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Advice From a Lifelong Urban Prepper
The basics to being prepared don’t require you bugging out to the wilderness.
For most of my adult life, I have been a secret prepper. I travel incognito.
If you plan for emergencies, people tend to label you a wacko, paranoid, or a magnet for doom. There is also an admonishment from fellow preppers to hide your supplies to keep desperate people from viewing you as their personal savior.
The first rule of prepping is that you don’t talk about your preps. So, I simply nod along when people tell me we shouldn’t “overreact.”
Along Came a Pandemic
I quietly monitored this COVID-19 outbreak as I do most emerging crises.
As a result, I have N95 masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, spray disinfectant, and a large supply of toilet paper. I bought these items in January, long before there were shortages. I stopped touching doorknobs before China locked down. My coworkers teased me about using hand sanitizer and admonished me that I was blowing the risks way out of proportion.
Many people don’t prepare at all because they believe they must address every situation and it is too daunting. So they embrace the normalcy bias and do nothing.
