A surprising amount of this book is dedicated to the more practical aspects of survival like food and medicine. Moreover it has a focus on how to sustainably produce these things as opposed to just hoarding a bunch of it and hoping for things to go back to “normal” before you run out.
As I’m reading this I start thinking about how these practices build autonomy, which is valuable even outside of a SHTF scenario. Growing, preparing and preserving food, learning medical care skills and learning how to treat medical conditions without a trip to Walgreens and generating power for yourself and your neighbors makes you less vulnerable to events that disrupt the “normal” flow of these things.
That’s when I realized that this sort of autonomy reduces ones dependency on employment as well, which is essentially retirement.
As someone who expects to work until the day he dies, this was a revaluation. Many of us won’t have a “regular” retirement. Capitalism and the collapse of institutions that provided our parents with a comfortable retirement won’t be there for us, and our efforts to save and invest on our own are undermined by the games played on Wall Street and the corruption of the federal government.
The “prepper’s path to retirement” provides an alternative where investment is made in skill and material tools, not fictional “financial instruments” we have no control over. Not only is this a more reliable path, it’s one that you can share with others and becomes stronger though collaboration.
It also has no lower limit on when retirement can begin.
There’s a lot more I could say about the upsides of this approach but I think it would be better to try it out and share the results in future posts.