche, don’t stop at the clapback. Don’t just take the (click)bait. Point to the larger machine running behind that article. Talk about the bad arguments and poor logic. Also, talk about the echo chambers and information ecosystems responsible for these bad articles and the urge to write them.

They want us against each other.

It’s how they win.

In 1956, Leon Festinger published When Prophecy Fails.

Maybe you know the story, but it never gets old. It narrates the ordeals of a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin and her cult, “The Seekers.” They believed an epic flood was going to destroy the world, but aliens were going to save them. Cult members quit their jobs. They sold their homes. They gave away all their belongings. They moved in with Dorothy.

They waited and waited.

The UFO never came.

Instead of giving up or admitting they were wrong, the cult members entrenched. The failed prophecy strengthened their beliefs. They worked overtime to bring in new members. They proselytized louder. Eventually, they told themselves that their resounding faith had saved the world. The cult dissolved.

In 1975, psychologists ran an experiment on high school girls who believed in the divinity of Jesus. They showed the girls convincing evidence that challenged their beliefs. Many of the girls even agreed that the evidence was compelling and that they might be wrong. But during their final interviews, the girls didn’t renounce their faith. They said the experience deepened it.

It made them believe more.

Social psychologists have called this response “the backfire effect” or “belief perseverance.” When you try to educate or inform someone, it can backfire. They can wind up clinging even harder to their beliefs. A major 2010 study found that it happens a lot, and it’s often politically motivated. If someone considers you their enemy, it doesn’t matter what you tell them.

They won’t believe you.

There’s a corollary to this, and we’ve all seen it. Even if you’re not someone’s enemy, if you start expressing ideas that someone associates with their enemies, they’ll reject the ideas, and they’ll reject you.

There’s one more study we need to talk about. In 2020, researchers ran a similar experiment on Trump supporters. They presented them with substantial documentation of his crimes and wrongdoings. Those supporters responded by focusing more on his opponents. Learning about Trump’s crimes made them more eager to talk about the alleged crimes of other politicians.

Actually, one last study:

In the late 1990s, researchers identified a phenomenon called spontaneous trait transference. It works like this: The more you try to warn someone about a bad person, the more likely they are to transfer those negative traits to you. It doesn’t make sense, but it happens all the time.

For decades now, time and again, over and over, social psychologists have documented these glitches in human thought. We’re only scratching the surface here. It goes far deeper, but you get the idea. We could also mention the Asch conformity experiments, where peer pressure managed to convince participants to willfully choose the wrong answers on a test, just to fit in.

Maybe you see where we’re going.

For about a year now, practically every podcaster and political strategist has predicted that the Epstein files would be Trump’s undoing. It was supposed to be forming irreparable rifts in the MAGA base, something we could exploit to wake them up and get them to turn on their dear leader. Well, look, I’m not in the business of telling everyone what they want to hear. I’m in the business of telling them what they need to know, and what they need to know is this:

It’s not happening.

There’s plenty of reasons to keep pursuing the Epstein files, but unseating Trump isn’t going to be one of them. I’m sorry.

Some of us have spent the last few years studying social psychology, to understand what on earth has been going on with everyone lately. We weren’t really surprised to observe what’s unfolding, whether it’s Thomas Massie losing a primary or Marjorie Taylor Greene fleeing the country. From psychology to communications theory, we’ve already seen how this story plays out. Once a group settles on an ideology, almost nothing can dislodge it. Members will even start ousting and exiling their own leaders who reject the shared ideology.

There was a brief moment when MAGA was starting to turn on Trump. Unfortunately, the Epstein files have become a liberal talking point now, and MAGA has responded exactly the way 70 years of social psychology would predict. They’re denying reality and digging in their heels.

They’ve decided to wait for the UFO.

Again…

Thomas Massie was right to break with Trump, but let’s be clear about something. His heart and brain didn’t suddenly grow ten sizes like the Grinch. He does not deserve praise or respect for standing up to Trump. He was doing what he and his team considered politically expedient. They banked on the podcaster logic that the Epstein files were hurting Trump, and that he was polling low nationally because of his bogus tariffs and wars.

But Massie made a critical mistake.

He started to believe his own hero narrative, and he forgot the role he played in creating this mess. Ultimately, Thomas Massie served in Congress for 14 years. He spent that entire time fostering ignorance and cultlike thinking among his constituents. He conditioned them to reject logic and compassion. He trained them to conform to groupthink at every turn.

Thomas Massie has a long history of unhinged behavior. You can look up his voting record, and his hate mongering. It’s despicable. His legacy is that he helped drive America into conspiracy land. He has led the charge on climate denial. He promoted conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines.

He spread Trump’s election fraud allegations.

He claimed January 6 was an “inside job.”

The point here is not that Thomas Massie is a terrible person who got what he deserved, although that’s true. The point runs deeper. He didn’t just get what he deserved. He brought it on himself—and us. He did that by nurturing the very kind of thought you see in these studies on social psychology.

He helped Trump build a cult.

When you spend your entire political career promoting conspiracy theories and training your own voters to behave like a cult, then they’re going to behave like a cult. They’re going to think like a cult. And as nearly a hundred years of social psychology tells us, cults learn to reject evidence and logic in favor of their own beliefs. They’ll choose their beliefs over their friends and family.

They’ll choose their beliefs over their own interests.

That’s what cults do.

It’s true that billionaire tech bros spent huge sums of money to unseat Trump critics, and it’s true that the GOP manipulates elections, but that’s not the full story. We’re not doing ourselves any favors by ignoring the social and psychological dimensions at work here. Thomas Massie wasn’t a reasonable Republican standing up to fascists. He wasn’t someone with “a different opinion.” He was a raging conspiracy theorist who made a career out of tearing down our democracy, stripping away human rights, assaulting public health, and destroying the planet.

He was also an opportunist.

Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie never had a crisis of conscience. They had image problems. They built their political brands on being the craziest voices in the room. But they ran out of gimmicks. It’s hard to stand out when everyone in the GOP sounds as crazy as they do now. The only way for them to stand out in their party was to start sounding halfway sane again. But it was too late for that. The cults they built don’t want sanity.

They want their beliefs affirmed.

The full story is that Thomas Massie forgot that he was in a cult. He forgot that he helped build that cult, and that’s his legacy. He saw populist sentiment drifting away from Trump, and he tried to mobilize that for his own campaign. He underestimated just how far to the right he had dragged his own district.

The Epstein files were never going to save Massie or Greene, because they spent their entire political careers working to eliminate the compassion, logic, and sense of justice that would’ve made their voters care. Even now, Greene is out there hawking ivermectin to treat viral infections.

We’re seeing the backfire effect in real time.

Someone could stand on the floor of Congress and read out the entire Epstein files. They could show every photo. They could name every name. It wouldn’t move MAGA one inch now. A piece by David Gilbert in Wired makes some similar observations. In short, the liberal podcast world has been reading this situation wrong. Trump has, despite all logic and reason, managed to manipulate his base and much of the Republican party to dodge the Epstein bullet. He has already shifted blame onto scapegoats and deflected the personal attacks.

For the researchers and journalists who’ve been writing about the Epstein files because they’re important in their own right, I say carry on. They’re doing valuable work. But if you’ve been wondering why the Epstein files seem to be having a muted impact on the elections, much less than anticipated, please look beyond the low-hanging fruit of saying the election was rigged. Perhaps it was, but you can’t underestimate the power of cult logic.

It’s the backfire effect.

“The atmosphere went from nothing to the darkest red cloud of fire.”

That’s Francois Auroux, describing his harrowing escape from the Palisades fire in early 2025, one of the worst fires in California’s history. He didn’t escape on a helicopter or a motorcycle. He escaped on a bicycle.

His home burned to the ground.

Here’s the video:

The story prompted a flurry of interest among preppers, eager to explore the potential for bicycles and e-bicycles for disasters and emergencies. A few of our readers have suggested them as well, and it makes sense.

Wildfires don’t just pose a risk to the west coast anymore. With severe droughts now hitting the east coast on a regular basis, almost anyone could find themselves dealing with one at some point over the next few years.

Last year, we were astonished to wind up stalled in traffic one afternoon because of a wildfire. Then they closed the road altogether.

It took us an extra two hours to get home, following backroads. We watched the giant plumes of smoke from our house, trying to keep up with the news, and wondering if we’d have to evacuate. Fortunately, we didn’t. Still, it was a major wakeup call, yet another disaster to plan for. A few months later, another wildfire erupted one county over, burning thousands of acres.

So…

For my family, that now makes a pandemic, an F3 tornado, a hurricane, and a wildfire. All in five years. And people ask why we’re into prepping…

Trying to escape a wildfire in your car? It’s probably the first best option, but it’s certainly not without risks.

From Heatmap News:

And when people die in wildfires, they are often found in their vehicles. In Portugal, 47 of the 64 people killed during a 2017 forest fire were in their cars, trying to escape. At least 10 people were found dead in or near their cars after the 2018 Camp fire, the deadliest blaze in California’s history. And in Lahaina, Hawaii, this month, in what the Los Angeles Times has called “surely … the deadliest traffic jam in U.S. history,” the lack of advanced warning combined with inexplicably blocked roads led an untold number of people to perish in their cars while trying to evacuate, including a 7-year-old boy who was fleeing with his family; a man who used his last moments attempting to shield a beloved golden retriever in his hatchback; and a couple who were reportedly found in each other’s arms.

Look, conventional emergency advice still says you’re safer in a car than a bike during various disasters. But more and more people are seeing the liabilities of cars, especially in big cities, and they’re looking for alternatives.

Here’s Maylin Tu, writing in KneeDeep Times:

Transportation and urbanism journalists (including me) have fixated on that scene at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Palisades Drive — people abandoning their cars and fleeing on foot. When thousands of people try to evacuate by car at the same time via one of the only ways out, what you end up with is gridlock.

When I picture evacuating on my e-bike, cars are in the way, but I go around them. I’m wearing the P100 respirator I bought during the wildfires. Maybe I am carrying someone on the backseat. We move slowly but surely around stopped traffic till we reach the open road.

I’m sure a few trolls will flutter around in the comments telling you and me how dumb we are for not accepting the gospel and never imagining the problems inherent in making a car our only form of transportation…

Wildfires or not…

The U.S. remains on track for “tank bottoms” by early July, thanks to the war with Iran. Everyone has their own predictions for what that means. Meanwhile, some of us know the importance of backup transportation systems, regardless of what international crisis has everyone’s attention.

Fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and other disasters aren’t going to stop and wait for the Strait of Hormuz to open up again. We’ll just pile one disaster on another. Rather than sitting around trying to predict exactly what’s going to happen, it makes more sense to just go ahead and imagine the worst—not as a certainty, but as an exercise in logic. Let’s assume that the worst happens. Gasoline and diesel shortages hit us at home. Maybe there’s panic buying. Maybe we see severe disruptions to supply chains and logistics. Maybe another Helene hits us at the worst possible moment. Now think about what you’d do if that happened, and what tools you’d like to have with you. That’s what I’ve done, and it helps.

So, I’m researching bicycles.

Why?

Bicycles don’t need gasoline. They don’t need electricity. They can go places that cars can’t. They don’t get stuck in traffic jams.

Not everyone can ride a bicycle, but anyone who can pedal one is putting themselves in a better position during any kind of crisis or disaster, including prolonged ones. A human can move at about 3 mph on foot. They can carry a limited amount of gear. On a bike, a human can easily quadruple their speed. They can carry several times more weight with a wagon or a trailer.

You don’t need to get a fancy bike. In fact, the simpler the better. Simpler bikes are easier to repair, and easier to find parts for.

At first, I thought it was going to be difficult to find bicycle trailers. It’s not. You can find them at most stores, even hardware stores. Trailers. Carts. Wagons. Many of them are compatible with a wide range of bikes.

You’ll probably have to order it online.

If you’re working against early July as a deadline, you’ll want to order it soon. In a worst-case scenario, you’ll at least have some options. You won’t be stranded at your house or reliant on someone else with a drivable vehicle for everything. You’ll have a way to transport some basic gear around.

If other people in your area do the same, then you could even build a relay network to haul around goods and services.

How do you fix a bike?

I’ve spent the last few days browsing forums and sites. I’ve landed on a handful of good bicycle repair guides. Here’s a list:

• Sutherland’s Handbook for Bicycle Mechanics

• Zinn & The Art of Road Bike Maintenance

• GCN Essential Road Bike Maintenance

• The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair

• UCSB Bike Shop Manual

• The Bike Book (Haynes)

You can find these guides online at sites like Archive.org and Scribd. You can print sections of them out, or you can order hard copies. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reading through these and making a very simple, generic guide for doing some basic bicycle repairs like changing tires, etc.

If you predict hard times soon, I wouldn’t wait. Get these guides now. If you have a backup electricity plan, then go to YouTube and look up Park Tools. Download them for future reference during a prolonged grid outage. They put out the big blue book, and they have a reputation for providing one of the biggest libraries of bike repair videos on the internet:

There’s one more thing to think about:

E-bikes.

A standard e-bike costs more than a generic bicycle, but it gives you more options. They come in three classes: Class 1 has pedal assist up to 20 mph. The motor only works when you pedal. Class 2 has a throttle feature, up to 20 mph. You can engage the motor even if you’re not pedaling. Class 3 has a throttle plus pedal assist up to 28 mph. So, class 1 is the simplest. Class 3 is the fastest. You can buy trailers and wagons for e-bikes as well. Just check compatibility first.

E-bikes offer a good option for anyone who needs some assistance on the pedaling front. They let you make longer trips without wearing you out.

Francois Auroux escaped the Palisades fire on an e-bike. Of course, you might opt for a regular bike. It’s a judgment call. An e-bike will help you go faster with less effort, but if the battery dies, many brands are harder to pedal. The motor and battery become dead weight. So, that’s a consideration.

In a prolonged situation, like the one we’re walking into this summer, you might want a simpler bike with fewer things that can break.

Here’s the main point:

Even if the worst doesn’t happen now, it’s a good idea. Many of us believe there will be a day when fuel becomes scarce, regardless of what happens with Iran and Hormuz this year. A bicycle gives you options that a car doesn’t. A bicycle works no matter what happens to oil. A bicycle means resilience. It means community. It means getting places. It means transporting gear and supplies.

A lot of preppers out there are talking about gold and silver.

They’re talking about stockpiles of gasoline.

Today, I’m talking about bikes.

You know what’s interesting?

Last February, Elon Musk “accidentally” cut Ebola prevention funding while leading his murder of tech bros on a rampage through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In his own words, “one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.” Remember that?

According to the news reports:

He grinned, smirked and laughed as he put his fingers up in air quotes around the word “accidentally.”

Now, with news of Ebola spreading fast through African countries, you’ve got to wonder. Did they actually restore the funding? Believe it or not, there’s an answer to that question, and the answer is no, they didn’t. A follow-up investigation by The Washington Post found that, wait for it…

Elon Musk was lying.

His DOGE team never restored the Ebola funding. USAID officials said, “Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments.” Even though the Trump administration granted a waiver, it was only on paper. The payments never went out, and “the teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled.”

That’s the first thing they don’t want you to know. And by “they,” I’m referring specifically to the Trump administration’s public health officials and the billionaires who helped elect them, including Musk. They don’t want you to know they’re likely responsible for the Ebola outbreak. If it winds up in the U.S., they’ll be responsible for that, too. They would hate for you to know that.

(So definitely don’t share this…)

Even after Musk stood in a room full of journalists, grinning about his snafu and promising everyone he’d already fixed it, statements were going out to healthcare workers in Africa that their contacts were canceled.

So, the U.S. has spent the last year ignoring Ebola, letting it spread without detection. Now we have a major Ebola outbreak.

How predictable…

It’s all over the news now, except for the important parts.

The World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency of international concern over a recent outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. An American doctor has tested positive. Just over the last few days, cases and deaths have skyrocketed. Global health officials have reported that the actual numbers could be “much higher than reported.” Yes, that makes sense, because Elon Musk and his tech goons dismantled the teams and tools we would’ve used to track and contain exactly that kind of outbreak.

Even Trump says he’s concerned.

It gets worse.

The current outbreak concerns the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which we have no approved vaccine or treatments. The incubation period runs up to 21 days. During the first stages of illness, symptoms look very similar to a cold or flu. Patients can spread the disease once they’re symptomatic. In the past, doctors have misdiagnosed the early stages of Ebola. It’s hard to detect.

Experts are going on the news and insisting that Ebola only spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids. There’s a big but here.

Here’s the second thing they don’t want you to know:

Ebola has airborne potential.

As the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reports, the debate is far from settled. Some research shows that “airborne infectious particles are likely to play some role in transmission.” You really have to hand it to academics for phrasing bad news in the nicest way possible. Let’s translate that into plain English, shall we? Airborne particles can infect you with Ebola.

The article’s lead author is Michael T. Osterholm. He’s not a grifter. He’s not a mystic. He’s not someone who wants you to panic. He’s a legit scientist who works at the University of Minnesota.

In 2014, Osterholm wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times explaining the risk in simple terms for the general public, in plain English. There were two paths for the future of Ebola. Here’s the second one:

An Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next.

The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

In the research article, Osterholm and his team go on to say:

It is very likely that at least some degree of Ebola virus transmission currently occurs via infectious aerosols generated from the gastrointestinal tract, the respiratory tract, or medical procedures, although this has been difficult to definitively demonstrate or rule out, since those exposed to infectious aerosols also are most likely to be in close proximity to and in direct contact with an infected case.

They also state that “Ebola viruses have the potential to evolve in the future into pathogens that spread mainly by the respiratory route,” especially if the virus is allowed to spread and mutate. Topping it all off, the researchers also found evidence of Ebola “superspreader” patients, and that Ebola has an incredibly low “infectious dose.” It takes as few as 10 particles to infect you.

So, there you have it.

Ebola viruses can already spread via the air to some extent. They’re undergoing hypermutation. They’re spreading faster than they have at any point over the last thousand years. They have the potential to become truly airborne, like the flu or other respiratory diseases. And the richest country on earth just recently killed all funding to deal with this mounting threat. The head of WHO has explained the outbreaks we’re seeing as a direct result of these cuts.

It’s just perfect that Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, gold member of the Epstein class, a man who espouses eugenics at every turn, the man building data centers and pushing AI like there’s no tomorrow, has also poised us on the cliff of another pandemic. Working with the CDC, USAID played “a key role in flagging outbreaks of unidentified diseases.” Under normal circumstances, the CDC and USAID worked together, responding to these disasters. They didn’t always get everything right. Now, that system doesn’t even exist. While Musk was destroying USAID, RFK Jr. was dismantling the CDC with deep cuts, layoffs, and purges. I guess he was too busy spreading measles to care about Ebola.

Where does that leave us?

Well, we’ve never been less prepared for a pandemic.

And yet, you don’t need to freak out over this news. That’s not the point. The point is something some of us have made over and over again, ever since we became aware of groundbreaking research on diseases and aerosol science over the last few years. Contrary to conventional knowledge, many viruses can spread through the air. If we allow them to spread, they can mutate. They can evolve. They can gain functions. They develop new ways to infect. They develop the ability to enter new hosts and become more efficient. That’s what viruses do.

That’s what Osterholm is talking about.

Osterholm’s research on Ebola’s airborne potential goes back to 2015, years before the leap forward in aerosol science led by Linsey Marr, who won a MacArthur genius grant for her pioneering work. She changed how we think about disease transmission, but there’s still a lot of resistance. That’s not surprising, either. Remember how doctors reacted to Ignaz Semmelweiss when he tried to get them to wash their hands before operating on patients and delivering babies?

They had him committed.

Osterholm was right, and Marr’s groundbreaking work lends new veracity to his warning. That’s just scratching the surface.

Here’s the third thing they don’t want you to know:

As I wrote early last year, one simple tool can give you peace of mind regardless of what virus is making headlines. It’s an N95 mask. Our politicians and media have gone to great lengths to convince us all that they’re not necessary, or that they don’t work, or that they can make things worse.

It’s all baloney.

As you’ve probably gleaned by now, the mainstream media has one goal. It wants your attention. Of course, these news sources are also owned by billionaires, members of the Epstein class. They want your eyeballs, but they don’t ever want you or me to do anything actionable based on the fear they spread. They just want you to sit there and panic, then go fight trolls on your phone.

We also see many healthcare CEOs saying the quiet part out loud, more and more. They don’t want to cure patients. They don’t want to prevent the spread of disease. They want everyone to get sick.

It’s a good business model.

Pair this with Naomi Klein’s work on disaster capitalism and end times fascism, and you see the situation clearly. Does it sound like a conspiracy theory? Well, do we not have billionaires like Peter Thiel ranting about the antichrist and building bunkers? Did we not just witness Elon Musk cancel Ebola prevention funding, followed by an alarming outbreak of Ebola? Did he not lie about it?

Did he not even stand there and gloat?

He thought it was funny.

There’s been an awful lot of talk over the last year about Malthusian plots to depopulate the planet, something some of us were once called crazy for suggesting. Maybe the super rich don’t want to actively depopulate the earth, but they certainly do want to withdraw all of their money and hole up in bunkers. They don’t want to pay for things like Ebola prevention, even as they joke about it. They don’t want to spend money on protecting your health. In the end, their negligence translates into a very similar consequence. Whether it’s intentional or not, their greed and myopia will subject us to ever more pandemics and disasters. Meanwhile, they believe they’ll be able to hide from the consequences in their bunkers.

Instead of funding global public health, this regime has spent their time manipulating the stock market with tariff extortion schemes, trying to annex Canada and Greenland, and invading oil-rich countries.

Their actions speak for themselves.

There’s one last thing they don’t want you to know.

It’s called elite panic.

Researchers at Rutgers University coined this term in the early 2000s. As they documented, institutions go out of their way to suppress justified fear in civilian populations. Why? Because they don’t trust them to act with accurate information about threats. They spread misinformation, out of fear that ordinary citizens will overreact and start rioting, looting, or revolting. The strategy usually backfires, often igniting the exact panic they hoped to prevent.

John Barry makes a similar point in his book The Great Influenza. Woodrow Wilson’s administration actively suppressed early alerts about the flu in 1918 because they didn’t want it to distract everyone from war efforts. By ignoring the warning signs, they made things far worse.

We can see elite panic everywhere now. It’s the primary doctrine of our media, to control the narrative over diseases like Ebola.

They follow a simple strategy.

Have you noticed?

They bombard you with stories that trigger your fear response. Then they diffuse that fear response by telling you not to worry, there’s no cause for concern, and so on. That’s elite panic at work. The elites are panicking, but not about the threat. They’re panicking about how you’ll react.

They don’t believe you have the intelligence to protect yourself without freaking out and making things worse. They think you’ll rush out and buy a bunch of toilet paper. They’re scared you’ll drive shortages at stores and gas stations. They’re worried you’ll start riots and damage their property.

They’re worried you’ll crash the stock market. They’re worried you won’t show up for work. They’re worried that you’ll also start to do reasonable things. They’re terrified you’ll demand that the government pay for things like N95 masks, because they’re responsible for this mess.

They’re worried you’ll want tests, and vaccines.

That’s what keeps them up at night.

Not the Ebola virus.

You.

The fools in charge don’t want to spend money on Ebola prevention or precautions. They don’t want you to know they’re the ones responsible for this outbreak. They don’t want you to know they’ll be responsible if it spreads to the U.S. They don’t want you to know its airborne potential, because they don’t trust you to handle that information like a mature adult. But they’re also worried that you will handle it like a responsible adult, and demand they do something other than hold press conferences about it and tell you to wash your hands. They don’t want you to know there’s one simple tool that can protect you, because it makes them uncomfortable and it might hurt their income streams if people protect themselves. In fact, there are several tools—and some of us have spent years learning about them.

The people like me are not the ones freaking out about Ebola now, because we have the tools we need and we know how to use them.

We’re also not spreading conspiracies. Is it strange that hantavirus and Ebola are both making headlines at the same time? No, it’s not strange. It’s the consequences that climate scientists have predicted for years now. As Ed Yong wrote in an underrated Atlantic article years ago, we’ve entered the pandemicene, an era where zoonotic viruses increasingly pose threats to us. Hundreds of these viruses are waiting to spill over into humans as we overheat the planet and destroy what’s left of wild habitats. This is what’s happening.

The ones who saw this coming, we’re not the ones freaking out. I’m sure I’ll get criticized for my title, and for the image. But guess what? Americans have created an atmosphere in which the only things that break through to them are packaged as clickbait. So, we’ve created an environment where we force writers to flirt with clickbait to get the message out, and then we trash the ones who are actually telling us something important. If that’s what someone wants to do…

Meanwhile, who’s actually freaking out?

The Epstein class, that’s who, and everyone who falls for their stories. Go online and look at the Reddit threads. The people freaking out now are the ones who’ve been living in denial for the last four years, pretending that they’ll never have to wear a mask or flip on an air purifier ever again.

There’s no need to freak out over Ebola, even if it has airborne potential, even if our dumb Epstein class rulers made this happen with their reckless budget cuts, even if it starts to spread in the U.S.

If you still believe in civic action, call your representatives. Ask them why our government let a billionaire with no knowledge or training in public health kill the funding for Ebola prevention. Ask them why they let him lie about restoring it. Ask them what they’re going to do to fix this problem. When they sputter platitudes, tell them what you’ve learned from this article.

Action is not panic. Action is action.

We know what to do.

So, let’s do it.

Earlier this year, the UN declared a “global water bankruptcy.” Look at that map. It’s from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a few days ago.

We’re heading into a super El Niño. For many of us, the droughts are going to get even worse. That means water restrictions. It means water pressure problems. It means problems with drinking water and toilets. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon, maybe for the rest of your life. If you can’t flush, that’s a major dilemma. Without functioning toilets, you have a waste problem. A waste problem becomes a disease problem. With data centers popping up all over the country, the threat multiplies. We’re talking about a large portion of the country in severe drought, on a failing grid, on a regular basis going forward. It might be a good idea to think about where you’re going to go.

You know, go…

My family lives in the suburbs. We contacted plumbers about installing composting toilets. Their quotes ran into the thousands. You see, composting toilets are designed for cabins, RVs, and tiny homes, not suburban houses.

And definitely not apartments…

These problems aren’t going away. Even as we advocate, organize, and resist, we’re going to have to deal with reality. The reality is that even if a data center never moves next door, even if your taps never run dry, odds are you’ll face some kind of prolonged emergency that renders your toilet inoperable.

We came up with a workaround.

We’ve got answers, and solutions.

As many of you know, I’ve spent the last several months working on solutions and putting them in an illustrated guide. I’m still working on it. For the last several weeks, I’ve circled back around to the most important topics to tweak my plans and offer even better solutions. So, let’s talk about a big one:

Toilets.

Previously, I’ve written about ways to generate water during a crisis. I’ve written about rain catchment systems, water generators, and dew harvesters. You can find all of that information in my guide. For now, we’re focusing on toilets. Because if you and your neighbors don’t have a clean way to dispose of your waste, that’s a problem. Lack of sanitation after disasters drives disease.

It can be worse than the disaster itself.

So, that’s the reason...

The simplest solution

We covered some of this information in my last post on composting toilets, but let’s review: You can find plenty of online articles explaining the basics of composting toilets, but Joseph Jenkins provides the most detailed breakdown in two books widely considered the definitive guides on composting: The Humanure Handbook and The Composting Toilet Handbook. A few readers recommended them to me, so I got them and read them. Then my family started to innovate.

So, what’s the fundamental philosophy here?

Let microbes do the work.

The world is full of thermophilic bacteria that evolved especially to break down organic matter. These microbes don’t pose a threat to us. They reside everywhere, dormant, in spores, waiting for things to die. Then they activate and go to work. They destroy the pathogens that cause diseases, including E. coli and Salmonella. They cleanse the dead. It just takes a while.

We’re using the term “waste” in this article, because that’s what most people consider it. Of course, Jenkins and other composters use the term “toilet material,” because what we drop into our toilets isn’t waste. It’s food for healthy microbes, and it’s a foundational ingredient of soil. You can’t compost your waste unless you have a functional compost toilet.

We wanted something that would work almost anywhere, in a house in the suburbs, or an apartment in a downtown area.

We made one.

What did you make?

We made our first design from scratch.

Then we found this:

The NettyGo started becoming a popular option for van lifers around 2022-2023. This solves most of your problems. It’s a portable toilet bucket with a urine diverter and a ventilation kit. We modified it, and I’ll explain how.

Here’s what it looks like:

The problem for most of us is that we have no easy way to vent a composting toilet without drilling a hole through our wall. That’s a dealbreaker for almost anyone who owns a conventional home or rents an apartment.

Some composters say you don’t need ventilation, but you kinda do, especially if you want to dry it out faster. Drying your solid waste shrinks it up to 90 percent, and that’s essential for those of us with smaller yards. That goes double if you have no yard, and you have to dispose of your waste elsewhere.

We solved that problem.

1. You’re going to vent your compost toilet through a window. First, measure your window.

2. Next, get a piece of rigid foam insulation board from the hardware store. I like 2x4 pieces. Cut it to fit your window. Next, you’re going to use a hole saw to drill a 1.5 inch hole into the board.

3. You’re going to coat the board in liquid Flex Seal or something similar. This protects your board from the elements, etc. Don’t use spray coats. Many of them will dissolve the foam. Liquids are fine. Next, you’re going to take the flange that comes with the NettyGo ventilation kit. You’re going to seal it to the board with Flex Seal. You’re also going to screw it into the board. We did that, and it’s holding nice and firm. The toilet will vent through this port.

4. Here’s the NettyGo in a nutshell. You have to buy the ventilation kit separately. For us, it was worth it. Bring your own bucket and your own milk jug. Install as shown. The vent attachment plugs into the back of the seat. It all snaps together nice and neat, so you don’t have to worry about parts fitting. The ventilation kits come with a hose that you can trim. It’s worth getting a pair of PVC/Pipe cutters. They give you nice, clean cuts.

5. The ventilation kits also come with an in-line fan case that fits your hoses. They come with a fan, but we opted to get some backup fans from Cooler Guys, along with 3-pin to USB adapters. They fit fine. We also had to get some hose clamps (separate) to secure the fan case to the hose. Make sure the hose clamps accommodate 1.5 inch hose. Add a power bank, and you can now run the fan for days on a little battery, during a power outage.

6. The last step: Close your window down over the rigid foam insulation (now coated in rubber). Wrap some insect screen around the hose end, and then plug it into the flange. Remember, the flange comes with the ventilation kit. You get a bunch of other equipment that’s meant for mounting to a wall or ceiling, but we wound up not using anything but these parts here.

Now you have a composting toilet for short and longterm emergencies. It’s going to separate your liquids and solids. It’s going to vent outside. It’s not going to smell. It’s going to dry out your solids.

You don’t have to buy any of this from Johnny Compost, the company that sells the NettyGo. I have no relationship with them. Once you understand the basic idea, you can design your own and source your own parts. Johnny Compost even sells some of these parts separately, like urine diverters, etc.

The last steps:

You’re going to want compostable bags. Many people say go with 13-gallon size bags for 5-gallon buckets. That’s for your solids.

Make sure you empty your liquid jug on a regular basis. The NettyGo comes with a bob to help remind you.

You’re going to want cover material. Plenty of compost toilet companies will sell you fancy, expensive stuff. You’re going to want a lot of cover material, and you can get cover material for cheap from stores like Tractor Supply. Many compost toilet enthusiasts recommend you get pine and aspen bedding (not cedar). You can also use coconut coir, sawdust and wood shavings, peat moss, sphagnum, and hemp. Anything with high carbon, that’s light and fluffy.

It’s a good idea to keep a second bucket of cover material next to your composting toilet, along with a scoop. Add a layer to the bottom before you start using your toilet. Add a couple of scoops each time you go. If you’re having problems with smell, spray or mist your cover material. Add a little more.

How long does composting toilet material take?

And how much space do you need?

Compost heaps don’t have to be big, 4x4x4 feet is fine. The minimum size is one cubic yard, or about 1 cubic meter (.76, to be exact). That’s 3x3 at the base, and 3 feet high. In metric, that’s about 1m x 1m, and 1 meter high. Generally, you don’t want one heap to get higher than 5 feet, or 1.5 meters. A family of 4 would fill one cubic yard in about 3 months. Once you fill an enclosure, leave it for about a year. The microbes will do their job and destroy the pathogens, creating clean compost. Meanwhile, you just start another pile. So, do some simple math. An average family fills 4-5 cubic yards or meters of space in one year. That means you’ll need a second space of the same size to use while the filled-up enclosures are composting.

Add it all up…

You could do all this in a space of 5-6 cubic yards or meters. That translates into 170—220 cubic feet. That’s about the size of a living room. It’s a fraction of the size of an average back yard. Set up 4-5 bins or bays, and rotate through them. It’s a manageable amount of space. No, not everyone can do it. But many of us could. If you live downtown or you have a landlord, then the major obstacle becomes convincing others to help you make it work. They might act like you’re crazy at first. When they start to envision the alternative…

They might come around.

What happens during that year?

So, you fill up the cubic meter. You let it sit there and mature. That’s the precise term for it. You’re not adding to it anymore. You’re letting it mature. That’s what composters say, meaning you just leave it alone.

You leave it alone for an entire year.

What happens, exactly?

Thermophilic bacteria dine out, producing heat. If you provide the right mix of waste and carbon cover material, these microbes will activate and maintain a high temperature on their own, even during cold winter months. It could be snowing outside. The environmental temperature could plunge well below freezing. Feed your compost pile, and it will keep taking care of itself, even if the temperature drops and the microorganisms go dormant. They’ll reactivate in the spring.

Jenkins advises keeping the ratio of carbon cover material to waste at 20:1. You don’t have to measure it exactly. Just track it.

You can also buy a compost thermometer. It will tell you when the temperature is running low. When the temperature runs low, add a little more material. Pour some water on it to add moisture. Turn it a little. You don’t have to turn it as much as some of the composting gurus say. Jenkins cites research that excessive turning doesn’t make much difference.

That’s it.

If you compost human waste properly, then you don’t need much except carbon cover material and an enclosure. Cover material for your outside pile means everything from sawdust to kitchen scraps and yard clippings.

Your waste provides the nitrogen. Nature provides the carbon. You build your enclosure, using whatever materials you have on hand. You can screw together some palettes. You can use t-posts and mesh. You just need some kind of structure. You dig a shallow pit in the middle. You put down a base layer of cover material. You dump your waste and scraps in the center. You cover it. You keep adding to the center, raking it outward as it grows.

You don’t need a thick base layer. In fact, initial contact with soil is good, because microbes will come in and start feasting.

Here it is, in list form:

1. Dig a shallow pit.

2. Build an enclosure.

3. Put down a layer of cover material.

4. Add waste to the center.

5. Don’t bury it. Cover it with sawdust, clippings, scraps, etc.

6. Keep the ratio 20:1 carbon to nitrogen.

7. Get a compost thermometer to help maintain the temperature. If you have a few heaps, then get a few thermometers.

8. Every time you add waste, rake the pile outward a little. Add more cover material on top.

9. When it’s 4-5 feet high (1m-1.5m), leave it for a year. Keep an eye on the temperature. Add a little cover material or moisture as needed. Agitate a little as needed. Otherwise, let it mature.

You don’t need a basin or a bin in most cases, because active composting piles absorb huge amounts of moisture. They police themselves and prevent leaching. If you live in an area with excessive rain, the most you might need to do is add a roof, or even just a tent with a tarp.

What about local laws and codes?

You would be surprised…

Where we live, no codes exist for composting. There’s only one law, that you can’t use it in a garden. We live in the suburbs of a mid-size city. So, you just need to manage your piles. Follow the science. Don’t do anything reckless or dumb. If your compost stinks, if it attracts flies, if it starts to look ugly and neglected, your neighbors will notice. That’s when you’ll have problems.

Just remember, drying your waste out isn’t the same as composting it. Drying it out makes it easier to manage. It helps with the smell. You still have to compost it, as described in the steps above.

Staying grounded.

Between wars and climate disasters, we’re in for a rough time. I firmly believe my family will be using our emergency composting toilet at some point over the next few years, maybe even later this year.

We just don’t know, and that’s the point.

Panicking is a natural thing to do given the crises we’re facing. After you panic, you have to come up with a plan. That’s what we’re doing.

From panic, to plans.

Stay grounded.

Last night, I went outside at 4 am and watched dew form on my mailbox. I watched it form on my spouse’s car. I watched it form on some PVC pipe. I’ve done this for several nights, to confirm with my own eyes what science tells me.

I thought, “How do I drink that?”

This is prepping.

This is what I do now, instead of scrolling my phone for confirmation that we’re going to have a famine in 8 weeks, instead of stressing over headlines, instead of bashing Trump, instead of gloating about his humiliating defeats, instead of gossiping about the 25th amendment, instead of yelling about MAGA. I stay informed, and I work on systems. I speak my mind on the internet, but I don’t dwell there 24/7. I go. I work. It keeps me focused. It keeps me from spiraling.

It keeps me grounded.

That’s one reason I’ve decided to give my newsletter one last name change, to finally reflect everything I write about, everything that I believe in. I believe in staying informed. I believe in talking plain truths. I believe in prepping. But above all, I believe in staying grounded. More than anything, that’s what I want to help everyone do. I want to help keep them grounded. I want to help them stay grounded in reality, and grounded in themselves. So, this one will stick.

After thinking about dew, I also caught up on Benjamin’s videos over at GrowVeg. As you’ll see, he knows his stuff. He doesn’t need to spend ten minutes telling you why you’re going to starve in 8 weeks. He doesn’t just throw out words like “community” and expect everyone else to figure out what he means. He actually shows you how to do it: Not many people would call Benedict a prepper, but he’s very much in the realm that preppers should live. On a related note, he has a great video on eating weeds, in the same spirit of my illustrated guide, trying to help people (and my family) take advantage of what’s right in front of them.

It’s what I aspire to do. It’s a lot to take on. Even though Benedict and I will probably never cross paths personally, he is part of my community.

I’m thankful for him.

That’s why I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to scale up dew harvesting with common materials, with mixed results. I’ve had much more success with dehumidifiers and atmospheric water generators. Those work great, but they also require planning. Without solar panels, they’ll fail when the grid does.

I’ve also had success with cheap, emergency composting toilets. I’ve modified a kit from Johnny Compost. Again, it meant tinkering with things and trying ideas, not waiting until everyone freaks out over a headline or a sensational prediction, but doing the work ahead of time and trying to keep it interesting.

That’s prepping.

Now, I’m going to share something less positive, a note from someone (a dude) who explained why they’ve decided to leave my community:

There’s a lot going on here, more than just the loss of one reader. We’re going to talk about the beliefs embedded in this comment. It tells you what millions of other people out there don’t understand about any of this, whether it’s prepping, community, or resistance. They think they get it.

They don’t.

This guy believes that preparing for a famine or a forthcoming collapse means separating yourself from the system now and forming small, self-reliant communities in order to survive in a post-technology world. Nothing I’ve ever said or written has ever contested that. Yes, it’s what we should all be doing.

The problem is... how do you get there?

That’s where voices like this stop. They don’t know how to get there. If they did, they wouldn’t be shooting hot takes over email.

They certainly wouldn’t be “saying goodbye” to someone who shares 99 percent of their worldview. Does he expect 100 percent agreement? Sorry, but my spouse doesn’t even agree with me 100 percent of the time.

If that’s how you go about building community, well, good luck. You’re going to have a rough time getting along with someone if this is how you react over a 1 percent difference in opinion, after years of presumed alliance.

And yet, this isn’t just one person.

It’s a bunch of people.

A bunch of people think like this. They go around shouting “community” at the top of their lungs, and then they burn the communities they’ve got. I get emails like this every week, people packing up and leaving over a single sentence they disagree with. It doesn’t matter if they agreed with you for years, 90 percent of the time. If anything, they seem proud to part ways with someone, in search of their true “community.”

You don’t quit civilization overnight.

It’s a gradual process.

Many of you know Jeff McFadden, who runs A Systemic Approach. He doesn’t consider himself much of a prepper, but he’s been doing this kind of work for decades. He’ll tell you, as well, that you don’t quit the grid cold turkey. Maybe you don’t ever quit the grid. But you become less reliant on it.

It takes time and dedicated effort. It requires a plan. It requires research. It requires a long process of trial and error. It’s hard. You will fail, and when you fail, it’s awfully nice to have a grid to fall back on. When Jeff injured himself in a farm accident, he went to a hospital. He took advantage of civilization, what’s left of it. I believe you should do the same. That’s what I’m talking about. Don’t give up hospitals until you have to, but do what you can to prepare for that day.

As for “post-technology...”

Some of you already understand that we’re not going back to the 19th-century version of homesteading. That was an unsustainable fantasy. It seems to be what a lot of people imagine when they talk about “small, self-reliant communities,” but it’s not practical at all.

As someone recently told me, even Amish communities are installing solar panels. They don’t reject electricity. They don’t refuse technology. They’re using it to run their farms. And, I verified it.

So, consider that...

I’m not saying your survivalist future must include solar panels. I’m not even saying they’re a great idea for everyone, and plenty of climate activists have strong opinions about them. But it’s just rubbish to go around thinking you’re going to live in a utopian community, free from the grid, free from electricity, free from fascists, free from bills, free from property taxes.

That’s not how it works. And the more people who go around spouting that, the worse off we are. We don’t need everyone in the suburbs to abandon their homes and try to live on farms in the woods. That would be a disaster. We need everyone to transform the space where they are. We need them to work together to make the places they already live more sustainable and more resilient. If you want a plan, that’s a plan. That could actually work.

But only if people can cooperate.

Or at least coexist.

We’re going to be living in the remains of cities, and there’s going to be plenty of spare parts. We’re going to be using tech, it’s going to be junkyard tech. Our back yards aren’t going to be manicured blights on nature. The HOA helicopter neighbors will have to deal with it.

That’s our future.

I suspect that the ones leaving these comments have never actually tried to escape the grid. They’ve never tried to build a community. They’ve never tried to grow food in their back yard, or watched dew form in the middle of the night. Maybe they’ve never even gone camping.

They just sit back and pass judgment on the rest of us, who are trying, who know better than most how hard it is, and how much we still need the grid, even if we’re doing our best to get off it. Until you figure it all out, which may never happen, you need to keep your job. You need to keep a roof over your head. You need your internet connection, so you can watch Benedict over at GrowVeg.

At the moment, Benedict on YouTube knows more about growing potatoes than most of our neighbors. He’s going to be our source of information. He’s going to have the patience to explain it all to us. I doubt local farmers are going to jump at the chance to show me how to keep slugs out of my strawberries.

I doubt the kind of person who leaves comments about the importance of community is going to be much good either.

I’ll stick with Benedict.

Most of the public still doesn’t understand this.

Real prepping and community building is often not what it looks like on television. It’s about going outside and watching dew at night. It’s about trial and failure in a garage, or a back yard, or a parking lot.

It’s about listening to people you agree with 99 percent of the time, or 90 percent of the time, or 80 percent of the time, and not flipping them the bird because they said one thing that rubbed you the wrong way.

It’s hard.

Hi, there.

We’re going to talk about that viral article predicting empty shelves and famine (one more time), because the world needs to hear a full, cogent critique of it—and all the attention it got. We’re not doing it because we like bashing prophets, but because this snafu illustrates a problem that runs deep in western culture, especially American culture. It has plagued us all decade. So, I thought, who better to offer a critique of this mess than the writer once referred to as “the queen of doom,” the one roasted online daily for her “fearmongering?”

So, let us begin.

Maybe some of you still haven’t seen this article, which has gone super viral, even outside Substack, inspiring urgent and often panicked discussions across Reddit and YouTube about starvation in America this summer. If not, it’s worth skimming, just so you know the context. Read this one, too. The author himself told us he got hundreds of thousands of views just over the first couple of days. There’s nothing too unique about the content. It predicts mass shortages and famine by early July, driven by the Iran War and the ensuing oil crisis. We’ve seen these predictions for years now, since the pandemic began. What’s unique about the article?

The tone, and the spiritual element.

The author doesn’t just discuss the likelihood or the probability of the famine. He frames it as a certainty, something he’s seen coming “spiritually” for decades. He says fate has selected him to share this message. In fact, he describes all this nonsense as his “assignment” and perhaps the reason for his struggles as an artist and father. No messiah complex there, am I right?

He goes on to say that “your” mortgage, “your” debt, and “your” other responsibilities are no longer “your” priority. He commands you to start building community, stocking up on food, and preparing for the end of our financial system, because money will become completely useless, and the entire government system is going to come crashing down. By the end, I was just sitting there shaking my head at how reckless someone could possibly be in their advice.

It would be one thing if this article had simply vanished into the ether, another false alarm by another false prophet. Instead, it pleased the algorithm gods. They presented the nonsense to us as truth, and people bit. They liked. They shared. They heaped praise on this guy. And that’s a problem.

The Collective Failure

This is not simply the story of one bad writer.

When a platform’s algorithms reward that story, when everyone who allegedly “isn’t a doomer” clicks and shares and heaps praise on the bad writing and research, that’s when it becomes a collective failure.

A big one.

The same calm cucumbers who’ve disregarded every warning about every real threat we’ve faced for years, suddenly felt that this guy was worth listening to, because something godlike had touched him with prophecy. His age, and no doubt his gender, conferred a sense of authority on him.

Everyone started freaking out.

In all honesty, it was not a well-written article. On top of all the froth and long-winded explanations, the author drops all their sources in one big pile at the end, poorly formatted, not contextualized, not cited in text, or even discussed. They’re just vomited down at the bottom, with the assurance that he has read them carefully, with the help of AI, to arrive at his conclusion of mass famine by July. Why would you trust this guy? Because he’s an expert in logistics or energy? No. Because he’s a journalist with a reputation for being right? No.

Because he explains it all very well?

No.

Hundreds of thousands of people listened to him because he checked all the boxes of what counts as an authority in America.

The author had a chance to apologize, and he bombed that as well. In a follow-up post, he talks about his spiritual and mystical insights into collapse. He says the data “now backs everything I have been tracking spiritually for forty years.” He talks about his struggles as an artist.

He also backtracks:

When I talk about bare shelves and famine, I am not talking about the United States in sixty days. That is not what I have said. That is not what I have ever said. I think the idea that famine hits the United States in six to eight weeks is, frankly, kind of crazy. That is not what I see.

What I see, and what I have said consistently for over two years, going back long before Trump attacked the Strait, is that in the United States, by June and July, things will start getting hard to get. You will go to the store and you will not be able to find this or that. Supply chains will begin to visibly buckle. Not famine. Not total collapse. But friction. Intermittency.

Oh, now he tells everyone…

Go back and read the original article, if you have the stomach for it. This is not how he frames the crisis. Alas, to sum things up:

No, you don’t need to panic about a famine by July. You shouldn’t stop paying your mortgage or your other bills.

Unlike the author, I’m no mystic.

I haven’t been tracking anything spiritually for 40 years. But now we get to the core of the problem in American culture. If you’re a scientist, or you just understand science, nobody listens to you. They don’t look at your data.

They don’t want your evidence.

A Real Prophet: John Wesley Powell

You know who actually predicted all this?

John Wesley Powell.

We’re not living through a fuel crisis; we’re living through a climate crisis. The fuel crisis is a driver. Empty shelves are coming with or without dumb presidents and their wars. And this was foretold by guys like Powell, long before any mystics entered the picture. A Civil War veteran who lost his arm at Shiloh, Powell led the first major expedition along the Colorado River, explicitly for the sake of determining its viability for settlement. He told everyone: Don’t do it.

That’s right. The U.S. federal government hired John Wesley Powell to lead an expedition through the west, then come back and tell them whether it was a good idea to develop that territory. His exact words:

“I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not enough water to supply the land.”

He said that in 1893.

120+ years ago.

As the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Powell continued to argue against the settlement of the southwest.

He called it unsustainable.

Nobody listened.

Instead, they settled. They built big cities, exactly where Powell told them not to do it. They built dams and giant reservoirs, thinking they would outsmart nature. They named one after him. Yep, Lake Powell. Lake Powell is now drying up. It won’t supply the land, exactly as Powell said it would.

Americans have a long heritage of disregarding facts and evidence in favor of mystical thinking, and it’s exactly why we’re in this mess. Most Americans have no clue what they could be doing to actually prepare for, or even prevent, many of these catastrophes, because they don’t listen. They don’t listen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about. They listen to grifters and charlatans, who are right by accident sometimes, often too late.

So, I guess it’s fitting for Americans to continue shrugging off warnings from their actual Cassandras, like John Wesley Powell. It’s fitting for them to completely freak out when some dude with zero training or background tells us he has spiritually foreseen a famine, backed by data delivered to him via AI models designed to validate his thoughts, run by robots that will also tell you to eat pebbles and poisonous mushrooms. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

This Has to Stop

Please, stop sharing clickbait articles about famines in 8 weeks.

Guys like this, who write articles like this, aren’t helping anyone. They’re making it that much harder for the real Cassandras to get their message out. They’re making it that much harder for us to be taken seriously.

The next time someone like me talks about real threats now and down the line, like Dust Bowls and failing breadbaskets, or airborne diseases, people are going to remember Mr. Famine and his mystical clickbait article that scared them into thinking they were going to starve.

They’re going to remember how they overreacted, and how the author dodged responsibility for predictions he ultimately retracted.

They’re going to ignore the next warning.

There are times when I’ve gone too far in my predictions, when I was certain something was going to happen.

Then again, the most I ever asked anyone to do was wear an N95 mask and take some precautions. And you know what? Most of my predictions have come true, because they were backed by actual data done by real human beings, peer-reviewed, and subjected to intense skepticism.

The problem is that the world has simply learned to accept slow-moving disasters. We have various names for this phenomenon. Call it shifting baseline syndrome. Call it normalcy bias. Call it the Region Beta Paradox.

I’ve written about them all.

The world doesn’t seem to care if you tell them that 6 million children have been disabled by an airborne virus, because it happened slowly and it doesn’t affect them directly. They can ignore it. They can keep blaming social media. The same goes for my warnings about Trump and the flaws of our two-party system, or the cascade of biblical record-breaking disasters we’re seeing every week now. They can continue throwing hopium at each other.

If I have any advice:

Stop ignoring your real Cassandras for years on end, then freaking out over viral articles about empty shelves in 8 weeks.

This is not healthy behavior.

It’s not productive behavior. There are things you can be doing now to help prepare for and even prevent pandemics and famines in the future. They require you to put in some effort, not because you’re absolutely going to starve 8 weeks from now, but because you might starve 8 years from now.

A related example:

We committed tens of billions to preparing for pandemics, and then… we didn’t do it. Our leaders spent the money on everything from cop cities to wrestling tournaments. People didn’t get used to wearing N95 masks. They taught each other to see them as symbols of trauma instead of protection. Universities threw hundreds of air purifiers into dumpsters. I’m serious. If you don’t believe me, look it up. Now, people are wondering if they should freak out over hantavirus. They’re missing the point. If we had done the right thing, then we wouldn’t need to freak out over hantavirus, because we would have the tools to manage it. We didn’t commit the sustained time and energy, and now we don’t have the tools.

It’s like this with famine, with pandemics, on and on.

Maybe you get it.

Between each one of these viral freakout articles over empty shelves or a new virus, there are so many things we could be doing. There are ways to clean the air and make pandemic viruses much less dangerous. There are ways to grow food in parking lots. There are ways to capture water even if it’s not raining. There are ways to localize prescription drug production.

Lots of us are working on these ideas, and we need help. We need sustained support. What we don’t need is to be ignored, laughed off, and insulted when we try to talk about all these problems, only for the exact same skeptics to freak out and give all of their bandwidth to the next viral article written by a mystic, with AI insights, who doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

One day, the mystics will accidentally be right.

The shelves will be empty.

Then what?

You’re going to starve in 8 weeks. Oh, wait. Never mind. The guy who wrote that essay walked back his bold claims. You won’t necessarily starve. Someone will, somewhere. Turns out, his AI-driven research might’ve been based on some faulty assumptions. Sorry if you already made any down payments on a large wooded lot between those two posts and told your mortgage company to go to hell. But, hey, he got 3,000 likes and a big boost to his new Substack. He appreciates you.

Fun fact: A famine is already underway in Afghanistan. Back in January, Reuters interviewed an Afghan family who eats one meal a day, a little bit of bread. They said, “We’re content to die.” So, that’s a real famine. Even then, the media doesn’t say “famine.” They say “the brink of famine.” We’ll get there soon enough. By the time it happens, Reuters will show up to interview you about it. They’ll run the story. Nobody will read it. You’ll welcome death.

And that will be that…

This debacle over the “eight weeks to famine” article zooming around speaks to an issue we should address, because it comes up over and over. Are you going to starve? When is everything going to collapse? How much longer do you have to keep faking small talk at your job? Nobody has an answer for you.

Cheer up, here’s another cat in a box:

I’m sure some risk analyst out there has a pretty good idea of when you’re going to starve, but they get paid vast amounts of money to sit around and crunch numbers. They have access to tools you don’t.

You don’t have 14 hours a day to sit around and calculate your risks of famine over the next 12 months. You have to make the best decisions you can with the information you have. You have to dedicate a certain portion of your time to staying informed. Then you have to make judgment calls.

That’s why it’s hard.

Would you like to know the life of a prepper? Some of you already do. As I keep saying, it’s not about bunkers. It’s not about predicting the exact date when a famine or a Cat 5 hurricane is going to hit. It’s not about surviving every disaster and living forever. It’s not even about this glorified notion of “community.” In short, it’s about being MacGyver, but there’s no camera, no dramatic music, no bombs to diffuse, and often nobody even appreciates what you’re doing.

You do it anyway.

For the last month, I’ve been trying to design a dew catcher. I know that sounds painfully boring compared to the sensationalist declarations of imminent famine we all enjoyed over the last few days.

Stay with me.

My dew catcher isn’t fancy. It’s made out of trash bags and PVC pipe. That’s on purpose. I want something everyone can make. So far, it’s been a mixed success. It works great as an emergency rain catcher. I’ve collected gallons of rain, with just one trash bag and some pipes. But it fails as a dew catcher. So, we keep working on it, looking for the right material. Will drinking water from a trash bag kill me in ten years, even if I filter it with a Berkey? I don’t know. But I do know that if I have zero water, that will kill me faster.

Meanwhile, I’m working on other plans.

Soon, I’m going to start learning about growing antibiotics from dirt. Do you want to hear about my emergency composting toilet?

Okay, maybe later…

I could tell you about my community, with the other homeschool parents who lean toward homesteading and prepping. We have to be careful around them. There’s a good deal of raw milk and Jesus talk. Out of all of them, there’s maybe one family we could probably count on during an emergency. My daughter is best friends with their daughter, and I’ve already made a decision.

I am not going to let my daughter’s best friend starve. I am not going to let her parents starve. We will share everything with them.

If things get really bad, here’s my plan: Round up the best friend’s family and our aging parents, my brother, a couple of my in-laws, pool our financial resources, and all share one house together with my preps. It will be extremely difficult, but we’ll make it work. My apocalypse team will come together not because they finally saw the truth of my prophecies, but because I’m offering the best chance they have of staying alive. I’ll be taking care of a lot of people, and putting up with a lot of bullshit, and specifically not going around saying “I told you so,” because nobody is going to want to hear that once things cross the threshold.

See, I told you.

Boring.

Maybe your eyes are glazing over. Maybe it’s more interesting to calculate your odds of famine and then fantasize about building a community and starting a vegetable garden. Doing it is hard, and it’s often boring, with mixed results, and that’s why everyone keeps reading the articles without actually doing it.

Here’s another cat:

This morning, I worked hard to convince my spouse to start storing our daughter’s favorite frozen food in mylar bags. Why? To save space. Because you can store twice as much in a mylar bag, for a longer period. They said they didn’t like the idea of creating more plastic waste with mylar, but ultimately consented. For me. To do it. After all, there’s going to be empty shelves and a famine in 8 weeks.

Haven’t you heard?

I know what you’re going to say. I should just tell my daughter she should get used to the idea of living without her favorite food, because the world is collapsing. But she’s seven years old. Doesn’t she deserve a few more months of her favorite food? Even if it’s frozen? Even if it becomes hard to get?

Even if it creates an extra burden?

And no, I don’t just go to the store and deplete the frozen food section of my daughter’s favorite food. Yesterday, I called stores and talked to clerks. I asked them about their supply situation. I asked how many I could get from the back end, what’s reasonable for someone to buy in bulk, without inconveniencing others. Again, that’s boring. It’s a pain to be considerate.

But that’s also a specific example of what often gets filed under “community,” actually giving a dam about other people, even strangers, people you’ll never meet. They’re part of the community as well.

That’s Schrodinger’s apocalypse. You’re somewhere between stuffing frozen plant meat in mylar bags, and telling your daughter to give up her favorite food. You know she’ll have to give it up eventually. Why rush it?

Go ahead, tell me I’m privileged.

Prepping would be so much easier without kids, without family, without responsibilities. I could live in a tiny house, with a small solar array, prepping away, eating my beans, and probably do just fine during almost any catastrophe.

The guy who wrote the “8 weeks to famine” article opines that his own family is weeks away from eating canned beans. Are you kidding me? I’ve been eating dried beans for years. It’s my staple. I love them. My daughter will get there in her own time. For now, she can have what she wants.

That’s the thing…

You can’t live life based on someone else’s prediction that there’s going to be a famine in 8 weeks. You can’t make decisions just because they make prepping easier. You have to make some kind of future to live for.

You have to live as though there’s going to be an apocalypse, slow or fast. And you have to live as though there won’t be one.

You have to exist with those two realities. It’s the quantum physics of doom. I wish it weren’t. I wish the world would wake up and see our predicament. They won’t, except every now and then, when someone manages to get them riled up over empty shelves. Between those moments, when the public oscillates between panic and toxic positivity, we get to reconcile the two realms, every day.

At least we have cats in boxes.