collapse camp 2 of 2-article 2 of 2 today

COLLAPSE CAMP 2 ( article 2 of 2 today )
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COLLAPSE CAMP 2

Camping is only enjoyable with the right gear and skills, and the same is true with the apocalypse.  And just as camping ain’t really roughing it and hence isn’t even really camping if you cheat too much, neither will you really be able to survive the apocalypse if you cheat on your gear.  With camping, an emphasis on luxury, comfort and substituting money for skill makes the whole enterprise camping only in name.  With the collapse, an emphasis on luxury, comfort and substituting money for skill makes the whole endeavor surviving in theory only.

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Just because you are sitting around without a house surrounding you doesn’t mean you are camping.  All you are doing is substituting on grid luxuries for off grid luxuries.  Doing without luxuries should be camping.  That doesn’t mean you are living like a savage, it just means you are minimizing your logistics trail.  Minimizing the dependency on modern non-replicated goods.  What you are attempting to do should be more like getting as far away from modern living as you can, not trying to duplicate as far as possible that kind of life.

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A Coleman gas lantern for super bright light, that is luxurious.  A LED headlamp or even a LED flashlight with solar recharging built in, that is far higher of a technology piece of equipment than a candle in a lantern, but the price is similar to candles and LED’s last a lot longer than the fuel.  It is minimizing your need for illumination, not trying to duplicate a room’s brightness from your home, while minimizing  your needs and investment.  Setting aside the need to abide by fire prevention regulations, two soup cans burning twigs make as efficient a stove as an expensive butane burner using canisters of gas.  You aren’t shunning modern materials, you are just minimizing them.

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You’ll have fire long after the butane would have run out, and another two AA batteries are a much cheaper back-up for illumination than another liter of fuel.  You are maximizing the use of every item as cheaply and with as few accessories as possible.  Granted, less expense and less luxurious also means greatly reduced performance or convenience, but for the life of me I can’t understand why that is considered a bad thing.  Manly men go camping and rough it.  They shouldn’t be pampered females about it.

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Anyone that was in Army can relate to this minimalist experience.  The military wasn’t too concerned with your comfort or providing any kind of luxury ( like, say, sleep ).  If your unit was mechanized all that did was ensure you were out in the field a lot longer than if you had only a backpack for provisions.  But the lifestyle was exactly the same- living out of a backpack.  The only difference was three to five days compared to three to five weeks.  And you know what?  I remember a good portion of that month long deployment in the boonies better than the rest of my time at the unit.  I say the Army ruined camping for me, but it wasn’t a terrible experience.  Since officers dislike camping, being the pampered princesses they are, they mostly leave you alone out there.

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But really, the best part was the closer contact with nature.  Fresh air except when inside your fart sack, and a better grasp of primitive living.  It was just more natural.  Just as the military allows you to embrace your natural state of violence and hatred, camping gets you closer to your primal state that was far more natural than farming and its hovel dwelling ( a wilderness hovel isn’t occupied long enough to breed vermin ).  What I disliked about it was the controlling nature of everything that would have made it far less primitive.

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Simple things you wouldn’t deny yourself even in the most simple camping experience, such as hot water to shave in, or take a whore’s bath with.  Carbohydrates with your meals.  A full nights sleep.  A fire to warm yourself with rather than relying on living in Artic gear.  Stripping that gear to sleep, rather than leaving it on for tactical reasons.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d do it again the same way just for practice in deprivation if needed.  What chapped my ass was the deliberate rules against individuals seeking these small comforts themselves as a control mechanism.  Evidently one morning of hot water to shave with would have eliminated all the training gained by living in a cold tent in winter with no bathing or hot meals for a month.

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So, military camping is needlessly primitive, and most modern civilian camping is needlessly luxurious and wasteful.  I trust the average bear is smart enough to pick and choose between the two.  Can you do the same with the apocalypse?  Not so luxurious as it endangers you nor so primitive it is just needless torture.  You don’t need a grand in Mollie super tactical web gear, dozens of AR clips and other equipment, nor do you want merely a wool blanket and a handful of cartridges for your hunting rifle.  I would be thinking about caches instead of enough gear to carry around the kitchen sink, and I’d be more worried about training for ambush as a light infantryman than being a Ninja equipped for close order combat.  But that is just me.

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I’d rather have a small primitive underground cabin than a deluxe aboveground concrete bunker.  But again, that is just me.  I’d rather buy a buttstock recoil pad for my old surplus rifle than buy a fancy plastic gun that came with a recoil spring as standard equipment.  You have the same amount of comfort with a lot less money ( oranges to oranges, compared to an AR-10 rather than an AR-15 ).  It is just the 80/20 Rule.  80% of the gain for only 20% of the cost.  It is a tiny amount of skill or deprivation over throwing money at the problem.

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Rather than modernizing your post-collapse experience, add some primitiveness to it.  Can you really enjoy the apocalypse if you look on every day as your fancy equipment subsides to entropy?  That is nothing but stress!  But if you move closer to a pre-industrialized lifestyle ( with exceptions, obviously, such as smokeless gunpowder and LED’s ), there is less to break down or run out.  Focus on taking the edges off the too primitive.  A deck of cards is great entertainment, compared to none.  A electronic game system with solar panels to run it, that is too luxurious.  It is too close to modern life and not close enough to post-apocalyptic. 

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If you cling too hard to now, post collapse will be a miserable experience for you.  Plan for and transition to less luxurious.  It will pay off in intangibles you ignore now.

( .Y. )

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