[iugtmkbdfil834]

I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.

[jmuguy]

Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.

[wisty]

Do you know of any preppers who buy guns and rations but don't have a plan for water?

OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.

[bee_rider]

I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…

[judahmeek]

The term you're looking for is "homesteader"

[armenarmen]

Mormons?

[JuniperMesos]

Mormons have a widespread cultural practice of prepping, which I understand is mostly the sensible kind where you keep stocks of food and water onhand in case of a natural disaster (rather than the generally-less-sensible rifle militia LARPing). This is something that the institutional Church of Latter-Day Saints encourages among its members, and it strikes me as a pretty good thing to do. Nonetheless, there's no reason why you need to accept the other religious tenets of the LDS church in order to do sensible emergency preparedness, and I'm not sure that not every Mormon community or household is equally diligent about preparedness.

[pigpop]

Well, we did have a term for it until it got dragged and sensationalized in the media. I'd tell you that's a standard "psyop" that the propaganda arm of the government often uses against communities and subcultures that they want to discredit and suppress for one reason or another but then you'd probably call me a conspiracy theorist[1].

[1] another example of a successful smear campaign

[moorow]

"staff engineer"

[reaperducer]

the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals

Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.

I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.

I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.

[vetrom]

This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement.

Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.

"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.

There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.

Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).

[bombcar]

Costco sells those, too.

https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f...

Sometimes they even appear in stores.

Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.

[vetrom]

Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to.

Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)

[yobert]

Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.

[rpdillon]

If you're thinking about a period without power after a disaster, you're supposed to have a gallon of clean water per person per day, along with food that can be prepared in that environment. At least according to https://www.ready.gov/kit.

For me, it made a ton of sense to buy a couple of boxes of MREs and some Mountain House meals for this. They last decades, and they double as camping food.

[K0balt]

I think that pepper mostly exists in movies.

Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it.

Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?”

Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural.

Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day.

As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv.

A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence.

Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.

[jmuguy]

I agree with you on actual preparedness and getting to know your neighbors.

However, I think the derogatory prepper must exist in some number because you see so many products clearly targeting them. All the tacticool stuff, the buckets of dehydrated food, etc etc

[tristor]

Why is a bucket of dehydrated food specifically targeting the stereotype/strawman you are constructing? Costco sells buckets of dehydrated food, and Costco is what comes to mind when I think middle of the road middle-class America. Do you think it's unreasonable to have a bucket of dehydrated food and enough water to last a week?

As someone who lived through the "Snowpocalypse" in Texas in 2021, had no power for 11 days and no water service for 6 days, I was very thankful that I had a backup source of indoor heating, a couple of boxes of MREs, and clean water for a week as just part of having good disaster preparedness, as well as the mylar emergency blankets I hung by fishing line from my ceiling fans so to help create a warm space for my family. All that stuff is just part of a prudent approach to disaster preparedness that anyone who grew up in the middle of the country and has a house would do.

I know quite a few people who you'd write off as "preppers" that are not consumed with fantasies of a zombie apocalypse, but are instead wanting to ensure that their family is taken care of with basic necessities, vital medication, and a set of viable contingency plans when you lose power, water, etc for days or weeks.

Also, nobody but the very wealthy have "hundreds of guns". Guns are expensive. Guns hold their value. Guns are an asset in some communities. But they are expensive, and therefore even rather serious gun people have tens, but not hundreds. I'm probably more of a gun nut than the average, and I definitely do not have "hundreds of guns". To even store "hundreds of guns" safely (e.g. safe from theft, if not for other reasons) I'd need enough money to build a dedicated room in my house just to hold them. "hundreds of guns" is an armory, not a collection. I'm in the top 1% of wealth in my community in Texas and used to shoot competitively, so I'm more of "gun nut" than average, and I can't even imagine owning "hundreds of guns". That's such an outlandish fantasy strawman you have in your mind, it's nothing close to realistic.

You're really just smearing people with stereotypes in this thread that have no basis in reality, and it's clear you're completely unprepared for the reality of what life is like anywhere in the middle of America, much less in much of the rest of the world.

[jmuguy]

Well for one thing - you'd get by a lot better with beans and rice and a functioning garden than overpriced dehydrated meals. And what I'm referring to by buckets (that is a lot/years supplies) of dehydrated food and who is being targeted are companies like this https://www.mypatriotsupply.com/pages/about-us

"We’re taking steps for survival for what we all know is coming. Today." I mean, come on.

Maybe I'm just beating around the bush too much - what I'm making fun of are people that are "prepping" for the end of the world. It is a silly (and strictly American, I imagine) fantasy to think that you're going to ride out the end of days sitting on a pile of guns and MREs. That is who I'm making fun of, and yes those people exist.

[K0balt]

Well, even though I am in general sympathetic to and even a proponent of disaster preparedness, there are undoubtedly people preparing to “ride out the end of days sitting on a pile of guns and MREs.” I have brushed against a few in my life. I count them as useful idiots, because now I know where there’s a pile of dehydrated food, if push comes to shove.

That said, I am convinced enough of the decay of western civilisation in general that I moved to a remote island nation and built a self contained off grid community, so I guess I am actually the extreme case of prepping. That’s certainly true, in a way, except it’s where my daily food, water, and power come from, and I am surrounded by a thriving community of family members and good friends. I honestly never thought I would see a cataclysm within my lifetime, so this was a legacy project for me, but it seems I may have been optimistic lol.

But I do agree with you that there are some nutty fruitcakes out there that are actually hoping for something bad to happen so that they can have their moment of glory, I suppose? It’s actually kinda sad.

I would say though it is uncharitable and even foolish to portray everyone who doesn’t have complete faith in the continuity of our Jenga Castle, especially in the context of recent events.

[tristor]

> Well for one thing - you'd get by a lot better with beans and rice and a functioning garden than overpriced dehydrated meals.

The lived reality of the "Snowpocalypse" says otherwise. "A functioning garden" doesn't produce food when it's 2F (-16C) outside and there is a foot and a half of snow on the ground. Beans and rice require soaking/washing and cooking at high temperature to be edible, dehydrated food does not.

I have beans and rice on hand always as well because they're staples in my diet, but it's ridiculous to consider them comparable in the situation where you don't have power (e.g. no way to heat food easily) and the weather makes the outside dangerous and not conducive to gardening/food production.

You're just doubling-down on a strawman, and it's frankly utter bullshit. Be better.

[shrubby]

Sorry about this, but buckets. Buckets. Wow. https://youtu.be/rOH37W0jPpA?si=eIa_dcA9JLPvXRNK

[Gormo]

> I think that pepper mostly exists in movies.

What type of pepper are we talking about: piper or capsicum?

[xeyownt]

You can buy peppers in food shops. I recommend the red ones.

[philipallstar]

This is just a straw man, though. We all have biases of course.

[expedition32]

I live in a country with a functional government with an unlimited creditcard. The prepping is their business not mine.

I remember when Russia invaded we were all supposed to freeze to death- in reality 2.5% of GDP was diverted and it was Bangladesh that didn't get their LNG tankers.

[colechristensen]

I mean preppers are mostly cosplayers and I don't criticize people who go to comicon either. If you're not hurting anyone there's nothing wrong with having an unrealistic hobby or one without a lot of practical utility (even if the premise of the hobby is having practical utility).

But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years.

And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters.

My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.

[msla]

> But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years.

> And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters.

The only one of those things someone survived by being an individual prepper is the natural disaster, because in the other cases the government didn't just go away, it was replaced by other groups who could kill any given individual and take their stuff. The only way to survive is to leave and become a refugee or to band together in an even bigger group that can kill all individuals and smaller groups and take all their stuff. This is how you get the Carolingian Empire, Los Zetas, MS-13, the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge.

Individual preppers are living in a fantasy land to the extent they think they can wait out political collapse. They might well be competent enough to wait out a terrible natural disaster, but at that point they aren't "preppers" so much as people who listen to what FEMA and NOAA and other disaster-focused government agencies recommend for their regions.

[colechristensen]

Many places around the world will have gone through five or six vastly different governments seated in very different locations over the last century or two and during the transition 1) most of the people stayed 2) most of the people had no part in whatever new group held power and 3) there usually wasn't mass slaughter of the people living there during the transition.

You overestimate the importance of government and underestimate how it very much can just go away... and how distant it can be even when it exists, particularly historically. And how the local warlord equivalent isn't going around to everybody's house and murdering them.

And yeah in those times having food and a means of defense and whatever else is useful as often times very very many people had no option but to stay wherever they were. Famine and revolution are much more common and more mundane than you expect.

[pigpop]

The groups and communities that weathered the collapse of the Roman Empire the best were those with some degree of self-sufficiency and military protection.

Prepper has become an umbrella term that is applied to a huge variety of people and mostly as a pejorative based on the sensationalization in media.

Many people that would be dismissed as preppers are perfectly normal people who approach the problem rationally. They take a layered approach which involves preparing for a range of timespans and events from the most basic like an extended power outage of 1 to 2 days or an unusually heavy snowstorm or minor flooding that may temporarily make roads impassible. Then escalating to natural disasters with week or monthlong power outage, gas and food shortages and damage to infrastructure. Personal disasters such as a housefire, flood or even financial difficulty from loss of job or health crisis. Then larger natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and forest fires. Only after those are sufficiently covered would they consider more speculative events such as extended nationwide financial crisis, large regional disasters like a volcanic eruption, extreme earthquake, tsunami, major civil disruption, war, economic collapse, government coup, pandemic, etc.

What they do to prepare would include basic individual preparedness like having a generator and electrical hookup to power their home, extra water and food, essential everyday medications, alternate heat source, emergency radio, enough gasoline on hand for both the generator and vehicles and equipment like a chainsaw for clearing downed trees. Also vehicle packages or "go bags" with what you would need should you have to leave your house immediately during an evacuation or fire, if these are kept in the vehicle then they also help should you become stranded in your vehicle during a snowstorm or breakdown. They also prepare in their community often by simply having good relations with their neighbors and helping them when they're in need but may also volunteer with local emergency services or be involved in charitable groups or with likeminded people.

A lot of this has a long history in rural communities that required some level of self-sufficiency due to a lack of services, more precarious roads/powerlines and being low priority for aid during disasters.

FEMA's recommendations only address short term problems and evacuation. They're not sufficient for disruptions lasting longer than a week and the difficulties that people face in more rural areas during disasters.

I've personally been through events that have cut off grid power and transportation for my area for a few days as well as large widespread power outages lasting more than a week. When that happens you find out very quickly how important it is to prepare ahead of time.

Disasters are rare but not rare enough that you can be certain you'll never experience one first hand. "Collapse" events are very low probability, low enough that most people in the world won't likely experience one in their lifetimes but they do happen, you can probably name several countries that have recently been through such events due to war and many more that have been through them in the last 100 years. Many of us are lucky to live in very stable nations so you don't need to make those scenarios your number one priority but it's at least worth the effort to consider what you should do now to help yourself and your community to continue to thrive over the long term.

[colechristensen]

>A lot of this has a long history in rural communities that required some level of self-sufficiency due to a lack of services, more precarious roads/powerlines and being low priority for aid during disasters.

My grandmother and particularly great grandmothers prepared for winter... because it's a cold climate and grocery stores with the varieties they have are pretty new. So shelves in the basement full of canned goods they canned themselves, I remember making soap with my grandmother when I was a child... things like that.

For everyone it's this huge unreasonable hobby for me it's like well this is a bit of a return to a practice that was dying because of modern conveniences... but having a gun, a supply of water, a generator, and a full pantry in the rural midwest isn't exactly a radical concept.

[globalnode]

calling someone a prepper is an adhom, just like calling a greenie a tree hugger. just another way to dismiss something that is emotionally confronting so one can continue to feel some comfort in their own bubble.

[atoav]

Well yes and no. You will always have some have actually prepared; people, and you will have people who cosplay people who are prepared. The latter see buying things that help survival more as a hobby than a thing that needs to get done in order to survive. It is the difference between a hunter who needs a gun as a tool and a gun nut that collects guns because he likes theorizing over minor differences between them online and nerd out about them.

That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone.

This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.

[bombcar]

Every peppers' dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSd1GoUW-M

[computably]

Calling somebody a racist is an "adhom," but it's not very controversial to say racists exist and it's bad to be a racist...

[sigbottle]

I feel like fallacies can always be applied to anything because unless you're doing pure math (and even then, tons of caveats - one major one being that you already bought into the framework), you can always question deeper assumptions and yes, structurally it might even fit a fallacy. I mean, is-ought is one of the famous unresolved ones.

Yet we still have arguably correct beliefs in spite of fallacies. That suggests that merely pattern matching isn't a good solution to detect what "truth" is...

[coldtea]

The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.

[vetrom]

I have lived in places like that, and absolutely prep like that when the environment calls for it. I'd expect a non zero proportion of the HN readership has as well. See: Burning Man, the fanciest refugee camp on Earth, where you need to schedule, plan, haul in, and haul back out again everything you need to survive.

(I've also spent time living in legit BFE where the closest store for something can be more than an hour away, YMMV)

[coldtea]

If you think the Burning Man is in any way representative to what people do in places like that (think war torn African states, the Middle East, etc) then...

[komali2]

The most important aspect of Burning Man and why it works is the thing most preppers/American Libertarians ignore: the community.

Burning Man isn't interesting because a bunch of individuals pitch tents in the desert, it's interesting because a society is built in the middle of the desert, spontaneously.

[bigfishrunning]

The "preppers" I encounter are on ham radio, and I'd say they are more community conscious then the average person. Many of them work in public services (EMTs and the like) or are retired and formerly did. Most have stocked pantries, gardens are common. Most are willing to help out when there's a power outage or a fire. The anti-social picture that popular culture paints of preparedness-minded people is entirely not true in my experience.

[komali2]

Right, I agree, basically my experience with preppers and libertarians is, the ones disgusted when you ask them if they're "leftist" are the ones with too many guns and not enough neighbors, and vice versa for those who embrace the label or don't care.

[bigfishrunning]

So you go around asking people if they're "Leftist"? Why? Either you get a non-answer or you start a fight with somebody for no reason -- what a strange thing to do

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

But I bet they would've loved the opportunity to do so before it all went sideways.

[coldtea]

I mean they practically know and prepare in different ways, because the popular idea of prepping is bullshit.

[nxobject]

> I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd.

I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash!

In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children.

In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)