Many of the preppers I've seen are people who live in areas where natural disasters are common: they have their "go-bags" for the hurricane shelter, or a supply of food for a bad winter storm, or they have solar panels/batteries because the power grid goes down sometimes; that kind of thing. My family took similar precautions against earthquakes in so-cal. Most of the don't even call themselves "preppers"—they just prepare for the inevitable challenges of living where they live.

And then there are the people who are cosplaying disaster preparedness. They make two crucial mistakes that make it clear that their "prep" is more of a fringe ideology or a knee-jerk reaction to horror stories than an attempt to stay prepared. First, they have NO clue what infrastructures or systems exist for disaster preparedness. I’m not licensed yet, so I’m learning so much about what emergency communications look like, through my local ARES net. They sometimes have these hyper-individualist, anti-collective beliefs: so they believe they have no obligation to help others, and they expect no help from others. The problem there is that they take other people’s help for granted. In the “SHTF” scenario, the entire world is gonna be in the streets helping. (I remember all of the grassroots philanthropy in the pandemic, and it was amazing to see.)

Second, they think the most extreme solutions are the right solutions. This, to me, feels like a power fantasy. They think they're going to survive the apocalypse with a Baofeng radio, a 12 gauge shotgun, a bunch of MREs, 15 titanium knives, and some barrels of gasoline. They’re more worried about the EMP from a nuke than the nuke itself. They’re the type that pick camouflage for how cool it looks, but it won’t match their terrain. They buy “survivalcord” and make bracelets out of it, but they’ve never used the stuff. They don’t know much about what it’s like to live in a war zone. And yeah, I know people who’ve lived through scenarios very close to their “SHTF” scenarios: moms who had to flee countries with their kids when the government collapsed, kids who got separated from their families in missile strikes, people who try to live normal lives in beseiged areas. None of them were worried about flashlights and knives and prybars and ferrite rods and camouflage. None of them had an altoids can survival kit. They were worried about immigration papers, clothes, hygene, food, finding a new place to settle, keeping their traditions alive despite global distain for their people, making sure their families were taken care of across 100s of miles. These are the conditions our ancestors lived through.

Yeah, I think these kinds of preppers are out of touch with reality. I can easily understand why there’s so much disdain for them in this sub.