Schrodinger's Apocalypse
An essay with cats in boxes.
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.
❤️ 🐈 🐈 in boxes. Puppy cuddlepuddles, too.
Yesterday, I realized that we have about 200 gallons of potable water in our water heater tank if it comes to that. I do need to flush it ASAP.
In the last 50 years I've been through several prepping situations. The realistic timeline for creating a community and working collectively is decades. This is really difficult to maintain, I've made a couple of 10 year runs but it's very hard to keep group members focused. Without a mixed group doing the work of preparing and another group bringing income to pay the ongoing costs and lack of income tensions build. In a couple of situations the land was withdrawn years in. As in your daughter's case it's hard to deny the comforts of 'normal' life. I have the skills and accumulated more knowledge than the current preppers but that doesn't make for an optimistic, focused standard bearer.
For now I see a brief, month or so, which anyone should have enough in their pantry for at any time. At that point either sanity has returned to government, or your beans and rice then belong to someone better armed...c'est la vie...