Survival Slop Won't Save You.

This might.

Unsplash

Well, here we go again…

Weeks after a dude went viral for telling everyone to stop paying their mortgage because we were going to have a famine in July, yet another survival article has gone viral, racking up more than a thousand fans in a few days.

It tells me something:

People are waking up to the idea of prepping. It’s just sad that they’re choosing to promote this kind of content to the exclusion of everything else.

What’s wrong with it?

We could talk about the problems all day, but I’ll skip to the heart of the matter. Down at the bottom, this article links to a clickbait video promising to teach you “a simple method that could help generate water even during extreme drought.” Like most clickbait videos, it takes forever to get to the point.

Well, I managed to make it through the entire thing.

What’s the secret?

It’s a water generator, something we’ve talked about in this newsletter for years. It’s not classified information. The government isn’t trying to scrub it from the web, as the article claims. That’s all nonsense.

The so-called innovator of this system makes you wade through his entire life story before finally plugging his digital book. The book tells you how to make a DIY water generator with simple parts.

That’s interesting…

Because I explain the same setup here. I didn’t invent it from scratch. The idea has been around for a while. We modified it. We tested the results. If you want an even more sophisticated filtration system, you can look at the setup I talk about here.

At first, I second-guessed myself. Surely I didn’t just tell everyone exactly how to make a DIY water generator for free, in one article, in the same way that a dude takes an entire video and a 180-page book to explain.

So I bought the book.

And…

Yep, it’s pretty much the same thing. The “water freedom system” tells you to go out and buy a new dehumidifier, then walks you through a complicated series of steps to rig it up with a filtration system and storage tanks.

It’s not just about the link promoted down at the bottom. It’s the entire disposition. It’s all the AI peppered in. This is problematic.

That’s what you get from survival slop.

Survival slop doesn’t actually show you how to survive. It markets the idea of survival. It sponges up half your day just to explain what a water generator does, then tricks you into thinking you can build one for less than two hundred bucks, as long as you buy their guide. Well, you can’t. I actually made one, and it cost a little bit more than that. Mine works. We tested it. Simplicity is the superpower.

Closets full of rice and beans won’t save you without a rotation system. We actually explain how to build one here. Oh, and you also might want to know a few different ways to cook those rice and beans.

I’m not here to beat up on one single article. I’m here to point out a problem with the fact that these articles continue to go viral while content that goes deeper and further continues to get so little support by comparison. I’m here to talk about why the people who shower this kind of work with so much praise regard the rest of the survival and sustainability canon with so much animosity.

So, look, I’ll just say this:

Last year, my family decided we were going to learn how to actually survive in a suburban hellscape. We were going to learn how to grow food. We were going to learn how to harvest water. We were going to learn how to address problems like sanitation without running water or electricity.

We were going to prepare for disasters. We were going to learn how to do it without moving out to the country. We were going to do it right here.

We did it.

Sometime later this month, we’ll install two hot composting bins that won’t piss off our neighbors, and that will be the end of phase one. Of course, there’s going to be a phase two, and a phase three, and a phase four. But phase one is probably the hardest part. It’s the part we didn’t think was possible.

What bothers me so much about survival slop is the lie. It’s the fact that some dude is taking up all the oxygen in the room, making misleading claims, leading people down deadend paths, selling false comforts, and doing it while perpetuating the very systems that are accelerating the collapse.

Real survival doesn’t have to cost a fortune. But it’s also not cheap. It’s not impossible. But it’s also not easy. Sometimes, the hard part isn’t making a humanure compost pile. It’s making one in a neighborhood where everyone else has a manicured lawn. It’s not stockpiling food. It’s figuring out how you’re going to share your food without attracting unwanted attention.

I’m sorry, but “don’t tell anyone about your stockpiles” isn’t going to work when your neighbors start to realize, halfway through the famine, that you don’t ever seem hungry or stressed. You’re going to need a plan for that.

I don’t think guns will work. Are you going to shoot every single person in your neighborhood, including their kids? Are you going to barricade yourself in your house and let them all eat each other?

I just wanna know…

This is what real preppers are thinking about. It’s an investment. You have to make that investment. You can’t just share an article or make vague plans to buy rice and beans and think you’re being sustainable.

This is my project, and it doesn’t involve filling closets with spam or pretending that I’m a genius for plugging a dehumidifier into a bucket stack and hiding it behind endless walls of clickbait. My journey was funded by AKET, an organization that sees the value in this kind of work. It’s free.

You’re welcome.