There has never, truly, been a better time to start prepping. With tensions rising around the world and the domestic situation in the US getting worse by the day, it’s more important than ever to become truly self-sufficient in as many aspects of your life as possible.
As you start taking radical responsibility for your own outcomes, you’ll probably feel a sense of peace and calm that you haven’t before.
That’s the peace that comes with knowing you’ve done everything you can do before trouble strikes. That’s one of the best reasons that anybody should become a prepper!
But in the interest of complete transparency, I’ve got to tell you that there are some definite downsides to prepping, ones that you should know about before you begin. Keep reading, and I’ll tell you about 12 that you need to consider before you take the plunge.
It Can Cost a Fortune
There are just no two ways about it: prepping can cost a fortune! And I mean a literal fortune…
And yes, I’ll be the first person to fly the flag and proclaim that prepping always begins with where you are and what you have, regardless of your budget and assets.
There’s always something you can do to be better prepared than the person you were yesterday, and lots of things won’t cost you a nickel—just time and sweat equity.
However, when it comes to material preparations like equipment, extra food, real estate, vehicles, and more, chances are you won’t have any options for acquisition except by plunking down cold hard cash.
And the costs tend to snowball: the more prepared you want to be, the more money you’ve got to lay down.
Handling your prepping finances in a family that has to account for every nickel can be enough to give you nightmares.
Your Friends and Family May Look at You Differently
Prepping is more socially acceptable than ever today. After living through the horrors of 9/11, 20 years of the global war on terror, and the recent pandemic, more often than not people will look at you like you’re a little crazy if you tell them you aren’t doing anything to prepare.
Remember how desperate people were for toilet paper a couple of years back?
That, ultimately, is a good thing. This sort of self-sufficiency should not be stigmatized. But regrettably, I can tell you decisively that it’s still so in some quarters, with some people. Especially if you are enthusiastic about it!
The stigma of the fanatical, howl-at-the-moon doomsday prepper persists, and even though you might not be living in an underground network of repurposed school buses, when family and friends find out how you are spending your time, money, and energy, they might start to genuinely question your mental health.
It goes without saying that friends and coworkers finding out you are a prepper might be the kiss of death for your social life…
Paranoia is a Real Hazard
By the same token, even if you are 100% good to go mentally and emotionally, prepping has a way of fomenting paranoia, even if it is a soft paranoia.
And spare me the old rejoinder that goes, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”
The more people focus on problems, the more fixated on those problems they become. It’s sort of like your mental muscles that hold a threat, or an issue, in the bounds of your attention start to lose their tone and then what you are focusing on gets bigger and bigger all the time.
If you start focusing on self-defense because of a violent crime or two that happened in your area, it’s easy to start seeing threats everywhere and losing touch with reality out of a desire to be prepared.
This has a legitimate cost on your well-being and that of your family.
You can say the same thing about prepping for natural disasters, social unrest, or anything else. Truly living your life as if something terrible will happen in the next minute, hour, week, or month is no way to live.
Security Will Be a Real Concern
On the other hand, security might well become an even bigger concern when you start diving into prepping. You’re going to be accumulating food, expensive equipment, possibly firearms, pricey electronics, and potentially raw assets in the form of cash or precious metals.
Don’t be surprised when word of your activities starts to travel, no matter how careful you are and how much you impress the need for secrecy on your family members. Another old saying says that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, and that’s definitely the case when it comes to prepping.
This game of Chinese whispers has a way of increasing your profile and significantly increasing the chances of robbery or home invasion: everyone has scumbags in their personal circle, even if they don’t know about it.
Most People Won’t Hold Themselves to a High Standard
Here’s another thing you should be aware of before you take the plunge. The business of survival, the real thing, can be brutally difficult and demand a high level of competency for success.
The fact of the matter is that most preppers won’t stay disciplined enough to attain and maintain the levels of proficiency that will improve their chance of survival.
It will be the occasional bout of weekend warrior-ing, or using prepping as a thinly veiled cover for trying out new hobbies. The dedication won’t be there, and neither will the grit and tenacity.
Accordingly, most preppers won’t develop any sort of cohesive, holistic readiness. Certainly not when it comes to skill sets. If anything, when push comes to shove, you’ll be a glorified loot box for some other survivor or for predators who want to take what you have.
And if you are committed and dedicated to beating those odds…
Learning and Practicing New Skills Takes a Lot of Time
Everybody can buy gear, but the gear won’t make you good. Having the right gear is only half the battle; the other half is skills.
There are lots and lots of skills you should learn to be a well-rounded prepper, including land navigation, first aid, self-defense, crisis response, leadership, camouflage, gardening, sanitation and hygiene in austere environments, and a whole lot more.
Reading a manual once or twice does not equate to skill. Neither does messing around every once in a while on the weekend.
Dedicated practice takes time, and a whole lot of it, and reaching even a journeyman level of skill requires considerable investment.
That means a lot of your free time and other discretionary time will be dedicated to skill-building—if you are serious.
You’ll Have a Lot More Chores to Do
No matter how efficient you are, when you start prepping you’re going to have a lot more things to do one way or the other.
Taking up something like gardening, for instance, will require weekly or even daily chores during the growing season if you want your garden to stay productive. No problem, you might say, you’ll just store all of your food in cans or packaged form.
That’s fine, but now you’ve got to inspect it, rotate it, and keep a database on what you have on hand if you are smart. That means, yep, more chores.
Batteries need to be changed and rotated, all kinds of equipment and gear need to be inspected for rust or dry rot, and bug-out paths need to be scouted and maintained.
Truly, when you decide to become a prepper, your to-do list will never end.
Prepping is a Lifestyle Change
Reading over all of the above, you might have come to this conclusion already. Make no mistake, prepping—really prepping—is a lifestyle change.
It’s not a hobby. It’s not something you can do once a year like your taxes.
If you’re going to get ready and stay that way so that you and yours have a better chance of survival when the balloon goes up, a large part of your waking hours, effort, and energy will be devoted to your endeavors.
That means other things must be pruned away or given lower priority.
Is that hobbies? Free time? Rest? Events and gatherings? Start taking stock of your life and what you’re willing to part with now before you decide to pull the trigger.
If You Plan on Surviving Alone, You’re Probably Won’t Make It
Something that every would-be prepper needs to hear right up front! It’s just the way it is.
I know for American men especially, the notion of the lone badass, the grizzled, edgy frontiersman, is firmly and rightly ensconced in our national identity, but those guys typically do it because they have no other choice.
You do. People are social creatures, and we work and operate best in groups. When it comes to survival, you simply won’t have the margin for error, the available manpower, or the sets of eyeballs to cover all eventualities going it alone.
Whether you involve your family or join a group of like-minded people in the form of a MAG, you’ve got to have folks you can turn to in times of trouble.
The Most Important Preps are Super Boring
Like I mentioned above, I know a whole lot of preppers, and to a degree, I’m guilty of this myself, that use prepping as a thinly veiled excuse to explore new hobbies or buy fun new toys.
This can be okay to a degree, and there are lots of enjoyable pastimes that translate to better readiness, but the fact of the matter is, the most important preps tend to be pretty boring.
Learning to tie knots, practicing primitive fire starting methods, carefully researching which bug-out locations are best, and rotating stored food isn’t a super fun time for most of us.
Even if you are going shopping, most of us would rather buy guns or tool-up a bug-out truck rather than buy water filtration systems, a big stockpile of food, a generator or backup battery system for your home, medical supplies, and the like.
Nonetheless, those boring things are the things that will most likely save the day when the sky starts to fall!
The Gut Check
This is something that’s rarely talked about in prepping circles, but I believe it’s important.
If you’re ever faced with a serious calamity, be it a natural or man-made disaster or something like a societal collapse, there will be tons of desperate, ailing people out there who need or want what you have.
You must consider, and discuss with your family, ahead of time what you will do.
If you’ve spent countless hours, untold money, and no considerable amount of your own life preparing for this eventuality so that you and your family may live, are you just going to give it away? This is harrowing stuff.
Worse yet, there are going to be desperate, deranged, or simply evil people out there who will kill you or your loved ones to get what you have.
Are you ready to deal with them and do so with finality? This is not conjecture; this stuff really happens in the aftermath of catastrophes, and it always has. Search your own soul now because there won’t be time at the moment of truth.
Your Preps Might All Be for Nought
Lastly, something that no prepper wants to consider as a possibility, but nonetheless it might be. It’s entirely possible that whatever occurs, disaster or otherwise, that would send you running to get your preps, might take all of your preps from you.
A tornado or wildfire might level your house. Your house might be looted bare while you and your family are away. Maybe everything just gets flooded under 10 feet of water and ruined.
Losing your “stash” of preps entirely is a devastating punch in the gut. Are you prepared for that? Do you have the tenacity and the skills that can compensate? If the answer is no, maybe prepping just isn’t for you…
Tom Marlowe practically grew up with a gun in his hand, and has held all kinds of jobs in the gun industry: range safety, sales, instruction and consulting, Tom has the experience to help civilian shooters figure out what will work best for them.