Survival Needs To Be More Than Just Living Another Day

Discussion in 'Mental Preparedness' started by TexDanm, May 11, 2018.

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  1. TexDanm

    TexDanm Shadow Dancer
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    One of the things that I fear is going to happen to a lot of people is that in their drive to live another day and survive that they will lose themselves in the effort. The people that have been to war often survive to come home only to die one way or another when they are safe again. Post traumatic stress syndrome, battle fatigue, shell shocked, whatever you want to call it you didn't survive.

    The stress that a total collapse of our socioeconomic environment is going to cause is going to be a killer if you don't have the preparation to live a life rather than just survive. You are going to have to pull in and hunker down and keep your stress levels as low as possible. Even more important as soon as the danger passes even if it is only temporary you have to decompress.

    Those of you that are already living at your bug out location will have a lot less stress. If you are going to have to bug out your chances of coming out of it safely will be dependent on how well you plan for this and hopefully you won't just be on the run. Life as a refugee is BAD. People are not going to know you or want you. Everyone is going to be on a hair trigger and you do not want to be perceived as a dangerous stranger. That means that if you are going to bug out you need to bug out TO SOMEPLACE. If you have familly that you can go to great but if not you need to start making you a place now.

    What this will do for you is that you are more likely to be accepted but also as important you will be going to someplace that you will be familiar with. This will reduce your stress. Life means some laughter, some friends and some pleasures. You have to be able to feel safe sometimes and can't be on guard 24/7/12/365.

    I've been through a lot of hurricanes. I've seen people just fly all to pieces because they assumed the storm wasn't going to be bad where THEY were and had made no preparations. Where I live out in the woods, We have been without power for over a week a couple of times. I know people that were without power for 6 weeks after Rita. Those of us that STAY prepared actually have a pretty good time. We have water, food and ways to cook. Most of us have generators that will keep out freezers cold and allow some limited other things. I personally don't worry about power other than charging things and keeping the coolers cold. No power means that the gas pumps don't work.

    After a collapse you need to have all your plans already laid out for as many possibilities as you can think of. The situation after an EMP won't be the same as a financial collapse or a plague of some sort or a period of really bad civil disorders. Each will have slightly different problems. Sit down now and look at what you would need to do in every sort of disaster that you can imagine.

    I will tell you this for a fact, running off into the woods and going Davy Crockett is a slow death. It will be you and a few hundred thousand strangers. Expect forest fires, people shooting at each other trying to protect THEIR territory. I personally think that the national forests will be about as dangerous as being in the middle of Los Angeles!

    Each person has their own idea of what is comfortable and what can't be lived with. You need to plan according to your personal comforts. Every plan you make is a way to lower your stresses. Let me tell you, when people break down it is a mess. They can go in all sorts of directions. Some just shut down and become useless to themselves or anyone. Others can go MEAN crazy. In the US it is called going postal! I hate to admit it but I've seen a LOT of crazy in my life and you do NOT want to go there. People can rck along for years and then one day they have handled all they can and they break.

    After TEOTWAWKI there are going to be a LOT of crazy people whose minds just couldn't deal with their losses and the stress of having to adapt to a new world full of new rules. We live in a timesoft minded. We keep death at arms length and any time something bad happens we let someone else "handle" things for us. My Grandfather dug his father's grave and he was laid out on the table for the wake. Death was a familiar thing to them. They killed their supper pretty often and most families lost some children. By today's standards these people were a hard and merciless people. In Teas at least "justifiable homicide" covered a lot of things. For example if you caught an man in bed with your wife you had a legal right to kill him on the spot. If you got caught stealing you might not survive.

    This is going to be the world we will be living in if things fall. They weren't hard or cruel, they were survivors. If you will look to how they lived you will learn a lot. They didn't just survive, they lived.
     
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  2. Keith H.

    Keith H. Moderator Staff Member
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    I do agree with the majority of what you say Tex, & I do bare in mind that you are referring to America. Here in Australia we have much more room, & "going Davy Crockett" as you put it is not such a bad option here. I am already living in the bush, but I am very aware that there is always the possibility that we may have to leave under certain conditions & move further into the wilderness. I don't see many city people lasting out bush for very long, most won't even make it to the bush in a major shtf situation. There will be just us & the Aboriginals.
    Keith.
     
  3. Old Geezer

    Old Geezer Legendary Survivalist
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    A.c.t.u.a.l.l.y. many people get saner-er-er when put to task. During WWII, asylums -- especially ones in remote towns -- were often abandoned by staff, even medical staff. The staff were either off to serve in the war or they got out as the battle fronts shifted. So there the psychologically afflicted were left on their own. They fell apart didn't they?! Nope. The "inmates began running the place" phenomenon kicked-in. The "disabled" began doing their own laundry. The catatonics cared for the kitchen. The hebephrenics did the hedges.

    One of my uncles saw the absolute worst of the worst during WWII -- the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of Remagen, on and on, he said that there were times when he could have stepped from body to body. He was awarded the Bronze Star and should have received the Silver Star as did one of his company commanders (the two of them were together, went forward and called mortars over their own heads to wipe-out Germans; half of his own company were killed; I'm looking up at a photograph of his company, wide photo, before they went to war). I had to drag these stories out of him. He simply went on with his life, put the war behind him, wouldn't talk about it. I'm sure his experiences troubled him, however he did not crawl into a whiskey bottle, he just went on, fathered kids, held down jobs, was a productive citizen ... and war hero.

    “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." -- William Faulkner


     
  4. lonewolf

    lonewolf Societal Collapse Survivalist. Staff Member
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    most people in the UK aren't going to make it past SHTF, people here live a 21st century life addicted to their technology and they wont be able to survive without the trappings of modern life.
    anyone who tries to leave a city whilst there is still fuel will end up in one big traffic jam on the main highways, the roads will end up as one big parking lot.
    anyone who tries to leave the cities after the fuel is all gone is walking and even in a country the size of the UK its a long way to anywhere, for instance London to the South West will take 3 weeks to a month and possible more if your talking Lands End Area, I don't think most will even get half way, they'll give out about Salisbury Plain.
    getting into the South West will be difficult for someone brought up in a city because of all the rivers and river valleys and hills(the south west is very hilly).
     
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  5. TexDanm

    TexDanm Shadow Dancer
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    You are very right. It is called being forged in fire. In my opinion most of the liberals are insane in their belief that Uncle Sugar will tend to all their needs and protect them. I can NOT imagine how they can refuse to protect themselves!!! Understand though, while that fire hardens some there will be many many more that it is going to burn up.

    I had an Uncle that was a tail gunner on a Flying fortress. They were shot down over France. He was shot in the left temple with the bullet exiting out his left eye. It did surprisingly little damage other than costing that eye. He spent a little over 2 years in a German POW camp. He was a good man and was sane but there was a part of him that never came home. He live on the family farm and stayed to himself other than family. He never married and didn't like to be around too many people at one time. He was one of my favorite Uncles but it was sad.

    I have a first cousin that left his soul in Vietnam. He was marine recon and did three tours back to back. He evidently was good but when he came home he was deathly afraid that if he lost his temper he would just kill someone. He couldn't deal with the normal bickering involved in life and eventually ended up living in his parents garage like a hermit.

    A second cousin made it home from Korea but ended up killing himself he couldn't sleep without having nightmares. I knew way too many guys that came home from Vietnam and ended up eating a bullet. Back then they just sent you home and dumped you out. Post traumatic stress disorder back then was more or less considered whining. We do slightly better now...at least our returning warriors aren't spit on like my cousin was.

    A AM a survivor. Suicide have visited all to many people that I have known over the years. Some family some friends and a bunch of just people that I have known. I wear a semicolon tattoo that is on my heart and soon to be on my hand. Look up semicolon tattoo and you will understand.
     
  6. Old Geezer

    Old Geezer Legendary Survivalist
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    The inhabitants of megacities will be devastated by the coming SHTF string of horrific years and hell events. And like you, I believe the majority will die. As systems break down, it will not just be starvation and violence that takes them, it will be diseases of every ilk. Right now, as we correspond, nine million, (9,000,000) babies die every year due to dysentery.

    It is my belief that more than we imagine will be able to survive and predate on peripheral / rural areas. Why? Many living in cities migrated there from countries where survival is iffy even in good times. Weekly I speak with Africans, Arabians, and former Eastern Block inhabitants. We share stories. How they survived back home will melt your eyebrows. They know how to grow food and though most have zero experience with firearms, there are significant numbers who have used firearms during their many wars, conflicts, and times of utter chaos. Now that these folk have been here for a while, their health has returned to them; their strength is back and they are fully able-bodied ... and then some. Many hold down jobs requiring strength and endurance. They are NOT going back to the conditions they once knew. They will do anything -- and I do mean anything -- to protect their families from that which they have known.

    Again, the squishy-soft white urbanites are gonners.

    Mean sociopathic white urbanites and the non-Westen cohort with whom they have aligned themselves will form packs, they will leave the cities if necessary, they will arm themselves and royally so. Uber-violence is no stranger to them now and will become second nature to them post-SHTF. Thank God, their numbers will not be grand. If rural folk form military units, they will be able to take on such feral packs without incurring heavy losses on their own side.

    Were I in a rural area of England or over on the Continent, I would be putting back some serious amounts of ammo -- legally or illegally. I would tell no one what I was doing. During hard times, maybe (a really big maybe) I would share -- that, if and only if my neighbors were mentally in the right place. Note also, that I would NEVER share with anyone who had ever had employment with government or any dealings with government.

    Post SHTF there will be many refugees out into rural areas; however far out, they will be there. The non-violent will be a bother and a drain. They will have armed folk to protect them such as ex-police and military -- some currently uniformed people will serve even without pay. In amongst them will be the damned. Predating on their own will be wolf-packs of once-humans.
     
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  7. TexDanm

    TexDanm Shadow Dancer
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    The killer in the megacities won't be when the power stops. It won't be when the water stops. It will be the sewer systems going down that will end them in a hurry. Typhus, typhoid, cholera and all the old diseases that were mostly based on people coming in contact with human waste weill return with a vengeance. People will be like the native Americans when they met the white europeans. Diseases killed 90% of the peoples that inhabited North and South America and the Caribbean Islands.

    At that time the people from Europe lived in cities with open gutters in the streets and had lived through plagues over and over. There is evidence that the Black Plagues finally stopped because anyone without a certain level of natural immunity had been killed. Those people bathed seldom and because of their environment had massively strong systems that protected them from all sorts of illnesses that other people in other parts of the world were decimated by.

    We no longer have that protection. Now our kids don't even have to deal with the old common childhood illnesses. If we get the sniffles we run to the Doctor and they give us a pill. The immune system of most people today is massively anemic by the standards of even 75 years ago.

    Animals of all sorts drink the water from puddle, streams rivers and lakes and live just fine. The same water is poison to people now. This is one of the reasons that I drink from fresh puddles. It gives me a little protection from some of the common minor things that others will have to adapt to. If things go bad the last thing I want is to be sick on top of it. You are going to have to deal with these things. You will be living in the dirt and unless you want to spend all your time boiling water you are going to contact unpurified water from washing your clothes, taking a bath or just being wet from crossing a creek and such.

    Sickness will wear you down if you are not prepared for it. I look at eating things right out of the garden that might have a little dirt on them and puddle drinking like allergy shots. I swim in ponds, rivers and lakes and the water gets in my nose and my body is exposed to the things that are there. Some is going to get in my mouth too and I never worried about it.

    LOL some people are going to freak out about being just healthy dirty. We wash our hands constantly and now days there is hand sanitizer everywhere. I never touch the stuff for a reason. Being dirty is going to be hard as heck for a LOT of people. Guess what? People will also start to smell again too. Other than a few hard working folks, nobody even recognises the human smell now. I used to be able to tell a lot about your ancestry by your smell went I was a kid. This was before air conditioning and people back then had body odor. So much has changed...
     
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  8. lonewolf

    lonewolf Societal Collapse Survivalist. Staff Member
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    I have always said disease will kill far more people post SHTF than violence will.
     
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  9. TexDanm

    TexDanm Shadow Dancer
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    The pale horse is always the fourth horse of the apocalypse and the end. It follows all wars and shows up at all disasters. No matter what the cause or form of the end as we know it in the end disease and pestilence will show its ugly head and finish off the weak and injured.
     
    Keith H. likes this.
  10. lonewolf

    lonewolf Societal Collapse Survivalist. Staff Member
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    in this case I think the weak and injured will go before the fit and healthy.
    given the land acreage available in the UK, which decreases each year as they build more houses for the increasing population, we cannot feed everyone without imports-which will cease in the long run if not sooner, without imported food we would only be able to feed 25% of the population, even that is debateable as the majority of this is "mono cropping" the same crop grown in the same field year after year after year, this is only possible by the liberal use of man made pesticides and fertilisers which again are all imported.
    so the "die off" in such a globalised economy would be huge and would certainly exceed 75% at the very least.
     
    Keith H. likes this.
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