Prepping is good for removing (a lot of) your impact on crises, particularly panic buying. You don't need to go to the store for TP "just in case" when you already have 100 rolls and a bidet. You don't even need to buy produce between pantry meals, a decently-stocked freezer, and vitamins.
You will also be able to weather moderate crises fairly well, like power outages, weeks-long water boiling advisories, a breakdown in services and transportation.
It is also an interesting exercise that will make you thoughtful of supplies and your place within the wider productive context. If everyone lost their job tomorrow - or enough to fundamentally change the character of society - how would you get food, clean water, maintain shelter, and protect yourself from sociopaths, chuds, and the desperate? And more importantly, you need to think about what you'd realistically do either as a small unit or as a larger mutual aid network, the latter of which is vastly superior in every way, not least of which is helping prevent your compatriots from dying. Your network is your comrades and/or your neighbors. If you don't have a least one of those, go fix that. As a bonus, joining a socialist org will also make you cool and helpful in other ways.
You will also probably start eating more cheaply and healthfully. This follows from the necessity to rotate your prep by eating the oldest stuff regularly. More meals from scratch using high-quality dried ingredients rather than processed foods and you'll be buying in bulk. Keep in mind that a "prep" need not be more than a few buckets of beans and rice and some vitamins. A 25 lb bag of chickpeas is like $20 and you can make at least a month of dinners with it (plus rice and veggies) for two people. That's less than going out to eat once most places (for 2).
The core skills overlap pretty well with mutual aid generally, so you can wrap them into community resilience and planning. Cooking a big-ass cheap meal is an essential skill for feeding people. Knowing how to treat and store rice so it doesn't get weevils or eaten by rats would be useful in many crises - and not just in the context of your own prep, but in a community food store. Basking in the glories of cheap bulk coconut oil is fun for everyone.
And be wary of libertarian LARPing preppers that think they'll just escape to the mountains with a backpack, guns, and an off-site prep and everything will be fine. In the context where they would actually need to do that, there would be refugees everywhere and armed gangs almost immediately and they'd just steal all their shit. You need to plan to stay where supplies and organized people are and to help the effort if such a thing even happens in your lifetime.
Prepping is good for removing (a lot of) your impact on crises, particularly panic buying. You don't need to go to the store for TP "just in case" when you already have 100 rolls and a bidet. You don't even need to buy produce between pantry meals, a decently-stocked freezer, and vitamins.
You will also be able to weather moderate crises fairly well, like power outages, weeks-long water boiling advisories, a breakdown in services and transportation.
It is also an interesting exercise that will make you thoughtful of supplies and your place within the wider productive context. If everyone lost their job tomorrow - or enough to fundamentally change the character of society - how would you get food, clean water, maintain shelter, and protect yourself from sociopaths, chuds, and the desperate? And more importantly, you need to think about what you'd realistically do either as a small unit or as a larger mutual aid network, the latter of which is vastly superior in every way, not least of which is helping prevent your compatriots from dying. Your network is your comrades and/or your neighbors. If you don't have a least one of those, go fix that. As a bonus, joining a socialist org will also make you cool and helpful in other ways.
You will also probably start eating more cheaply and healthfully. This follows from the necessity to rotate your prep by eating the oldest stuff regularly. More meals from scratch using high-quality dried ingredients rather than processed foods and you'll be buying in bulk. Keep in mind that a "prep" need not be more than a few buckets of beans and rice and some vitamins. A 25 lb bag of chickpeas is like $20 and you can make at least a month of dinners with it (plus rice and veggies) for two people. That's less than going out to eat once most places (for 2).
The core skills overlap pretty well with mutual aid generally, so you can wrap them into community resilience and planning. Cooking a big-ass cheap meal is an essential skill for feeding people. Knowing how to treat and store rice so it doesn't get weevils or eaten by rats would be useful in many crises - and not just in the context of your own prep, but in a community food store. Basking in the glories of cheap bulk coconut oil is fun for everyone.
And be wary of libertarian LARPing preppers that think they'll just escape to the mountains with a backpack, guns, and an off-site prep and everything will be fine. In the context where they would actually need to do that, there would be refugees everywhere and armed gangs almost immediately and they'd just steal all their shit. You need to plan to stay where supplies and organized people are and to help the effort if such a thing even happens in your lifetime.