Do Survivalists grow up to be preppers?

[Magus]

So back in the heyday of Survivalists, you had these people that hated how the world was turning, collected massive arsenals of weapons, stored months of food and medicines and lived in creepy places out in the middle of nowhere, listening to short wave radios and the early internet with sweaty brows while counting their Krugerrands and numismatic coins while sitting on crates of MREs and ammo.

About twenty years ago, it seemed to go mainstream, they shed their camouflage for plaid shirts and overrals, and turned off conspiracy radio, got married, had kids and mellowed out. is that what happened or did I miss something?

 

[sonya123]

I love reading your posts, always something to laugh about You should be a writer or something

and yes I am on the "other " forum, been there a lot longer than here

 

[Neb]

So back in the heyday of Survivalists, you had these people that hated how the world was turning, collected massive arsenals of weapons, stored months of food and medicines and lived in creepy places out in the middle of nowhere, listening to short wave radios and the early internet with sweaty brows while counting their Krugerrands and numismatic coins while sitting on crates of MREs and ammo.

About twenty years ago, it seemed to go mainstream, they shed their camouflage for plaid shirts and overrals, and turned off conspiracy radio, got married, had kids and mellowed out. is that what happened or did I miss something?

Pretty much.

Back when magazines were periodicals I read Soldier of Fortune. SoF spun of Survive that was less bang bang shoot em up and more focused on survival after nuke warfare in about 1980. That is where I learned to make a radiation detector using a Styrofoam cup and aluminum foil.

Time passed and the cold war fizzled out and ushered in the age of Aquarius peace and love as the hippies came to power. Survivalists then saw the enemy within and graduated from surviving with a pack on my back to thriving with what I have in my house.

It was only after the TV show Doomsday Prepper did I learn of the term Prepper.

If the shoe fits...

So that is my story and will stick with it.

Ben

 

[Bacpacker]

My .02 is that while parts of my life may appear to be survivalist or prepper. My life is more patterned after my grand parents who grew up in the depression, farming, gardening, etc.Even in some ways farther back than that. At some point I'd like to get to the point of being seperate from the grid. More like the 1800's, but with knowledge from all those years

 

[Magus]

I love reading your posts, always something to laugh about You should be a writer or something

and yes I am on the "other " forum, been there a lot longer than here

I am a writer. check out the library section for some of my housebroken stuff.

 

[Cabin Fever]

I thought survivalists and preppers were the same thing? For me, I grew up to be both, probably because I took the part of the Boy Scout oath to heart that says, "Be Prepared."

 

[Magus]

No, Survivalists are more likely to be single, militant and individualistic, Preppers are family oriented and more defense oriented for the most part.

 

[Faez]

Too many labels to categorize people these days. It was once called country folks that worked hard in growing and harvest season to prepare for the winter and spring. All this new age nonsense with labeling just shows how disconnected many are from reality. I defy all labels except eccentric and old hahaha!

Did having 6 rifles, 4 revolvers, and 10k rounds of ammo make me a survivalist? Did growing my own food and putting up food for 6 months, make me a prepper? Did having goats, chickens, sheep, and beef cattle make me a homesteader? Did living in the mountains make me a mountain woman, hippie, or mother earther? Did having kerosene lamps and all hand tools, in the beginning, make me a pioneer? How about when I added solar, hydro, and wind, did that make me an environmentalist?

Too many labels too much categorization. Don't tell me you are a prepper, tell me how you are preparing. Don't tell me you are a survivalist, tell me how you are going to survive. Can you survive in the wilderness with just a knife?

 

[Aerindel]

Well, if you look into the history of it, original survivalists where combination of Vietnam vets and back to the land hippies, people who would sit on their porch in eastern oregon, smoking a joint and cleaning their AK while watching their naked four year old play in the garden, and IF they voted, it was probably democrat.

Then over time, 'anti'government' morphed into meaning 'conservative' and 'liberal' morphed into 'totalitarian' and the hippies all moved to the cites and became gay rights activists and the conservatives got diabetes and switched from pot to meth and 'survivalism' got forgotten about.

The next phase came more recently from an uptick in bushcrafting hobbiests and fans of zombie video games and you got a huge wave of sc-fi nerds who got interested in owning guns and knives and working out maps of how to get out of the city and building bug out bags, and figuring out clever little techy solutions to old problems. A lot of these people idolize 'back to the land' but given that land was by now really really expensive, they mostly focused on bug out scenarios.

The zombie thing really was the driving force in prepping for a long time, as it gave a lot of otherwise 'normal' people a 'story' to get them motivated, and since zombies where non-political, a common ground where people of different affilations could talk to each other. It was the height of prepping as a mainstream hobby.

Then covid hit, just a couple of months the prepping movement disintegrated into factions and ate itself alive and almost all the 'real' survivalists went dark and we where left with mostly just politicals and a handful of random misfits....everyone else having pulled the plug and gone to ground to avoid getting canceled. It was rather shocking and depressing how quickly any concept of 'community' imploded with first contact with 'the enemy'. I imagine it hit 'community' style preppers rather hard.

There WILL be another wave of popular prepping at some point but I can't really say what or who it will be. But I think its going to be pretty funny when the next generation suddenly thinks they've invented survivalism and finds out that there are people who have been living it for decades in secret like the Japanese solider who kept fighting WWII for years after the war was supposed to be over.

 

[joel]

I voted yes, but we were not survivalists, we were poor homesteads, who used everything we could to make to the next Spring.

 

[Alaskajohn]

Well, if you look into the history of it, original survivalists where combination of Vietnam vets and back to the land hippies, people who would sit on their porch in eastern oregon, smoking a joint and cleaning their AK while watching their naked four year old play in the garden, and IF they voted, it was probably democrat.

Then over time, 'anti'government' morphed into meaning 'conservative' and 'liberal' morphed into 'totalitarian' and the hippies all moved to the cites and became gay rights activists and the conservatives got diabetes and switched from pot to meth and 'survivalism' got forgotten about.

The next phase came more recently from an uptick in bushcrafting hobbiests and fans of zombie video games and you got a huge wave of sc-fi nerds who got interested in owning guns and knives and working out maps of how to get out of the city and building bug out bags, and figuring out clever little techy solutions to old problems. A lot of these people idolize 'back to the land' but given that land was by now really really expensive, they mostly focused on bug out scenarios.

The zombie thing really was the driving force in prepping for a long time, as it gave a lot of otherwise 'normal' people a 'story' to get them motivated, and since zombies where non-political, a common ground where people of different affilations could talk to each other. It was the height of prepping as a mainstream hobby.

Then covid hit, just a couple of months the prepping movement disintegrated into factions and ate itself alive and almost all the 'real' survivalists went dark and we where left with mostly just politicals and a handful of random misfits....everyone else having pulled the plug and gone to ground to avoid getting canceled. It was rather shocking and depressing how quickly any concept of 'community' imploded with first contact with 'the enemy'. I imagine it hit 'community' style preppers rather hard.

There WILL be another wave of popular prepping at some point but I can't really say what or who it will be. But I think its going to be pretty funny when the next generation suddenly thinks they've invented survivalism and finds out that there are people who have been living it for decades in secret like the Japanese solider who kept fighting WWII for years after the war was supposed to be over.

The Covid thing really exposed the prepper community and all its faults.

 

[joel]

Covid exposed a lot of people & their faults.
The Florida tee shirt with the name of star & politicians who fled the shut downs to party in Florida.

 

[Tirediron]

I don`t know, I get orneryer as time passes, so I started out as a helpful kind be prepared guy an now it seems like people are getting stupider and less able to process thought, so I kind of find that the opposite is happening, still prepared, but my line in the "sand" is becoming far more defined.

 

[Magus]

Covid exposed a lot of people & their faults.
The Florida tee shirt with the name of star & politicians who fled the shut downs to party in Florida.

Covid let me know just how good at getting by I am, I had a few wake up calls, but in all it made me stronger and showed me leaks that needed plugged.

 

[Biggkidd]

The only thing covid changed in my life is my daughter had classes online. Otherwise we noticed no change. Feeling pretty insulated from the worlds problems here.

 

[joel]

I am glad I got the herd immunity

 

[Hardcalibres]

Covid was a mild, but global crisis.

For survivalists, it provided the potential for learning a lot without a big risk of dying.

It showed how even mild crises can caused cascading failures.

It also showed how people without a Survivalist mindset can get themselves all tangled up, lose logic, make big mistakes (that would get them killed in a severe crisis), put all their trust in youtube clickbait and fail to see the forest for the trees.

At the start of the crisis, I posted that the crisis was going to provide several million opportunities to win a Darwin Award.......and that exact thing came to pass.

It turned the biggest online Survival forum in the world into an ugly and unproductive rant fest mostly full of bad advice.

Most people even failed to see that, once they started reading particular subject matter online, tracking cookies were making sure they stayed engaged by just showing them more of the same. Many disappeared down tracking cookie driven rabbit holes.

I was glad that I was separated from most of them by a very long data transfer network.

Like Aerindel posted, so much for groups/communities.

That was no surprise for us survivalists though - long ago, we assessed that would happen.

The crisis is the trigger - but people constitute the real and enduring threats.

 

[Hardcalibres]

I am glad I got the herd immunity

I hung out through the crisis with my cows.

That must be why I still haven't had covid.

 

[Aerindel]

I hung out through the crisis with my cows.

That must be why I still haven't had covid.

It's almost as if practicing what we preach works....

I don`t know, I get orneryer as time passes, so I started out as a helpful kind be prepared guy an now it seems like people are getting stupider and less able to process thought, so I kind of find that the opposite is happening, still prepared, but my line in the "sand" is becoming far more defined.

Indeed. One thing I learned about myself was that I have a far smaller tolerance for stupid people than I thought. When the subject was just hypothetical, I mostly just thought debating with them was a diverting game. As soon as it became at all real, I realized I had almost zero tolerance for most people....which was really funny considering I always thought I hated people. Little did I know how much I reeeeally hated people when the chips where down....to the point where antipathy is a problem for me. Its lucky I'm married...because I burned almost every other bridge to other people.

 

[Magus]

I'm a hermit myself. I can count the people I let near me on one hand, but I must have been exposed to it at least a bit.