Why I became a Prepper

I have a confession to make. It’s taken me a long time to admit this, but I just can’t hide the truth anymore.

**whispers**

I am a prepper.

Now, I completely and totally understand if this is how you now view me:

But the truth is, I’ve been a prepper for years. There’s a confluence of motivations that brought me around to this point of view, and I’d like to talk to them a bit in this post before I talk about the how of prepping in another.

One thing I’ve noticed is that interests tend to cluster, and I’ve found that to be doubly true of any interest that convinces you of a position that goes against the grain of a widely-held view. In my case, it was Bitcoin.

I got into Bitcoin a long time ago in college, as America was still dealing with the 2008/2009 recession. I was already moderately pre-disposed towards the economic and ideological thinking that aligned with Bitcoin’s core ethos; I found austrian economic thinking compelling and explanatory, and I found a lot of libertarian, agorist, and anarchist thought engaging and interesting.

Bitcoin fit very nicely into the niche that I found myself, at the time, most aligned with. Its success over the next few years convinced me that the mainstream view of money and economics in general was simply wrong.

Coming to that conclusion broke down some very powerful barriers in my mind; suddenly, everything was brought into question (and I don’t think this is an uncommon phenomenon when a person undergoes such a radical undermining of a mainstream opinion). If the mainstream perspective on such a massive topic could be wrong…what else was wrong?

Along with general interest in Bitcoin, I also developed an interest in developing software, where I learned all of the standard things you learn as a new developer. Object oriented programming, functional programming, etc. But what I learned on my own after getting started developing professionally was three huge lessons that I took with me outside the realm of code:

• The importance of de-coupling
• The importance of redundancy and backups
• The fragility that sometimes comes from being overly-optimized

Tightly coupled code is code that needs to know a material amount about other code elsewhere in your system, and that code is (usually) highly dependent on each other’s interfaces. Changing one class or service in a tightly coupled application often requires changes to a number of other objects. This isn’t as big of a deal for small applications, where the changes are easier to identify and can likely be caught. But in larger applications, these inter-dependencies are not always known or easy to find, and the risk of missing areas that require refactoring increases significantly (especially if your test suite is not up to par!) Loosely coupled code, however, is code that is not dependent on other code elsewhere in your application, and leads to increased flexibility and re-usability of your classes and services. You have to do less to make changes to your application than in a tightly-coupled situation.

Redundancy and backups are obvious; in the event of trouble, you want a way to remain operational while you address problems that arose. In the case of catastrophic failure, you want a way to restore your system to where it was at the time of the catastrophe. No real explanation needed.

One that really stuck out to me, however, was the fragility that comes from being overly-optimized. “Optimization” is a very broad term. In general, it implies modifying the system to make some aspect work more efficiently, or use fewer resources, or be more robust. For example, an API endpoint might be optimized so that it will execute faster so that it can serve more requests, or use less memory.

One thing to be wary of with “optimization” is that optimization is NOT the same thing as “optimal”. Optimization does not produce a totally “optimal” system: there’s always a trade-off. There are no silver bullets. When optimizing, only those attributes of greatest interest to the stakeholders are optimized; other attributes are often left by the wayside.

What can end up happening is that through the optimization process, you do something non-standard, less readable, more precarious than the way you had been doing it; you overextend your code, or your abilities. Code that goes from being an acceptable speed but readable, to extremely fast but unreadable, has just introduced another element of complexity and another vector through which bugs could potentially be introduced. Will you yourself even be able to understand what that code is doing in 6 months from now when something changes and you need to refactor?

In addition to these three lessons, I developed other ideological and moral views, especially around the topics of localism, resiliency, self-sufficiency, and scale. In general, I developed towards embracing an expanded locus of control and the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the principle of delegating the problem to the lowest level of organizational structure required to solve it. Think of it in terms of the US’s Federal vs State approach; if it can be solved by the state, or even by organizational levels below that, at the county or city level, then there’s no need to “lift” the problem to the Federal level. I sought to bring as much control over my life as possible into my own hands, which coincides with the principle of subsidiarity by bringing as much as possible into the lowest organizational level possible; myself, and my family!

Those were many of the things that influenced my development into adulthood, and continues to inform my views today. They also led me to asking questions like:

• Just how long the economy will continue to roar before a serious downturn?
• How long until the New Madrid fault line (which I live near directly on) would last before the next major earthquake?
• How long we could survive if a Hurricane Katrina style event (in terms of damage and disruption) hit where I live?

In an effort to hedge many things that I considered to be systemic risks (such as irresponsible Federal Reserve spending, etc) I began to actively challenge my normalcy bias. What happens when life is no longer “normal”?

I’ve seen the devastation that massive tornadoes can bring to a community, a big risk here where I live; I went through Joplin, MO several months after it was hit by an F5 tornado and the amount of devastation was still unbelievable. I’ve heard about the aftermath of massive earthquakes, and we’ve all see what’s happening to the world in the wake of Coronavirus transmission going global only a few weeks after it was found. How do I hedge those risks?

With proper preparation, of course! Prepping is about minimizing risk/disruption and maximizing survivability, be that physical, financial, or emotional.

Being prepared to handle as many situations as possible, in a way that minimizes disruptions to your normal life, is the essence of preparedness.

Let’s take food, for example. You get your groceries from the grocery store. Does the grocery store keep any non-perishables in inventory? No, they get regular shipments of food and only keep on hand what they’ll need to stay stocked until the next scheduled delivery is set to arrive. This all works beautifully…when things are normal. But take a knife out and pop that normalcy bias balloon for just a moment, and think about a few things with me.

What happens to the grocery store if the transportation system is degraded? If truckers aren’t able to work, or if the suppliers of food goods can’t produce enough product because their workers refuse to come into work? The point is who cares why, what happens if those deliveries don’t get made? The Just-In-Time logistics system that runs the world is, in my opinion, an over-optimized resource distribution system.

By having your own supply of food and water that you can fall back on in rough times, you enable others who did not have the same foresight as you to possibly get the items they need in times of distress. You reduce overall stress on the system.

Every prepared man or woman is a relief valve.

Every person that government agencies don’t have to provide food and water to in an emergency is a man or woman who is enabling a more resilient society, who is possibly even contributing to saving not only your own life and that of your family, but the lives of others by enabling the resources at hand to go further than they otherwise would have. That’s a wonderful thing!

Let’s also talk tight-coupling. What happened to the American industrial base? A lot of it was shipped to China (why it was shipped abroad is a complex topic and too long for this post). Huge amounts of our electronics, pharmaceuticals, plastics, medical equipment, even much of our national defense infrastructure is manufactured in a country that is likely to become a competing world power. So much of our ability to produce anything is extraordinarily tightly-coupled to China, and countries that are aligned with China or cannot be reliably counted on in a power struggle between us and them.

So if a regional conflict happened between us and them, what happens to our ability to import medication? What happens to our ability to make antibiotics, since so much of the ingredients we need is manufactured in China? What happens to our ability to wage war, given that we no longer have the factories or the tooling to make all of the necessary items we need for doing so? The tightly-coupled nature of America and the Chinese manufacturing base is a systemic risk that rises to the level of being national security concern.

You cannot ultimately escape the systemic forces that you live within; you can only seek to hedge against them, little by little.

And that’s exactly what I set out to do: to protect my family, as best I can, from those things that would pose a threat to our daily life. The goal is simple:

Minimize disruption; maximize survivability.

Prepping is an insurance policy against chaos. I chose a long time ago to begin ‘funding’ my own insurance policy against things that most never even consider. With the recent global outbreaks of Coronavirus, there are many more people beginning to take this seriously, especially those with Financial and Technology industry backgrounds where you tend to see a more thorough understanding of risk and how fragile complex systems can be.

For those just looking to get a start, a great, practical guide to prepping (without the tinfoil hat) is The Prepared, and is one that I wholeheartedly endorse.

Until my next post…