Pardon my French, but that's a bullsh*t question. In a hypothetical TEOTWAWKI scenario - off the scale of what we generally consider here - what you carry on your back doesn't really relate to your chances of long term survival. First, if I'm actually living out of my BOB for more than a few days, I can guarantee you I'm not a spoiled baby (and there's nothing high end about my preparedness supplies, fwiw). Second, if I'm faced with a scenario of living outside my BOB for a considerable time, I'm looking at alot of active scavenging for food, warmth, humanity. My first objective would be to collect everything and anything that I might eat or I might use or learn to use, and to find people with similar wants and a desire to live on. That's because the principle of the BOB is a restoration of civil order after a relatively short time, and a return of the flow of supplies of food etc. Civilization in other words. Some in this forum may be situated where they hope to grow crops to sustain themselves after such an event - I hope they're pretty well practiced at sustainable non-mechanical argriculture, and I wish them well (and just the right bit of rain, and very few marauders). You want to posit the end of civilization and wonder how we all might fare if we had a knapsack on our backs - it's a bullsh*t question. Regardless the state of our BOBs, 95% of the most prepared of us would be dead by the first winter, and its a crapshoot which of any of us here might defy those odds. It's a question for some other forum if you ask me.

First winter? Lets make it our goal to all meet up in so-cal if anything bad were to happen!

I think you have it backwards.

Practical preparations for known, expected and understood short and mid-term situations are not likely to interfere with less well understood, less probable, possibly more extreme and long-term situations.

Generally I have found the more a person or group concentrates on the less probable and fringe possibilities the less likely they are to have real and practical preparations in place and ready to go for the short-term situations that everyone will be facing. Things like storms and blizzards.

A friend recently spent a bit more than $500 on radiation meters and KI but his family doesn't have even a three-day bag. Their important papers are scattered. They always eat out so there is little food in the house. There is no reserve of water or provision for obtaining, storing or treating water. When his kid fell down his wife, a nurse, didn't have enough on hand to produce even a simple bandage.

Preparing for an imaginary and unlikely mega-event he has failed to prepare for things that happen every year. Last storm that came through I gave him a flashlight and spare batteries.

I have noticed a lot of guys in the same boat. Bomb shelters, radiation meters and guns maintain their interest and get the vast majority of resources. Batteries and and bleach and toilet paper are just too mundane to hold their interest. They can see themselves wearing their MOPP gear and heroically fighting off villainous marauders amidst the fallout and it is a role they relish.

Chemical toilets, primitive hygiene; living off canned goods and bottled water for a fortnight; practical survival and preparations; are not so heroic. They are virtues of bean counters, list makers, shepherds; servants to friends, family and neighbors. Much harder to be heroic filling these rolls. But much more practical.

It reminds me of boys playing cowboys. They are keen to play the shootouts against the indians or rustlers or, given a mature bent, the romance and wild times of going to town. But kids and young men seldom play out the 100 hours a week riding drag. The long hours. Working in the heat and dust and rain. The lousy food. The monotony and boredom. The stuff that makes up 99% of what it is to work cattle.

If anything I see the focus on the possible adventure heroics and highly unlikely situations of mass collapse and apocalypse as being a detriment to practical, mid and short-term, real-world preparations. Not the other way round.

Thanks for the thoughtful responses.



Then you don't really need your BoB, do you?

*giggles*

In one of Heinlein's books he makes a similar point about guns. As I recall, he argued you'd be better off unarmed because you'd feel more paranoid and would avoid the dangerous situations where a gun would help. If you have a gun, you need to guard against any sense of invulnerability. (Heinlein has made pro-gun arguments in other books. I don't intend to start a gun debate here, but just to give a perspective on the original question.)

However, I think a short-term BoB would mainly be a benefit. It'd help keep you alive and so give you time to adapt. Bootstrapping. For example, you could use commercial cordage to build a shelter, and then sit in the shelter while you figure out how to extract natural cordage from plants. There's a danger that you might decide you don't need to figure it out because you have your commercial cordage, but in an EOTWAKI scenario hopefully you'd know you were in it for the long haul and wouldn't get complacent.

I completely agree with Art_in_FL. Whenever I talk to my friends and neighbors about preparing, they always think I’m talking about the end of the world. They say “it’ll never happen” or that I’m just paranoid. But I always tell then that I’m not prepared for the end of the world and that I don’t think anyone could be. Living in Minnesota we get a lot of different types of severe weather from blizzards to ice storms to tornados. People ask me if I think the Mall of America is going to be bombed. It doesn’t really matter! We KNOW that bad weather is going to happen… it happens every year! It’s only a matter of time until the right combination hits us with an ice storm (that knocks out the power) followed by a blizzard (which hinders attempts to fix it) and a lot of people are in a lot of trouble. My standard question is “What will you do when the power goes out for a week in the middle of January?” That usually gets my point across. I’m trying to prepare for likely scenarios, not ones from a Hollywood script. That being said; being prepared for the probable problems, I believe, puts you in a better position to cope with (or even think about) something bigger.

Same here. The more stuff you have the harder it is to hide it and the more likely you're going to have it taken from you.

I don't even think about stuff like TEOTW...what's the point? I'm more worried about real threats to my future like breaking a leg hiking or getting mugged at night waiting for the bus.

Only if you look like a soft target. I'm concerned that a Texan is concerned about people owning guns.

If you've got a good set-up don't bug out. Do the Alamo thing and make them come to you. . . okay, bad example.

Getting caught in the open "camping out" would put you at a disadvantage. Staying home with your supplies (shelter food, water, ammo) is almost always a better option. All you need is a fortified shooting point with clear lines of fire. Are you on good terms with your neighbors?

Yeah, I don't even have a BOB. I have a 96 hr kit that looks a lot like my truck and I have a get home bag that looks like a small backpack and which is part of the 96 kit on wheels. Bug out from San Diego? Where you gonna go? North to LA? East into the desert? Good luck with that. It's a pretty crowded neighborhood and very dependent on a supply infrastructure. If I bug-out it's because I sensed a problem and left way ahead of time -- driving.