My experience in survival preparedness has spanned roughly a decade now, from my early 20’s into my early 30’s. I have learned a lot along the way and would like to share my experiences, varied as they are, on many subjects. These are only my opinions. Your individual circumstances will vary; you can take from this what you will and ignore the rest.
Money
The number one most important survival consideration is that NOW, while money is worth something, you had better get HOT on MAKING MORE MONEY. Ten years ago, I was absolutely convinced that the financial system was imminently going to implode. Therefore, instead of investing money and time into being able to expand my own financial growth, I poured every spare penny into weapons, ammunition, equipment, et cetera. These are all things that are useful, but in the long run I did more harm than good.
Although we all know that one day the reckoning for this world will come, the game can go on much longer than anyone can imagine. It is their system, and they will keep it going as long as they can keep looting this country and destroying it from within. This could take another 10-20 years. We just don’t know. So always invest in yourself, in new skills, in new businesses, and in your capability to generate money. Have a second job, learn a trade, and just increase your income somehow. Preparedness becomes so much easier when you are making $10,000 a month instead of $3,000. Spend a year or two right now creating that larger income stream for yourself and you will suddenly be able to afford the best weaponry, optics, free dried foods, gear, and more. Skills can always defeat equipment, but when you have enough money to buy the best equipment and also go take excellent training, you are going to be an order of magnitude better off. Money opens up a lot of doors.
Relationships
Most of the people reading this blog are probably men. Guys, survival is not just about having an arsenal that the terminator would be envious of; it is also about having a life that you love. This means having companionship, a wife, kids, and a legacy. Our individual lives are not that important in the grand scheme of things. This is going to sound like it has nothing to do with survival, but hear me out. Go take dancing lessons. Yes, dancing lessons are imperative to your survival situation. A man who can dance salsa is going to be able to attract a woman ten times easier than a man who can’t dance. Good luck finding a mate by preaching about Austrian economics and derivatives. This can come later, once she knows you are a fun and happy go lucky person who keeps her laughing. (Save the Rambo persona for the cannibal raiders down the road.) Ensuring the survival of our way of life means having children to pass our values and culture on to, and you need a woman to have your children.
So, do yourself a favor and find out where you can learn salsa. Then, go find yourself a mate. Absolutely do not bring up guns, politics, or preparedness until you can ease her gently into it. Women are wired differently than men, and it behooves you to approach these topics very cautiously, as not to upset her idea of what the future might be. Women fall in love with an idea. If her idea of life with you is nothing more than living in an underground storage container and eating beans while repelling cannibals, well guess what, she is going to pass that idea up for another idea.
Physical Preparedness
If you think that working out at the gym a couple of times each week is going to be the same as living off the land and building a community, you are absolutely going to be in for a physical and mental shock. I have personally gone from working a construction job and going to the gym five times a week to working on an oil rig for 28 straight days with 12-hour shifts every day. I thought that I was in shape and strong, but what 95% of the population considers to be hard work is a walk in the park. I realized this when I went to work on the oil rig.
Our ancestors would spend all day long tilling the earth, day after day. They would swing an ax, swing sledge hammers, split wood, haul heavy equipment, and do this from sun up to sun down. Their bodies were conditioned from a young age to work for the entire day. This probably prevented them from a lot of injury, but for all the rest of you who work regular office jobs, your body will be prone to injury when you make this transition. I wanted to tell you about different types of pain, because you are going to become familiar with pain, and it is good to have an idea about what is serious pain and what is not.
You will deal with muscle soreness, naturally, being the most mild pain of them all. After the soreness will come aching joints, from your fingers to your wrists, and especially your knees. Aches can get pretty uncomfortable, but you should never worry about aches, because they will go away with some good food and rest. The harder you work, the more you must eat. You absolutely must follow that rule. The body can withstand a tremendous workload as long as you are fueling it with plenty of calories and nutrition! That cannot be emphasized enough. You will begin to fall apart if you do not heed this advice.
Stabbing pain is something more serious, and it is likely from some kind of injury. I can only assume you will not have a doctor around or access to any real medical care. So you have to be able to function-test your body. This means that you basically check for range of motion, and if something is giving you stabbing pains, then you just need to stop aggravating it or you will run the risk of truly injuring yourself. Restricting movement or supporting it somehow with improvised braces or supports can help.
What you must be in the habit of is the proper and safe way to use common tools. For example, you must be in the habit of properly positioning your body so that when you swing that sledge hammer and it glances off whatever you were trying to hit, it doesn’t clip your knee cap on the way down and cause an actual injury. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people do exactly that. Just imagine you are on your retreat, where you have been splitting wood for eight hours straight, your hands are aching terribly, your muscles are exhausted, and you are mentally about to quit, and your ax slips out of your hands and cuts your foot wide open. Toughening up for hard labor is not a fun thing to do, but get in the habit of using your tools safely, at a minimum!
Food Storage
With the best intentions I have pretty much tried every method of food storage that you can think of. I have settled on freeze-dried food stoage. The other methods I have found to not work for me for a few reasons:
- Preparation time. Other methods required a lot of time. It’s better for me to spend that time working more and making more money.
- Pests. Even sealed in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers and then placed into sealed food-grade buckets, I have still had pest issues.
- Weight. Normal food weighs more and takes up more space.
- Spoiling. Freeze-dried food doesn’t spoil for decades. It may seem like freeze-dried foods are expensive, but if you factor in things like the time you will save, the guarantee that pests will not ruin it, and that it will almost never spoil and holds the best nutrition value over the years, I think freeze-dried storage is the way to go right off the start.
Firearms and Training
There are a thousand idiots out there giving advice for every real professional you might find. Do yourself a favor in the beginning and read the book On Combat. This will drive home the importance of reality-based, stress-inducing training. Weapons are secondary to training and tactics, period. As long as you have a reliable weapon that you will be mentally prepared to aggressively use, then you will do better than all the arm chair commandos who only ever shoot at stationary paper targets on a flat range on a nice sunny day. I own a non-standard rifle– the Steyr AUG– and all my friends always tell me that if I get into a SHTF situation I won’t be able to find parts or whatever else. That’s not true. There will be so many corpses with AR15s laying around that if I need another gun, I will pick one up. I have met countless morons with weapons, zero training, and zero combat mindset. The ground will be littered with unfired rifles.
For hand-to-hand fighting, just go right to www.scars.com and subscribe. Practice it with your team. My good friend is an expert in the system, has been in hundreds of real life fights on the street as a cop, and never lost a single fight, period. I am skilled at an intermediate level and still surprise others trained in the more well-known systems, with the simplicity and effectiveness of SCARS. You will find a lot of negative stuff about it online, but that comes from ignorance. It has the fastest learning curve, most scientifically-developed concepts, and trains the mind and not just the body. To give one sentence that sums up why SCARS is the best: There are no defensive moves in SCARS, only offensive movements.
So, to sum it up, make more money, dance yourself into the arms of a good woman, work hard like your ancestors, train for reality, and study combat.