Five Reasons People Quit Prepping
Kevin Felts 08.17.17
What are some reasons people quit prepping? I have seen this quite often over on the Survivalist Forum. Someone may join the forum, be gung-ho, ask all kinds of questions, post pictures of their progress, then slowly disappear from the community.
For the most part, I can not blame someone for losing interest. People become bored, lose sight of their goal, depression, divorce and so on.
It takes a lot of dedication to stay in the survivalist/prepping community for years, or even decades.
Let’s take a few minutes and talk about things that may cause someone to quit prepping.
Burn Out
If you do something over, and over, and over, and over for long enough, you eventually get burned out.
Stockpiling food, doing inventory, checking expiration dates, and rotating canned foods gets down right boring. How many times can someone do the same repetitive action before they get sick of it?
Then there is burn out from watching the news and waiting for something to happen. How many times can the news report on Iran developing a nuclear bomb or North Korea, before the fear mongering gets old?
No Time
Who has time for prepping when the kids are enrolled in every after school activity available. Whether is it football, soccer, baseball, basketball, dance. Whatever it may be, it takes time out of the schedule. So, people quit prepping to make time for other things.
Leave time for some kind of prepping activity. This could be camping, hunting, hiking or gardening. Rather than consuming the kids with sports, leave the schedule open for family time that is prepping related.
When my kids were young, we would go to a Pawn Shop in Orange, Texas and buy silver quarters. I was attempting to teach them the value of precious metals. So, something as simple as coin collecting could be prepping related.
Overwhelmed
When someone looks at prepping as a whole, it can be overwhelming.
A few examples:
- Bug out bags
- Nuclear fall out
- Caching
- Bomb shelters
- Nuclear war
- Bird flu
- Swine flu
- Stockpiling food
- Guns
- Ammunition
- Gardening
- Training
It is pretty much impossible for someone to train in all aspects of prepping. The time, and probably money, is just not available. I have seen people in the forum say there is so much to prepping they feel overwhelmed. That may be the reason some of them quit.
Money
Having extra money to spend on prepping is a limiting factor for a lot of people.
The middle class is barely getting by. Home ownership is the lowest in decades and buying power has been stagnated since the 1970s. The honest truth is, few people have expendable income that can be dedicated to prepping.
Some people say prepping does not take a lot of money. However, we can not speak on the finances of others. For some, $25 may not be a lot. For others, $25 may mean the difference between their children eating or going hungry.
Lose Interest
Why are we prepping? The United Nations and free trade agreements have abolished global conflicts.
With modern science and vaccines, we are safe from any new pandemic.
Right?
There is a trait to human thinking, we expect trends to stay the way they are. Because something has performed a certain way in the past, we expect it to perform the same way in the future. Because there has not been a global conflict since the 1940s, we expect the world to stay peaceful. Therein lies the fallacy.
Maybe losing interest and burning out are related? However, someone can lose interest without ever reaching the burn out phase.
Don’t Quit
Prepping in a long term activity. Generations ago, people relied on the food they grew, and it was considered part of everyday life.
The difference between then and now, we have become more dependent upon others for our day-to-day lives. Rather than growing our own food, we go to the grocery store and buy everything we need. When the system collapses, people will have no idea how to feed themselves.
