Conversation

Replying to
I’m fairly good re this list. I’d give myself a B- overall. I’d guess the typical American would be at a D- but many would have guns (which are not on my list... if you have to prep for more than improvised “buy 2 minutes and run” level of violence, your planning is bad)
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If you need real weapons and fighting skills in any situation, you plans should have you leaving that area weeks before that situation develops
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I hate doing all this btw. I’m not a natural prepper. I like living on the most-leveraged edge of civilizational capability. Functional postmodernity is my milieu. Heavily hedged situations imply you’re spreading your mind thin over many futures with low leverage in all of them.
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An apocalypse is when you have to work 3x as hard to secure your future in 3x as many scenarios, all of which are way shittier than normalcy. Some people come alive with prepping, usually because they hate normalcy. They feel powerless and unhappy in the status quo. Not me.
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Most leveraged as in all-in on something fairly new and unproven (like blogging in 2007), not as in debt. Needs a label. My preferred mode is to early-adoption as grey-man mode is to tacticool. I like the edge, but rarely the next shiny new thing for its own sake.
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My default mode is actually lowest-energy/path of least resistance. In good times, I can coast with almost no effort on the slightest breeze of serendipity, putting like 99% of my energy into stuff I do for fun. IOW, 99% of my available energy is surplus/abundance energy.
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The problem with bad times isn’t that low-energy/path of least resistance diesnt work. It in fact works really well, and way better than more combative stances. The problem is even that minimum energy/resistance path is pretty demanding. Flow like water uphill over rocks.
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A fictional character who comes close to my ideal mode through good/bad times is Abelard Lindsey in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix. He’s a consummate flow-like-water exit/escape artist. Picks no fights he doesn’t have to. Isn’t selfish, but is pragmatically aware of his own limits.
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I suspect I have a “correct play” poker sensibility though I don’t play poker. Pick the right table and play correctly even if it means you sometimes lose and an incorrect player wins by luck. This mindset is hard to bring to open-world infinite-game conditions.
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Curiously I think many strong preppers don’t have strong poker sensibilities in the sense that they’re disappointed if the future they prepped most for doesn’t happen. They’re emotionally invested in the apocalypse that proves them right even if it means they lost.
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Replying to
The inner game of prepping, I think is separating your identity development path from your effort path. Otherwise you end up victim of a metaverse level sunk cost fallacy. Just because you’ve logged 10k hours of zombie-killing prep doesn’t make the zombie apocalypse a good future
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Surprising how many otherwise wise people fail to achieve this separation. Do not invest identity in proportion to distribution of prepping effort across scenarios. Prepping is what you do, not who you are. But you’ll default to them being the same if you don’t look out.
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For eg. if poetry is your identity path but you can only spend 5 minutes/week on it in the gaps of 100 hours of zombie killing, invest all your identity narrative in those 5 minutes. That’s what makes life living for you. Secure that pilot light through the valley of darkness.
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If it looks like zombie world is here to stay, get good enough at zombie killing to expand those 5 minutes to 5 hours. And then work to find the poetry in zombie world and make it yours. Start work on a poetry collection titled “Undead Thoughts” etc.
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