Some of The Worst Mistakes You Can Ever Make as a Prepper

They're not what you think.

Photo by eldhose kuriyan on Unsplash

If you’re into prepping, maybe you remember how it felt at first.

Maybe you wanted to keep it a secret.

You were embarrassed.

Maybe you remember how your family reacted when you started talking about bugout bags and rain barrels. Maybe you remember the look on their face and the sound of their voice, like you were confessing to a crime. Maybe your friends and relatives suggested therapy, as if you were wrong to worry about the state of the world and your family’s future. Slowly, time proved you right.

My evolution as a prepper went a lot like this, starting about five years ago. I’ve done a lot right, but I’ve also made a lot of mistakes. My mistakes weren’t spending too much or making bad purchases. They go deeper.

Here’s what I mean:

Doubting yourself

It’s easy to judge yourself for prepping when everyone around you thinks you’re a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Alas, look around.

The whole time, the worst conspiracy theories out there were all true. You were right. I was right. From private islands to underground bunkers, the richest and most powerful people in the world never cared about us.

They couldn’t be bothered to save the planet or protect human rights, because they were too busy destroying the planet and preying on our children. They weren’t just negligent. They weren’t just careless. They weren’t just lazy or ignorant. They were the ones causing all the death and destruction.

They’re still doing it.

There was never anything wrong with taking steps to protect yourself from these monsters and the fallout from their actions. That’s what you’ve been doing. In a nutshell, that’s what prepping is. It’s about protecting yourself and the people you love, so they can continue living.

Obviously, we have to make decisions with care. We have to plan. We can’t just cut a hole in our wall on a whim or buy a pallet of food with no idea where to put it. But wondering if you’re overreacting isn’t planning.

It’s simply self-doubt.

When you doubt yourself, you waste time. You waste energy. You waste resources. You spend a lot of that lying awake at night, wondering if you should be doing something instead of just doing it. I’ve been there, and I’ve done it.

I’ve stopped.

Taking half measures

If you don’t trust yourself, you take half-measures.

They’re expensive.

Looking back, my biggest mistake was trying to prep without looking or feeling too much like a prepper. It’s fine to start out small. It’s even a good thing. But eventually, we’re all going to have to make bigger decisions than keeping a deep pantry. We’re going to have to make some hard calls.

Should you get solar? Should you install a composting toilet? Should you get a water generator? Should you build a rain harvesting system? Should you actually start trying to grow some of your own food? Should you try to start learning how to do home repairs yourself, even if that’s harder? Should you have that difficult conversation with your spouse, your neighbor, or your best friend?

Or should you just keep buying little pieces of gear and hoping they save you? Should you just keep hiding canned goods around the house? Should you just keep browsing Zillow for the perfect bugout location you’ll never afford?

We all have different goals and different resources. We’re all going to make different decisions about what’s best for us in a collapsing world. Some of us will get that cabin with 20 acres of land. Some of us will make plans for staying in the suburbs. Whatever decisions we make, we have to make them with care.

But simply deferring them doesn’t help us.

It only hurts.

Not committing to a plan

If you don’t trust yourself, and you take half-measures, then you never commit to any real plan for a future that many are scared to face.

A plan doesn’t have to mean moving out to the country. It doesn’t have to mean building a utopian collapse community.

It just has to be a plan. It just has to exist. The plan can change. It often means deciding what you’re not going to do. So, you’re not going to build a bunker in your back yard. You’re not going to stockpile food buckets and ammo. So, what are you going to do? What can you do? How? When?

That’s a plan.

Only prepping from a sense of urgency.

Prepping got a lot of attention after Hurricane Helene, and Trump’s election. Suddenly, everyone wanted to learn how to grow their own food. They wanted to know how to fortify their homes against storms. They wanted to know about water purification and bugout bags. Now, it seems, not so much.

Of course, there will be more Helenes.

And more fascists…

It’s easy to prep from a place of urgency. Fear motivates us. But when you only prep when you’re scared, that’s not prepping. That’s panicking. It’s not wrong to feel a sense of panic. Fear is a valuable emotion.

What you do with it, that matters. Panic-buying supplies and then letting them collect dust in your closet, that’s a mistake.

You have to prep when you’re not scared. You have to gather the supplies. You have to build the systems. You have to grow the food. You have to learn the skills. You have to do it without all the fear in the background.

You have to do it when everything feels fine.

Prepping should be calm.

Not chaos.

Feeling guilty

Not everyone has the time, resources, or ability to do the same things you can do. And vice versa. Does that mean you shouldn’t prep?

No, it doesn’t.

You shouldn’t feel guilty about building a food stockpile. In the U.S., we throw away 100 billion pounds of food every year, up to 40 percent of our entire food supply. It’s absolutely nuts. That food could be preserved. It could be stored. Our government and their billionaire donors could end food waste and hunger at the same time, two birds with one stone, with better planning.

The problem isn’t resources.

It’s a lack of will.

Why don’t they do it? As we discussed, they’ve been too busy flying private jets to private islands to prey on our children. They’ve been too busy running international crime rings, maxing out profits, accumulating wealth, and running genocides. That’s why they don’t do it. They don’t benefit.

When you store some rice and dried goods with care, preserve it to last years, with plans to either eat it yourself or share it with someone during a time of crisis, you’re not doing anything wrong.

You’re doing something great.

Sure, you can make practical mistakes when it comes to prepping. You can store the wrong kinds of food, in the wrong place, with a bad rotation system. But the idea of storing food, water, and supplies comes from a place of logic and wisdom. Civilizations have been doing it for thousands of years. It’s not wrong. Our leaders should be doing it. But they’re only storing enough for themselves. Like so many other things, the burden has fallen to you and me.

When billionaires hoard wealth and resources, filling bunkers with gold and gas masks, the media says, “Do they know something we don’t?” But when you do it, they call you a doomer and a hoarder…?

Gimme a break.

Over/underestimating your preps

There’s only so much we can do.

No, we probably can’t stockpile enough food to survive a famine that lasts for years. We probably can’t fight off every militia that comes to our door. Eventually, things could get so bad, they become unsurvivable.

There’s middle ground here.

Your preps don’t have to guarantee your survival through every disaster for the next two decades. If they can’t, that doesn’t make prepping futile. If your preps help you live a few more years, isn’t that worth it?

If they help you survive one disaster, didn’t they do their job?

What are you living for, anyway?

Who are you living for?

Some of us want to stay alive as long as possible, because every day of life is another day with our friends, our families, our children, another chance to do something we love, or at least find meaningful.

That’s the point.

Forgetting to live

There’s nothing wrong with prepping, but you can go overboard. It’s not about the time you invest in it. It’s not about the money, either.

It’s the mindset.

Pop culture has conditioned us to see prepping as something we do out of fear. Maybe that’s how it starts, but think for a minute.

The fear tells you something.

It means you have things, people, and purpose in your life that you value. You don’t want to lose them. You want to protect them for as long as possible. So when you prep, focus on that. You’re doing it from a place of love and purpose. You can protect all of those things. And you can enjoy them. That’s the whole point. Some things are guaranteed. We age. Our children grow up. Things end.

You don’t want to spend your life protecting something you never experience. You don’t want to protect family members you never spend any time with. You don’t want to save a life you don’t find any meaning in.

You could prep for ten hours a day, and you could do it in a way that makes your family feel loved and appreciated, not scared. You can do it while taking breaks to spend time with them, while telling jokes, while listening to them talk about all the things they enjoy. You can prep, and you can live.

Don’t forget to enjoy it.

Giving up

Prepping is hard. It takes time, and patience. You’ll make mistakes, little mistakes. You’ll miscalculate something. You’ll get the wrong tool. Your crops will die. It’ll make you feel like the whole thing was a waste.

You’ll downplay the good decisions.

You’ll fixate on the bad ones. You’ll feel like quitting, when you should’ve just taken a break and tried again later.

Don’t.

Prep with purpose

Imagine spending countless hours thinking about all the reasons you can’t do something. Millions of people out there do just that. They don’t want to prep because they don’t want to dwell on the negative. But they dwell on it anyway. They just do it in secret, and they stuff it all down under a fake smile.

There’s no shortage of obstacles. Maybe you live in an apartment. Maybe you have an HOA. Maybe you work all the time.

Whether it’s prepping or something else, we’ve all had those nights where we couldn’t sleep. We were thinking about doing something. Well, some of us just got out of bed and started doing them. We turned the anxieties and uncertainties into action. I mean, we weren’t going to sleep anyway.

Were we?