“All Prep­ping and No Play, Makes Jim a Dull Boy”

One down­side to being a prep­per is there is always some­thing that needs doing to pre­pare for pos­si­ble emer­gen­cies. Peo­ple in your life may not share the same sense of urgency, to the point of being annoyed at your prep­ping behav­ior. Not only that, look­ing at worst case sce­nar­ios and threat matri­ces can be depress­ing. All of this can put stress on your­self, those around you and your finances. While there is always the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an urgent sit­u­a­tion such as an antic­i­pat­ed food short­age, a cur­ren­cy cri­sis, riot­ing, and all asso­ci­at­ed sur­vival issues, one also need to con­sid­er the rela­tion­ship and per­son­al health sur­vival needs. Your rela­tion­ships and your body/mind need to stay healthy or no amount of prep­ping can save you dur­ing a cri­sis. I sub­mit that it may be ben­e­fi­cial to take a break from prep­ping from time-to-time. A vaca­tion from prep­ping serves the pur­pose of:

1) Keep those non-prep­pers in your life from believ­ing all you do is plan to sur­vive, all day, every day.

2) Give you a men­tal and phys­i­cal break from the stress asso­ci­at­ed with think­ing and plan­ning for emer­gen­cies.

3) Give you time to reflect on your preps and what you might do next.

4) Give your bank account time to recov­er from those big pur­chas­es or a wave of small ones that have accu­mu­lat­ed. Yes, prep­ping is expen­sive and don’t let any­one tell you it is not. Going into debt to prep is not a good idea. Nei­ther is spend­ing all your free cash on sup­plies. You may need a break if:

-You find your­self stay­ing awake at night, obsess­ing over threats and pos­si­bil­i­ties.

-You are obses­sive­ly accu­mu­lat­ing a list of things to buy on Ama­zon and plac­ing orders such that some­thing is always in tran­sit or out for deliv­ery. You leave work ear­ly because you know a pack­age is wait­ing on the porch.

-You’ve made sev­er­al big-tick­et pur­chas­es (new hand gun, new shot­gun) or sev­er­al, week­ly $50-$100 pur­chas­es at the local sport­ing good store (you are track­ing your prep spend­ing and not hid­ing it from your spouse, right?)

-You find your­self work­ing on preps when you should be work­ing for your employ­er or com­pa­ny.

-You are rob­bing time and resources from your spouse or fam­i­ly such that they only get left­overs.

If this arti­cle sounds per­son­al, it is. All of these apply to me. I am lucky that my wife does not seem to mind what I am doing, except with guns and weapons train­ing. Our finances are in a good place so any spend­ing I am doing is not out­side our abil­i­ty to pay. I have spent a lot this year prep­ping, main­ly because I was so far from where I want­ed to be. Now that I have spent so much time, effort and mon­ey get­ting to a lev­el of com­fort, I feel like it is time for a break from prep­ping. I just have one more long-term-food-stor­age (LTFS) project to do this week and then I will like­ly take a cou­ple of weeks in May off. What that means:

1) Dis­en­gag­ing from two dif­fer­ent mes­sage boards and mul­ti­ple prep­per-blogs (except this one!) that I par­tic­i­pate in and mon­i­tor.

2) No gun prac­tice, ammo pur­chas­es, or read­ing about guns.

3) No buy­ing prep­per sup­plies, even more food for LTS.

4) Not talk­ing to my wife or any­body about prep­ping.

5) Focus­ing on home (hon­ey-do) projects that have noth­ing to do with prep­ping. In fact, the only thing I will be doing is blog­ging here about things I’ve already done to pre­pare. The oth­er allow­able activ­i­ty is main­tain­ing estab­lished preps, eval­u­at­ing progress and plan­ning next steps.

That will be my two week break, then it is back to achiev­ing prep­per goals!