Only one carry gun for life

On the basis of the recent poll I got this request:

Something Else – How to Survive Long Term in a WWIII Scenario for a married man with young children (Shelter, Food & Water, Surviving extreme Heat/Cold, Defense, How to keep your wife and children in good spirits, Not drawing attention to yourself, etc.)

It’s a pretty comprehensive question and an entire book could be written about each of the topics, so my reply will necessarily be brief and somewhat generic, but hopefully still specific enough to make a difference.

Good Spirits

Also known as Morale, may be the most important factor of all. It certainly tends to be in most conflicts throughout human history.

You should be aware of this, especially for your wife and children more than other factors. Consider: If you move to rural buttfuck-of-nowhere intersection and Hillbilly country, you might feel wholly relaxed that no one will waste a nuke or military to come steal your 3 goats and 15 chickens. However, your wife might miss things like actual shops where you buy food instead of have to skin and gut whatever you shot for dinner. She might even like to get a coffee at a cafe once in a while, frivolous degenerate that she is (joke! That’s a JOKE!). The rugged life of an off grid prepper that has his own bomb-shelter may be the stuff of manly dreams and boyhood joy, but generally is not seen in the same light by the gentler sex. So discuss these things and make sure everyone is clear on the difficulty and/or changes of lifestyle. Are there women out there that would love this life-style, sure. But they are a minority. And almost everyone likes hot water and indoor plumbing, and not freezing in winter. So, read my 4 part series on taking on clown world and winning (use the search me button on the right). If you do, you will see that ideally you need to pick your place on the basis of the geography you want to have ideally. Although, for most people that is already set, it is not too late to make the jump now (it is likely to be more expensive if you want to do it quickly, as always). The factors affecting morale are endless, and even more so for women, so it is difficult to give sound advice to all. One lady I spoke to was having trouble being an hour or so away from her family in what is still a pretty civilised area of a very urban country. She had not been living further from her parents than a few minutes and the change was a shock. The rural area she was in was not remote by any means but felt like it to her and feeling isolated with small children made her days feel like an interminable Groundhog Day. So you need to consider these things and take them into account.

Unlike men, most women will not be happy with an ideally fortified home in an ideal rural area, with a secure bomb shelter under the house, gun ports and plenty of weapons and stock-piles of ammo, food and clean water. Unless you have a wife like the one of the main guns-ho guy in the Tremor Films, what would seem to be ideal to a man is rarely ideal to a woman. She wants mani-pedi and spa locations nearby, a good hairdressers, nice friends to gossip and laugh with about the goings on in the town and their respective husbands and girlfriend’s love affairs and so on. Trivial nonsense that doesn’t matter in a hot war zone? You bet.

On the up-side, it’s mostly because women like these things that we don’t live in a permanent hot war zone, for the most part. Because we men tend to want to please them. And do they appreciate our efforts to give them a poisonous Starbucks on every corner in lieu of bashing irritating neighbours over the head with a nicely shaped stick? Not even a Thank you, kind Sir, I tell you. It’s just the way they are. No point getting upset about it.

So, the HOW you ensure good morale with your wife, is a giant minefield that no one on the internet can possibly navigate fully for you. I can only tell you to not ignore it, prepare for it, prepare her for it and consider that the things that are so insignificant to you that they may never even have entered your head all your life, might be extremely important for her. After all… she doesn’t even think about Rome daily!

Women are primarily solipsistic, so if they experience some discomfort, the Universe is out of whack and God should stop and make it right (through you mostly) and if He (you) don’t, then, you must be the problem. By and large. Your 14 hour days stacking wood for winter, pondering how to build a biological septic tank and your own solar panels, really are not as interesting to her as you would expect of any normal person.

You need to have a very deep connection based on honesty with your wife in order to navigate this well. And keep in mind off-grid farming is brutally hard. And even harder with small children to look after. So, building your community, having one that is active and fun and good is very helpful. Having little friends for your children is also very helpful.

That all said, I sincerely hope that your wife is good natured enough to be the kind of person that can read this entry and laugh, in unadmitted generic agreement with my caricatures. And more importantly, that she is smart and logical and objective enough, to realise that if and when the SHTF, she better be ready to take up a shovel and dig the dirt with you, and at minimum reload the rifles while you hold off the zombies, and preferably shoot some of them herself. How you find/foster/cultivate/generate that delicate balance of manicured nails, pretty, sexy dresses and chocachinos with friends with the realities of having your entrenched fall-back positions for the zombie apocalypse is a puzzle you need to figure out on your own. But figuring it out is VERY important, so don’t ignore it.

Children can generally be kept in good spirits by simply spending time playing with them and teaching them things in good order. Which of course takes up a lot of time, but our children (the little ones) are learning from us all the time and actually enjoy being helpful. The two older ones may need ye old dad’s foot in the backside to motivate them, because they were raised outside of functional family structures, unfortunately, but they are definitely improving and will get there soon enough, and when they do the sense of achievement for them and us both is also an awesome feeling to have. So make the entire concept of having good morale a game you enjoy instead of a chore you dread.

Not Drawing Attention to Yourself

Better than that is being thought of well by your neighbours and community. Help the people near you and be friendly and genuinely a good guy. Of course, if and when the SHTF they will also all come looking to you for help, so you need to balance that. For me that is relatively easy. I am a misanthrope by nature and don’t like people much as a rule, but I am polite and friendly to everyone, until they give me reason not to be, then there is no mistaking who I am and what kind of level of “force” I can bring to bear if required. Generally, if people realise you’re a nice guy but have no hesitation in turning heads of bad guys into pink clouds at the drop of a hat, you get the right balance of helpful (and good) friends, and respectful strangers. The down side is that if and when they DO get organised to come for you, they will actually be a force that is organised and to be reckoned with. But that is my way, because it comes naturally to me. You need to find your own natural way and work your strengths and better your weaknesses. I am not particularly worried about organised roaming gangs of zombies, because if and when it comes to that, there probably isn’t a worse guy to go after in a radius that probably reaches the nearest army base. Even so, I have made good friends where I live and will help my neighbours if I can or when needed and they do the same in return.

Shelter, Heat and Cold

Obviously, your primary home needs to be suitable for wherever you have chosen (or are forced) to live. I tried to pick a place that is not too extreme one way or the other, but in reality, it gets snow in winter (which will probably only increase over time) and is a bit too hot in summer with a lot of attendant bugs in all seasons (flies and mosquitoes in summer and stink bugs in winter). If the weather changes drastically here, a greenhouse will become a requirement (and I plan to have one anyway at some point) and livestock might require better shelter, but your primary shelter and provisions for heating in cold climate is obviously a priority that needs to be faced and that you need to be ready to address in a grid down situation. If not, I suggest you move! It is a lot easier to survive hot places than cold ones. I have plenty of wood to last me literally years and I installed a large wood stove that can heat the whole house and also be used for cooking (not as quickly as the gas stove, but in an emergency, the house remains livable and we can still cook food even without electricity or gas).

The next big item is electrical independence. the easiest way to have some of this is to have a generator and some fuel set aside. It is however a temporary and not a long-term solution. You eventually want to get at least enough solar panels to run your fridge and a couple of lights and at least one or two power tools at a time.

My gasifier project was meant to do this by providing wood to fuel a gasifier that could power a generator, meaning I would not have to rely on petrol. That project, however, has so far been a failure. Which is not to say it is impossible, only that the effort required to make it work in the first place is a lot more than I thought, and more importantly, the effort required to keep it functional if you get it working might be even an order of magnitude higher. That said, I still want to provide value to the people that supported the project, so I am looking at alternatives ways to at least give them something that might be of use or interest for them.

Conclusions

Overall, the main issues are to create a home that is self-sufficient in terms of the basics: Water, heating, food, electricity, and sewage processing.

If you have achieved that, 90% of your problems are taken care of. After that it’s just being able to maintain and even improve on things as you go and preparing with better shelter, better community engagement, better weapons, better food stockpiling and even alternatives to using cash and especially digital money. The economy WILL collapse at some point, it’s not an if, but a when, and when it does desperation will drive people to accept whatever draconian slavery will be imposed on them. The whole point is for you to be able to survive completely apart from that, and in turn be able to inspire and help others near you do the same.

If you saw the recent (2020) series based on the Brave New World of Aldus Huxley (and with he same name) you want to be one of those “troglodytes” living outside of the “utopic” city. And you certainly don’t want to end up caught by them and influenced and ultimately caged by them in any way. Ultimately, you want to be able to roam free and either KEEP them all locked up in their cities, or have their cities crumble to dust with the architects of them buried under them.