It’s been a rough cou­ple of weeks with work. In fact, work has become increas­ing­ly busy. It was the end of the quar­ter and a race to get cus­tomer con­tracts closed up, sig­na­tures, etc. For those that don’t know, I work for a soft­ware com­pa­ny in sales. It can be very high stress, even more so now that the econ­o­my is the way it is. It has real­ly hin­dered my abil­i­ty to write. It has also afford­ed a lit­tle time to reflect on my prep­ping, my true pre­pared­ness, etc. Dur­ing this reflect­ing peri­od, I’ve start­ed to feel like I am spend­ing, spend­ing, spend­ing. I feel like a crazy con­sumer who has to have all this stuff. The word stuff by the way, is rel­a­tive. By stuff I mean, any­thing from cloth­ing, to a new CB, to con­tin­u­ing to pur­chase food (I am get­ting bet­ter at rotat­ing), to the need for all these lit­tle things. And it seems the mon­ey keeps want­i­ng to go out the door. Now, I do not feel that the items that are in need of pur­chase are friv­o­lous pur­chas­es. They are a result of the recent hur­ri­cane and expe­ri­ences to make life and the shift into sur­vival mode eas­i­er. Are they neces­si­ties? Well, that is the quandary. When not in use, they are not real­ly neces­si­ties. When the road is flood­ed out, trees are block­ing high­ways, there is an acci­dent ahead, etc., it would be good to be informed; in the case of the CB, of course, as an exam­ple.

I feel… I feel like I am just con­sum­ing and spend­ing at the moment. “The more I learn, the more stuff I need,” keeps run­ning through my mind. More food, more gear, more skills that might require more gear. I feel like I am start­ing to be wheel going round and round with no des­ti­na­tion. To that end, the econ­o­my is not help­ing me, and not from a lack of resources per­spec­tive either. No, it is not help­ing because I feel the urge to accel­er­ate preps, pur­chas­es, etc. I live in an apart­ment. It is start­ing to get full of (par­don the expres­sion), shit. I am donat­ing a ton of stuff (most­ly clothes) to the Sal­va­tion Army this week. That is going to cre­ate a “lit­tle” addi­tion­al space, but it is most­ly clear­ing out some space in a cou­ple clos­ets. Hell, I have more rucks and back­packs than I think I will ever need. Some of them are going to the Sal­va­tion Army… I even recent­ly looked at replac­ing my cof­fee table and end tables with stor­age type tables. Do you know hard they are to locate, at least good qual­i­ty one’s any­way, not to men­tion how expen­sive good ones are. I am prob­a­bly just rant­i­ng, but these are thoughts that have gone through my head for the past sev­er­al days, and they are not going away… What’s a prep­per to do?

I’ have thought about this long and hard. My con­clu­sions are few. Slow down the pur­chase of nonessen­tial preps? Some of them, I have been putting off some of these pur­chas­es for a year or more. In fact I cursed myself when I did­n’t have bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tions during/after Hur­ri­cane Irene. Part of that was my own doing, I was out and about the day after, and trav­el­ing back home from PA, but still cursed myself…

What are your thoughts? Have you ever felt you need­ed to keep con­sum­ing preps, etc, and feel­ing like it was just too much, even if the mon­ey was avail­able?

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