The Famine Has Been Canceled. Heed the Famine Follies.

Here's what to do instead.

A road in Ireland

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.