# Is "Prepping" for Doomsday Worth It? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 30, 2014, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344 "2014-04-30T09:19:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![fiddlesticks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiddlesticks/32/18129_2.png) [@fiddlesticks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fiddlesticks)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2014, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/101 "2014-05-07T17:02:10Z")
If NBC’s _Revolution_ has taught me anything the **real** currency of the post-TEOTWAWKI world is diamonds. All you suckers with your gold coin hoards will be looking pretty foolish… ---
**Author:** ![ralfy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ralfy/32/600_2.png) [@ralfy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralfy)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2014, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/102 "2014-05-09T03:01:02Z")
Globally, we are seeing the combined effects of financial crises (on-going), peak oil (a tripling in oil price, crude oil production in a plateau), and global warming coupled with environmental damage (droughts, floods, heat waves, more powerful storms, polluted water, etc.), and there are likely no solutions to any of these problems. At the same time, we are seeing related problems, such as austerity measures, unemployment, greater significance of vectors for the spread of the disease together with more warnings of antibiotic resistance, increasing social unrest due to higher food and oil prices, greater tension between citizens and police/military forces, etc. Finally, we have various towns and cities–especially in industrialized countries–that only have a week or so of food, medicine, fuel, and even ammo available coupled with a fragile JIT system that is heavily dependent on the extensive use of fuel to delivery goods 24/7. Given these, preparations for short- and long-term crises are very practical. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2014, 3:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/103 "2014-05-12T03:53:17Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Is it worth it? Well it’ll definitely be worth it if The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) comes. 😛 Whether this is true depends on whether you consider life in the post-TEOTWAWKI world worth living. I not half sure I don’t. Hoarding supplies and camping out for the rest of my life doesn’t strike me as an attractive prospect on any level. Perhaps it is better than death, but that’s not saying much. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2014, 9:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/104 "2014-05-12T09:00:51Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > Whether this is true depends on whether you consider life in the post-TEOTWAWKI world worth living. I not half sure I don’t. Hoarding supplies and camping out for the rest of my life doesn’t strike me as an attractive prospect on any level. Perhaps it is better than death, but that’s not saying much. Life may suck in a post-apocalyptic world, but I’d want to try and make it suck less for the next generation. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2014, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/105 "2014-06-16T02:54:06Z")
I recently read a very good book, _ **One Second After** _ by William R. Forstchen. It depicts a shtf scenario in a rural community in the North Carolina mountains after an EMP attack against the United States. The hero, along with other good people, organize the town to maximize resources; they set up an effective defense against marauders; they improvise in every possible way around the loss of most electrical devices. Essentially they do almost everything right. After one year, 80% of the town is dead; from disease, starvation and raiders. Without modern infrastructure, there simply was no way to support that many people. And when help finally comes they’re told they did well to preserve even 20% of the population- in most of the eastern USA it was far less. Without food, nothing else is possible. If you really want to survive teotwawki, learn to farm. ---
**Author:** ![GusNSpot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gusnspot/32/436_2.png) [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2014, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/106 "2014-06-16T06:12:10Z")
30 years ago I thought I might be one of the intrepid leaders of the merry band. 20 years ago, I would be mobile and go gather family and tough it out. I have a bazillion relatives who do many things & are very tough & smart people. ( I think I might be adopted because I do not fit that mold. ) Now at 70, I’m the guy you give a rifle and some ammo to who covers your retreat as long as he can. I can’t run, climb, carry or breathe well, so I ain’t going far or long. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2014, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/107 "2014-06-16T11:40:04Z")
> [@Soylent\_Juicy](#): > > Well, after cleaning out my grandmother’s basement which contained a metric shit-ton of years-expired food, god-knows-how-old jugs of water, can openers, and other various dollar store crap that she’d been stockpiling for the hypothetical apocalypse…I’m going to say No. Not worth it. > > An “Emergency Preparedness Kit” is worth it. Stockpiling your basement full of food that ended up being wasted? No. > > It was absolutely heartbreaking to have to throw all that food out. There’s this. If you’re stockpiling lots of food, you should probably be rotating your stock – that is, regularly eating that food (oldest first) and buying new food to replace it, so none of it ever gets really too old. So suppose your doomsday larder consists largely of MRE’s, jerky, powdered milk, and other fine cuisine like that. How do you like it that you’re regularly actually having to eat that stuff? ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2014, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/108 "2014-06-17T18:39:52Z")
> [@Fuzzy\_Dunlop](#): > > It’s possible for something to be “worth it”, even if it ultimately isn’t necessary. Take health insurance, for example. If you have health insurance and are lucky enough to get cancer, obviously you’ll start pumping your fists with joy that your insurance plan is going to pay off so well. > > But if you have insurance for 50 years and never get so much as a sniffle, would you say it wasn’t “worth it”? You might look back and say it was worth every penny to be covered just in case. > > On the other hand if you spend $20 million building a private cancer center just in case you get cancer, and never get sick, you might think it wasn’t worth it. > > For emergency preparation, storing food, water, medication, making other reasonable plans seems a lot more like keeping an insurance policy. Building a zombie-proof bunker seems more like overkill. This. I have car insurance, health insurance, homeowner’s insurance, etc., but that just involves a certain amount of money, and very little time and thought. The doomsday preppers and survivalists are devoting a good chunk of their lives to insure themselves against disaster. Even if the disaster they’re preparing for (as opposed to the wrong distaster, per **RickJay** ) eventually happens, what’s the premiums and what’s the payoff? The premiums are a shitload of cash and a good chunk of your pre-apocalypse life. The payoff is getting to live for awhile in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And that’s the _best case_, the one where your insurance policy pays off. Do you even break even under that case? Not really, unless you really enjoy being a doomsday prepper - in which case, all those hours of prepping were your idea of fun. I guess that’s the case for a lot of them, but the rest of us with different tastes shouldn’t follow their example. If you prepare for the wrong apocalypse, or if there never is one, then it’s a chunk of a lifetime wasted. ---
**Author:** ![Mangosteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Mangosteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangosteen)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2014, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/109 "2014-06-17T23:05:49Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > By the time the situation degenerates to marauding tribes, I doubt most people will still be trying to hold out in one-family homesteads, if only because they would be overrun like you conjectured. People can band together for defense too. Many people are talking about “marauding tribes” breaking into preppers homes. I don’t think this is what will happen. Even in the worst case scenario, I believe some sort of government entity will survive. They will be the ones coming for your supplies. Under the color of “authority”, they will demand your food and water so it can be distributed to the community (with their families taking the best stuff first). Government already has the guns and organization to come after you. Let’s say you and your 20 buddies have trained and established a fairly secure compound somewhere off the beaten track. At some point though, someone is going to say or see something and a local government official is going to find out about your compound. Men with weapons will be sent to “liberate” the supplies you have stored. And maybe you even “win” the first skirmish with the authorities that have come for your supplies. The problem is that they will be back. This time with more men and bigger weapons. At this point the supplies become secondary. They simply want to kill you for daring to stand up to them. And kill you they will. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2014, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/110 "2014-06-18T01:33:36Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > So suppose your doomsday larder consists largely of MRE’s, jerky, powdered milk, and other fine cuisine like that. How do you like it that you’re regularly actually having to eat that stuff? One error is assuming “stored food” is only MRE’s and powdered milk. Things like pasta and canned goods can last a long, long time if properly stored and are more like normal food. I try to keep a couple weeks of food stocked in the pantry. Since these past few years I’ve had some very, very tight months moneywise I not only had a great excuse to “rotate” (that is, use up) these stores I learned a lot about what I was stocking, how to use it, and refined my choices. So now my stash is more useful for the current world. It will likely be more useful for TEOTWAWKI than stashes made without thought or “practice”. But I’m not doing it for TEOTWAWKI, I’m doing it for the next power outage or natural disaster or bout of unemployment. > [@Mangosteen](#): > > Many people are talking about “marauding tribes” breaking into preppers homes. I don’t think this is what will happen. Even in the worst case scenario, I believe some sort of government entity will survive. They will be the ones coming for your supplies. Under the color of “authority”, they will demand your food and water so it can be distributed to the community (with their families taking the best stuff first). Government already has the guns and organization to come after you. ^ This. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2014, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/111 "2014-06-18T14:27:34Z")
> [@Mangosteen](#): > > Many people are talking about “marauding tribes” breaking into preppers homes. I don’t think this is what will happen. Even in the worst case scenario, I believe some sort of government entity will survive. They will be the ones coming for your supplies. Under the color of “authority”, they will demand your food and water so it can be distributed to the community (with their families taking the best stuff first). Government already has the guns and organization to come after you. > > Let’s say you and your 20 buddies have trained and established a fairly secure compound somewhere off the beaten track. At some point though, someone is going to say or see something and a local government official is going to find out about your compound. Men with weapons will be sent to “liberate” the supplies you have stored. And maybe you even “win” the first skirmish with the authorities that have come for your supplies. The problem is that they will be back. This time with more men and bigger weapons. At this point the supplies become secondary. They simply want to kill you for daring to stand up to them. And kill you they will. This might not be the case, although it’s possible. I can think of three scenarios:[ul][li]there’s an unprecedently huge disaster but although civilization and government are shaken, they’re still basically intact. After a relatively short (6-9 weeks) period, disaster relief gets organized and the government has better things to do than impound individual stockpiles[_]Things fall apart so completely that everyone is on their own indefinitely; whatever else happens people can at least struggle as best they can without interference. The premise of numerous post-apocalypse stories like **Alas Babylon** [_]The worst-case scenario: just enough of something claiming to be the government survives that in a desperate attempt to “maintain order” you have the local National Guard commander or the CO of the nearest military base effectively becoming the local warlord. This is what you described, and it’s similar to the story arc in the television series _ **Jericho** _. That’s why the hardcore preppers/survivalists focus so much on weapons and guerrilla tactics: they foresee having to defend themselves against the “death rattle” of the government as it collapses.[/ul][/li]So the three scenarios break down to “there’s no need to fight the government”, “there’s no government to fight against”, and “the remnant government is weak enough to fight off”. ---
**Author:** ![T.Slothrop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3e96dc/32.png) [@T.Slothrop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/T.Slothrop)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2014, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/112 "2014-06-19T05:11:02Z")
I’ll tell you later. ---
**Author:** ![sara20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@sara20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sara20)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2014, 7:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/113 "2014-06-19T07:54:35Z")
no ---
**Author:** ![T.Slothrop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3e96dc/32.png) [@T.Slothrop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/T.Slothrop)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2014, 8:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/114 "2014-06-19T08:51:51Z")
Yeah, honest, I’m gonna have to tell you later after I find out. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c57346/32.png) [@Little\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Pig)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2014, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/115 "2014-06-19T08:54:43Z")
What is this, “downwind of a Yellowstone eruption” that people speak of? ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2014, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344/116 "2014-06-19T14:18:19Z")
> [@Little\_Pig](#): > > What is this, “downwind of a Yellowstone eruption” that people speak of? [Yellowstone Supervolcano](http://www.nps.gov/yell/naturescience/volcanoqa.htm). Two known past eruptions threw hundreds of cubic kilometers of ash into the air, enough to deposit ash on half the continental US: [![](https://www.cuttingedge.org/Yellowstone_SuperVolcano.jpg) ](https://www.cuttingedge.org/Yellowstone_SuperVolcano.jpg) Bearing in mind the eruption is not specifically predicted to happen soon but rather could happen anytime in the next several thousand years. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-prepping-for-doomsday-worth-it/687344.md?page=5)