How to Start Your Survival and Preparedness Journey

What is survival anyways?

Survival comes in many different forms, and there is nothing specific about it. In reality, every day we are alive, we are defying the alternative. Death. Survival, and the art of being prepared, doesn’t have to just be for the crazy folks who are sitting on enough freeze dried food to feed an army for a year. Survival is really more granular than that. Survival is getting enough sleep, being able to feed yourself, having a positive mindset, getting exercise, having a financial plan to sustain your lifestyle, and much more. All of these things we take for granted because the technologically advanced life we live in creates a simplicity to this thing we call survival. As technology advances, often times, it creates a form of simplicity to tasks that may have been laboring to begin with. Look at the every day use in GPS. Before opening Apple Maps and navigating to the nearest restaurant, we would need to find a restaurant, get the establishments address, pull out our map book of the area, find the best route to get form point A to point B, and if you were smart find an alternate route in the event of unexpected traffic or construction. With all that being said, even if it seems basic, we are all in survival mode in our every day lives.

To get us started, let's take a quick look at the definition of survival. Merriam-Webster has two definitions of the word; 1) The act or fact of living or continuing to live longer than another person or thing. 2) The continuation of life or existence. That being said the scope of survival is pretty wide open. In reality everything that you do on a daily basis to get through the day is an act of survival. Now, there are definitely situations one could find themselves in that increase the difficulty of survival from beginner difficulty directly into expert difficulty mode (a little gaming reference for all you nerds out there). Some of these key difficulty changing moments could be self-inflicted or we can have an event, out of our control, that would cause us to try a little harder. Sometimes just knowing you're crushing it at not dying is all we need to move forward (keep it up little buddy).

Budgeting for survival

The biggest factor with preparing for anything is the financials. Expenditures are littered throughout everyday life and hold us to a fixed budget. Let's also face it, we are not really getting wage increases yet the costs of everything are going up. That makes it extremely difficult to try and now fund this prepared mindset we are starting to find ourselves in. As with everything else in our life we need to be able to afford taking on new costs. If we are starting from square one with our survival preparedness, it can be a very large expense. Like lots of things in life we will just need to be patient and good things come to those who wait. I really don’t like waiting but it is better than putting myself, and my family, into a financial bind. We can avoid all of this heartache by sticking to a budget.

If you already have an itemized budget, this will be a quick step to work through. Simply look to see if there is any allowance that can be allocated towards saving for your new survival purchases. If we are set up correctly in our budgeting normally, these new financial burdens become easier to take on. However, if we are not previously set up for success, this step can be a lot more cumbersome. I won’t bore you with all in the logistics of creating a financial plan this time. If it is something that interest you, I plan on creating a guide for building a decent budget that will help you with more than just survival planning. But for now, let's just assume we all have a couple bucks every paycheck we can cram in a coffee can until we have identified the survival needs we have to spend money on.

What are you preparing for anyways?

It’s great to have a budget in place and to know we can start making purchases to better our survivability in whatever situation we are preparing for. However, what exactly is the situation we want to prepare for? If we don’t have a clear goal in mind, or a plan to achieve that goal, we are just pissing in the wind. Even though some of you are into that type of thing, lets focus on the metaphor; were doing something and not getting a positive result. It could be that the only thing you are preparing for is to have a larger savings account. In that case, complete that budget part we just talked about and mission accomplished. I think there is more we are looking to accomplish here though. Lets try to figure that out.

In the world we live in today there are unlimited things that are happening that could give someone pause. That pause is a good indicator of something we may want to be positioned better to work through. Below is a list of more popular scenarios individuals look to prepare for:

-Financial independence or a financial climate where we don’t worry about missing a paycheck

-Power outage

-Natural disasters

-Civil unrest

-Sustainability when in outdoor environments (hunting, camping, backpacking)

-Increased physical fitness and body resiliency

-Electromagnetic pulse (EMP)

-Mainland invasion by a foreign enemy nation

-Personal survival in a life or death situation

-Being able to defend others when needed (family, friends, complete strangers)

This list is not exclusive but hopefully gets you thinking of things that you could benefit from preparing for. As I said before, preparing for situations isn’t just for the loony bin crowd. It can be something very simple. Identify your topic or subject focus and execute on that. If we don’t know why we are doing something, it’s going to be hard to do it effectively.

Creating actionable steps for your survival journey

Very famously quoted by Benjamin Franklin “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. Life is tough. I get it. My wife and I just had twins and I'm still finding the time to watch the Yankees game and write this for your reading pleasure. What I mean by that is you need to make time to do the things you want/need to do. We are only given 24 very short hours in a day. Majority of the time, we should be sleeping for 8 of those hours. Work consumes another 8 (unless you have a commute, then your looking at about 10). You get home and need to eat food so you don’t die, another hour. Just these very simple things I described have eaten up 19 of your precious 24 hours. For those who don’t do math on their own, that leaves you with 5 hours. To some, 5 hours may seem like a long time. I will tell you right now, 5 hours is really not. In order for us to best utilize that 5 hours we have left with our pathetic excuse for a day, we need to create actionable items for us to be successful in that short amount of time.

Now that we went through that though exercise, preparing for survival is the exact same way. What are the factors we are working with? What is actually available to us at any given time? How do we use what we have to better our position in our given scenario? All of these are great questions to think about and dissect so we can posture ourselves in best of position as we can. Work through this by thinking of the big picture. An example of this would be; I want to be prepared to survive one week after a natural disaster that forces me to stay in place and wait it out. From there, we can build micro tasks to get to that main goal. What are the basic things I will need to survive? Water, food, and shelter. How much water will I need to survive one week by myself? One gallon of water per person, per day. What is the best food option for my planned situation? MREs, freeze dried meals, and a stock of longer shelf life items. How do I make sure all the contents in my fridge don’t all go bad? My Refrigerator needs energy to run, generators create energy… I need to think about buying a generator. What is the best generator for my situation? Identify required energy load, available fuel source, inverter vs standard operation, and so on. In an emergency situation, people will hear I have a generator and may want to steal it. How do I best secure my generator?

This back and forth is a good example of how we think big picture and come up with micro steps to achieve the greater goal we are looking to accomplish. The best thing you can do is try and think about all the potentials for that situation. Then think about more problems you will need to solve for that specific subject. Get really granular with it and solve all the downstream problems you can come up with. The other part of this is we have the world at our fingertips. Use the internet to help you think of things that maybe you weren’t considering. Watch videos of how people do things. Whatever you do, don’t stop working toward bettering your situation and being better prepared for your situation.

Where do we go from here?

If you have made it this far, I can tell you are doing everything you can to absorb as much information available to better yourself, your family, and or those around you to be more prepared. This is a great first step. There are many benefits of being a prepared individual. You could see a reduction of stress in your life to start. Often time we worry about things that are out of our immediate control. Thinking about things like natural disasters could create a form of panic or fear that makes you spiral into an unnecessary depressive state. Or, you can come from a family background where money was an issue as long as you can remember. Because of that, you made a promise to younger you to never let that happen when you were in control. Like I said before the goal may just be making sure you could survive if for whatever reason that next paycheck didn’t clear.

Whatever your reasoning for wanting to take the next steps in your preparedness journey, you are here. And for that, I am proud of you. Keep it up and stay curious. That is the only way we move forward as a civilization. I am starting my own writing journey now with this posting to help myself and others along the process. I live for thinking logistics and finding ways to better my situation. I like thinking about stuff like this as much as I like sharing it with others. Couple that with my drive to want and write more, I decided to start this journey to help others prepare for what could be the hardest day of there life. However, through good preparation, it will make that harder time suck a little less than it would have if you were not prepared at all. Please follow along with me as we get into the weeds of all this. I will be doing it if I have 1 or 100,000 people following along. This is my form of meditation so deal with it and learn something with me. I don’t claim to know everything ether. I am just like you, learning as I go. If you have a better way of doing things feel free to reach out on any of the JS Outdoors social media platforms.

Stay safe, and get outdoors.

Sources

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/survival