As a bachelor I was pretty good at NOT accumulation a lot of stuff, mostly because I couldn’t afford it. I still remember the days when furnishing my apartment consisted of a hand me down love seat, a few dishes, a mattress sitting on the floor and a 19” TV sitting on a TV tray… what else was I going to use it for, I didn’t have any food.
The positive side of this was I didn’t have anything and was able to move around quickly when I needed to. The negative side of this was well, I didn’t have anything.
Kind of ironic right?
Survival offers us the same kind of irony. Just think about water, the same water you need to survive could be the same water that causes hypothermia and kills you. The same animal that can sustain you, can also kill or injure you.
Now that I think about it, being a bachelor was survival.
Another reason I never had a lot of stuff to move was because sometimes I had to leave stuff behind. I remember times when I could literally pack everything I owned into the back seat of my car.
If that meant leaving my mattress behind because I didn’t want to be that guy with a mattress flopping around on the top of his car, attached with a single bungee cord, then so be it, I could sleep on the floor until I found another mattress.
When You Get Evicted
Luckily I was never evicted from any apartment, but there was a time that I had to get out because the living situation I was in was not a healthy one, that’s another story all together.
These days I like to think that I am a little more responsible, and I know I have A LOT more junk. Because of this I can’t help but think “What if I was put into this situation again?”
What if I had to leave my food, my water and my shelter behind and start with nothing? Can I do it? I have a family now, Can we do it?
The very things we are preparing for like Martial Law, an EMP and starving intitilists are the very reason we should all be ready for everything we own to be taken away from us, forcing us to make some lifesaving decisions.
Sometimes we get so focused on buying supplies, building our food and water storage and thinking about possible disaster scenarios, we forget that everything we own, and everything we have done to become more prepared could be taken away in minutes. Then what do we do?
PREP DRILL!
Put yourself in this situation: A week ago there was an EMP that caused the power grid to fail. You are not sure how it happened but you know it was man made. With everyone pointing fingers rumors begin to run rampant about the possibility of your very own government doing this.
You have enough food to last a month, so you are doing fine for now. But as you look down the street you see a small army of 50 or so post collapse thugs kicking people out of their homes and taking over the neighborhood.
Come to find out, this group of people have decided that your neighborhood is the perfect place for them to set up their headquarters, so if you leave you will probably be leaving for good, or at the very least over a month.
They are about 100 yards away and headed your direction, you have about 10 minutes until they get to your home…what is your plan?
Leave a comment below and let us know what you would do?
My Survival Plan…
Having a week to prepare for this, my hope would be that as a neighborhood we have thought about this scenario and are prepared for it. That being said, if I didn’t feel like there was enough support to stand our ground I would have to leave and live to fight another day.
My main concern is my family, as much as it would pain me to leave everything I would have to get my family out quickly and quietly rather than staying and fighting a losing battle.
Right now our BOL has nothing to offer so I guess we would grab our supplies, all the gas we have and head west to the mountains.
I think we would be able to last a month, and after that do a little recon to see if our neighborhood was still “under siege.” Even if we were not able to go back I think that if we can survive for a month with nothing, we are going to be fine, so we better start heading to our BOL get ready for winter.
Critical Thinking
As hard as it might be for some of us to admit, No one acts purely objectively and rationally all the time. We have our selfish interests, we gossip, boast and exaggerate. It is human nature to want to be right. We want to validate our prior knowledge, to vindicate our prior decisions or to sustain our earlier beliefs.
In the process of satisfying our ego however, we can often deny ourselves intellectual growth and opportunity. Doing this could lead to bad decisions now, and life threatening decisions in the future.
The fact that you are reading this, and you are interested in preparing shows that you use your critical thinking skills more than the average person.
Critical thinkers rely of reason rather than emotion, we rely on evidence and follow that evidence where it leads regardless of our personal opinions.
Critical thinking means being more concerned about finding the best explanation and always asking why, rather than needing to be right.
Critical thinking requires honesty and open mindedness. We consider a variety of possible viewpoints or perspectives and remain open to alternative interpretations.
Critical thinking also requires discipline. We need to resist manipulation and irrational appeals, and avoid snap judgments.
Non critical thinkers see things in black and white, as either or, rather than recognizing a variety of possible scenarios.
They take their facts as the only relevant ones, they take their own perspective as the only sensible one and they take their goal as the only valid one.
These are the subservient people the government likes, and these people are the ones we should be concerned about…they need to be lead and told what to do.
Survival Skills
As unrealistic as the movie Cast Away was, it does offer some good points. With all the mistakes Tom Hanks made in the first 4 days I just don’t think it would be possible to last 4 weeks, let alone 4 years.
Most of us will never get lost on a deserted island, but we could find ourselves in a situation that requires us to know some of these primitive skills and use some critical thinking.
Even if we don’t get forced from out homes the supplies we have will not last forever. What do we do when we no longer have a lighter? What will you do when you have to find more water?
Like the saying goes “you don’t know what you don’t know” and even though humans are pretty resilient, if you don’t have a good knowledge base to draw on you might have a steep learning curve to deal with.
When Tom Hanks was trying to start a fire he was drawing on the knowledge he learned from movies. He quickly found out that it was not as easy as they make it out to be in Hollywood. All the YouTube videos we have today are great, but take that you learned from it and try doing it, it’s not as easy as it looks.
Like I said, most of us will never find ourselves on a deserted island, but life does throw us curve balls from time to time. The more we can add to the database in our heads now, the better prepared we will be if something does happen.
On July 15th I will be doing a free workshop that goes through critical thinking, the 7 pillars of primitive skill and how skills like making fire, filtering water and building shelter not only apply to a wilderness situation, but an urban setting as well.
I will also be throwing in a few bonuses for anyone who attends live, and even 10 signed copy’s of my book “Be Prepared for Anything” for randomly selected people who take part in the Q and A session at the end.
Click the image above to grab your spot toady.
Discover more from Survivalist Prepper
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
2 replies to "When You Get Cast Away and Cast Out"
If someone can force you from your home, they can also force you to leave the supplies you need and maybe your wife or daughters.
Out comes the sniper rifle and the API’s @ 200 yards…After a dozen or so get set on fire with an API I think they would re-think that this was a good place to camp. That’s just me, then I have neighbors with the same mentality…