Armies roleplay scenarios. Because it provides strategic and tactical insights.
Sportsmen practice actively imagining performing well. Because it produces actual results in the real world. And yes it has been tested.
Even centuries ago, samurai were taught to imagine multiple scenarios of battle so as to be ready to act in accordance with their samurai ethos when it came to it. And they did.
The point is that there is enormous value in using your mind and imagination, with input and feedback from the real world, to consider how to overcome any adversity, out-do those who wish you ill, and thrive where the expectation from the majority was for you to go quietly into the night.
The latest poll I did showed that only about 15% of the readers of this blog would be instantly wiped out by a nuclear bomb hitting the closest large town to them.
Now, that might not be a very likely occurrence, being as it borders on the extreme, but depending on where you live, it’s not completely far-fetched either.
And even if not that, it is never a bad idea to be prepared. Economic collapse is a certainty after all, the only question is when, exactly, but there is no “if” about it, because math is not an opinion.
However, it is extremely important to understand the difference between being prepared and living in a constant state of low level anxiety about the future.
The first is a state that permit you to go about your days with a sense of confident peace. No one can be 100% prepared for everything life throws at you. Some are happy enough just going along with the stream, taking things as they come, and that may be a way. I have lived that way and it can be a useful set of faith or fate based ways to take life on. But the reality, for me anyway, is that I have always lived that way primarily because of two things:
Firstly, I have a deeply fatalistic core. I can’t take credit for that. God made me that way. I am not afraid of dying. I never have been, even when I was young. Only of not doing enough before I do. That way of being certainly helps to adapt, roll with the punches, get up again when you get knocked down most times.
But secondly, that very way of being taught me that even a minimum of preparation is very useful, sometimes enough to make the difference between life and death. So, in keeping with my own previously fatalistic Zen agnosticism, and presently fatalistic Catholic faith, I prepared in line with my own needs for comfortable peace. Back in my mid twenties it was by training obsessively and having a couple of guns I was very proficient with and a car. That was enough then. Now it’s quite a bit more; because I have children mostly, but, as time passes, it will increasingly become more about teaching them to be prepared, and to have faith. And for myself, my own preparations may return more and more to those of my youth, which probably are analogous to that old film: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The point is simply that each man must determine his own level of preparedness in order to feel at peace. And more than that really. To feel a sense of laughter, of joy, of absolute, chosen, lack of fear in the face of the chaos and darkness they try to force into your mind and life every day.
Use your imagination and your laughter. Put them to use.
It’s why I wrote the RolePlaying Game about the current zombie apocalypse. I know teenagers and zoomers and millennials all have no real idea about pen and paper RPGs. It probably causes them social anxiety to just THINK of sitting around a table with 3 or 4 or more other live, in the flesh, human beings and then play a game of make-believe with them.
And that fear probably translates into them thinking it’s all just a silly thing to even try.
I know all that.
But just like my blog is —for the most part— not for the average person, neither is the concept of preparing for serious situations by playing fun games. It really is not for everyone.
Only smart people have that kind of lateral thinking approach to life.
It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth trying it out for yourself or not.
Us who remember the threat during the cold war should have little trouble adapting to the new probabilities.
The only difference for individuals is the situation in which each finds himself. Like you I have children, although the eldest is soon to leave, and the other is only a few years behind.
For myself I am making efforts to keep them close enough, that I may help should problems arise. I don’t think one can ever resign from parenthood.