Is having a fire extinguisher in your home prepping or adulting? In my mind, it’s pretty squarely in the center of both mindsets. However, if you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck so you can stockpile bullets and beans, you may be a bit too far to one side. If your only flashlight is an app on your iPhone, you may be too far to the other. (If your life strategy is resulting in ever increasing debt, than you are neither prepping or adulting.)
I think many common apprehensions around “prepping” often come from examples that have a noticeable absence of adulting. However, there’s a lot about prepping that can complement your effective adulting efforts.
A common focus for prepping and adulting is health. It could be argued that both pragmatic prepping and adulting are built on the pillars of physical, mental, financial, and social health. If one of those is weak, it can make all of your other efforts that much more difficult.
If you think of adulting as progressing up the pyramid of Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, then prepping is all about being more resilient to backsliding when the status quo changes.
Those changes are inevitable whether it is the loss of of income, the loss of health, the onset of war, or catastrophic natural disasters. History has never had a period where people were immune to all of those. However, some types of change are more likely than others.
There was a time when I was preparing for the possibility of a massive earthquake in my relatively stable seismic zone, but I wasn’t contributing to my 401(k) because I thought a big enough catastrophe would render retirement futile. I have since learned that preparing for the least frequent circumstances does not eliminate the need to prepare for the more common ones as well.
When I started adding adulting to my preps, I found a sense of satisfaction in preparing in a way that covered the most common scenarios as well the rarer risks.
All of sudden financial preparedness shot way up the priority list, including insurance, emergency funds, retirement funds, and improving my earning potential. One of my favorite focuses became a deep pantry. For starters, I discovered a significant financial advantage by storing what I ate and eating what I stored. I was making fewer trips to the store and I found myself in a much better position to wait for sales. Also, when inflation hit hard, it was really nice to be eating food that I bought at last year’s prices. And, speaking of eating, I can’t think of any day, much less any emergency, when I would like to not eat. Now I had food that would be available for the most likely of crises (job loss or income reduction) to the rarest of risks. In fact, the only emergencies that would not benefit from a deep pantry were along the lines of total loss house fires and that encouraged me to better prepare for those as well.
As I’ve started incorporating adulting into my prepping, fire extinguishers have been added to firearms, firestarters, and other preps that I’d rather have and not need than need and not have.
I still have the basics of beans, bullets, and band-aids… but I am now much better prepared for many more changes to the status of my physical, mental, and even financial health. (Admittedly, social my be lagging a bit behind.)
While it’s wise to be wary of extremes in prepping, I find it hard to imagine effectively adulting without striving for the resilience that can come with pragmatic prepping.
One pitch for the ultimate prep: a modern economy with all it entails. Go ahead and prepare for a grid-down emergency (please), but that should never be the primary plan. No prepper worth his or her salt should let their clean water be contaminated due to neglect… just as no prepper should choose to let a society with hospitals and water purification plants crumble around them.
Don’t underestimate the benefits of a healthy society. Odds are that the overwhelming majority of everything you ate, wore, and used today was prepared by the hands of hundreds of others working together.
The ability to be self-reliant is essential, but good neighbors are priceless. IYKYK.
PS This article may not be received well by those who propose that skills are more important than tools. I am not trying to counter that concept in any way. Money is a tool and it requires some basic skills to acquire, use, and retain it effectively. If you are without those skills you can count on ending up without this tool. If you desire to be disciplined enough to survive in the wild or during a grid down situation, but you cannot live within your means even in the absence of catastrophes, that should be fertile food for thought.