A future that may ask a lot of you

[brin_bellway]

[cw: apocalypse]


(part 1)

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#domesticity #101uses for infrastructureless computers

I think about Siderea's "Nesting as Prepping" post a lot, TBH.

And while I'm on that subject:

The preoccupation with "can't stay" disasters focuses attention on a narrative of disaster which can be false for some kinds of disasters and will be false for the climate catastrophe as a whole. It's an assumption that disaster involves suddenness. Suddenly there's a flood; suddenly there's a fire. But you'll note that the pandemic wasn't sudden that way. I appreciate that for people who were not paying attention, or who scoffed at the warnings, and thus were caught unawares, it felt like that. But those of us who were paying attention had literal weeks of warning. Five, in my case.

The climate catastrophe as a whole is like that too. It's creeping up on us as an increasing frequency of calamities, increasingly unusual. If states or civilization as a whole is going to fail, it's not going to be all at once, overnight. It will be gradual, or at least step-wise. Probably.

I was reading a prepper forum thread recently talking about panic and crisis-leadership and thinking-on-your-feet and suchlike, and they theorised that the sort of people who get into prepping tend to be the sort of people who think well on their feet and take charge in crises. Which...feels like the *opposite* of my truth. I prepare in significant part *because* I know myself too well to think that I will be able to cobble together a plan at the last minute: my ability to make split-second high-stakes decisions is bad enough that in the end I surrendered my learner's permit, accepted a role as a second-class citizen because my thoughts run too slowly to be granted full membership in my society.

Working out how to deal with problems *in advance* lets me lean harder on the *quality* of my thoughts rather than their speed. *Quality* I can do, given time.

The top four highest-casualty disasters in Ontario, 1900 - 2016, were all plagues. There is, I suppose, a certain comfort in that: plagues rarely require split-second decisionmaking. The last two years have not demanded speed, but caution and skill. If those are what the future asks of me, then I may yet do well.

If not, then I will route around my weak points as much as I can, and aim for favourable terrain.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Yeah there's probably something here about, like - preparation is most vital for the fast disasters that change everything? The slow disasters are easier to prepare for while they're happening, so they don't enter the prepper threat model in the same way?

(... I'm not what logical connection assumes that because prepping for disasters requires a skill that therefore preppers were already good at that skill? Both because people aim to learn about things they need to learn, not that they already know, and secondarily because I've never seen that much evidence that the median prepper is very good at prepping? Maybe they would just like that to be the case?)

[brin_bellway]

I was figuring it might be wishful thinking, yeah. Although I'll buy that *after* you've spent some time contemplating and practising you're noticeably less likely to panic when it actually happens†, and some people frame prepping as more of a hobby than an insurance strategy and I guess maybe *those* people are more likely to already be talented at it. (...mind you I have absolutely met people who specifically seek out forms of recreation that they're bad at in order to improve, so maybe a hobby framing *wouldn't* result in attracting talented people. not sure how common that reasoning is among people deciding what forms of recreation to do.)

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>>The slow disasters are easier to prepare for while they're happening, so they don't enter the prepper threat model in the same way?

Word on the street is that by late January 2020, it was already impossible to get your hands on decent respiratory protection. I think there might be a lesson there about how even JIT supply chains have different amounts of slack in different areas: the more specialised and low-demand the item was in the Old Normal, the faster it runs out when it flips to being a basic necessity. Even just the people who were paying *very* close attention--more than Siderea, more than anyone I knew--were enough to overwhelm the supply.

(Plus there's definitely something about how keeping up with mitigation-of-slow-disasters leaves you with more slack to cope with fast ones. Keeping up with mitigation of general entropy, too: when the dirty dishes are piling up a lot, it pains me in a clutter/filth kind of way, but there's *also* the discomfort of a little part of me going "it would suck extra hard if the water went out right now".)

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†I've noticed a conspicuous absence of panic in my apocalyptic nightmares lately, which makes me somewhat hopeful about what percolation is going on down in my subconscious. ↩

[contrarianarchon]

Yeah I def agree that it's not stupid to prepare for them, but it's - less salient in people's minds, I think I was saying? (And to some extent it's still a lower priority, since you can juggle improvisation and JIT and such during a slow disaster theoretically if you're on the ball but you just Cannot do that for a bushfire if something essential is missing?)