The world (probably) isn’t ending, prepare for it anyway.

22ndApril2018

It’s that time again, where politicians start to spout their rhetoric about how strong they are in the face of aggression and tabloid newspapers start writing random words in capitals and prefixing every other article with ‘World War 3’. Even reasonably credible news sources post articles like this one. So the world might be ending, it probably isn’t, but you should prepare for it anyway.

This sort of thing happens more often than you’d think, the media has learned that disasters and potential wars sell papers and garner viewership a lot more than kitten videos and heartwarming tales of boy scouts helping little old ladies cross the street.

Although YouTube disagrees.

Here’s the thing though, the world probably isn’t ending, it might be, but it probably isn’t. The sort of thing that actually starts a war is hard to predict but as humans are obsessed with patterns, we try anyway.

These things usually take time

It’s a frightening time to live in as we probably are heading for a dramatic change in our civilisation, whilst it’s true that it might be caused by war, it’s much more likely that it will be an environment or economic disaster and those things don’t usually happen overnight.

During your lifetime, it’s growing ever more likely that you will face serious hardship, you may even see the collapse of civilization – you probably won’t but you might. It is, however, very unlikely that you will wake up one day to find that the world has ended, you’ll probably find that the world ends so slowly that you don’t even really notice it.

The one thing to take away from this is that humans as a species are as resilient and ingenious as we are fragile and stupid, the media just tend not to report on the good stuff as it doesn’t make them as much money.

I highly recommend checking out this article as it shows why we seem to cling on to the idea that the world is ending even though, it’s technically getting better, year-on-year.

We don’t need the media to scare ourselves

I take part in a lot of online prepper and bushcraft groups, I also use my knowledge of the internet to monitor the increase in ‘trigger’ words and discussion topics that cause me to start stepping my preps up (I have a personal alert code system, there’s an article about that coming soon). I’ve recently stopped monitoring those words and topics, because the information they gave me, was not how likely a disaster is to happen, but how likely people are to panic over the news.

Prepper boards fill up with people during times like this and a lot of the times, they are posting stuff like “Welp, this is the end, folks!”, those people, we tend to filter out, most of them are just in it for the drama. However, we always pay attention to posts which say things like “I’m really frightened and I don’t know what to do to feel safe”.

So what should I do?

The title of this post is my advice to you. Don’t worry, the world probably isn’t ending, it’s probably just the media whipping us into a frenzy in order to make more money, however prepping for the end of the world at the end of the world is too late. So, yeah, the world probably isn’t ending but plan for it anyway.

In fact, every single time I’ve needed to use my preps, it’s had nothing to do with a global catastrophe. I used my savings once when I was out of work for a few months. I used my portable gas hob and candles during a power cut and I’ve found that my knives are useful for so many things that one of them is starting to wear out!

I’d recommend prepping for any and all scenarios, the end of the world is only one of them and is actually the least likely!

If you want to get started, this blog is a good a place as any (in fact, I’ve written an article about getting started here), I also recommend joining a prepper group on Facebook and subscribing to a few prepper subreddits, here is another article I wrote about how to find prepper communities online, that should be a good starting point.

Article author: Merdok