(By Daisy Luther) Prepping isn’t all about whiling away your hours in a bunker, reloading ammo. It’s about the everyday things we do and the differences in our mindsets from non-preppers, and these are things that only real preppers will understand.
Preppers know these are actually signs of sanity, but we get used to being misunderstood by the unprepared and the mainstream media, who all seem to think that we’re crazy. Sometimes it’s fun to have a good laugh about their misconceptions of what we actually do.
PS: This is meant to be funny. Don’t get mad about it.
You might be a prepper if these signs relate to you.
Many of the following signs will be so relatable that they’ll probably give you a warm glow. Feel the prepper solidarity!
- Pantries are so mainstream…you have food stashed in strange places in every room of the house.
- You have enough toilet paper to get through a year of uncomfortable digestive upsets…occurring with 6 people simultaneously
- Speaking of which, you possess at least 3 different ways to use the bathroom, only one of which is an actual bathroom.
- Your kids know what OPSEC means…at the age of 4.
- You have topographical maps of your area…plural.
- When you’re forced to interact with “the others” you feel like you are awkwardly censoring your true opinions
- You think nothing of treating an injury or illness yourself because “what if there was no doctor?“
- Paintball and laser tag are no longer just a fun way to spend an afternoon …they are tactical training.
- You’ve purchased duct tape in bulk.
- With every major purchase, you contemplate going for the off-grid version.
- You have more manual tools than power tools.
- You’ve washed entire loads of laundry by hand for either necessity or practice. (And not just your dainties…we’re talking about jeans and stuff!)
- Your kids are not afraid of guns…or fingers pointed like guns…or pastries in the shape of guns…or drawings of guns.
- When house-hunting you look for multiple heat and water sources.
- You store food in buckets…lots of buckets…like, maybe even a whole room full of buckets.
- You garden with a determination and time commitment normally reserved for endurance athletes training for an Ironman triathlon.
- If you don’t have a water source on your property, you have put in miles of footwork searching for one nearby, and have mapped multiple discreet routes to and from the source, and figured out how to haul the water back to your house on each route.
- Your first instinct when hearing about some event on the mainstream news is skepticism. (False flag event, anyone?)
- You read articles about multiple ways to use white vinegar and nod your head throughout.
- You believe that FEMA camps are real and that you are most likely on “The List”.
- Instead of CNN, you have alternative news sites bookmarked in your favorites on your computer.
- You have enough coffee/tea/favorite-caffeinated-item-of-choice to last you through 3 apocalypses.
- You could outfit a small-town pharmacy with all of the over-the-counter medications you have stashed away.
- You have an instinctive mistrust of anyone working for the government.
- You could sink a ship with the weight of your stored ammo. In fact, you put it in the basement when you became concerned about your floorboards.
- Looking for a fun weekend outing with the kids? Forget amusement parks – the shooting range is where it’s at.
- When the power goes out, you calmly light the candles and proceed with whatever you had been dong previously.
- A longer-term power outage is called “practice”.
- If a like-minded person comes over to your house, they’ll realize you are “one of them” by seeing your reading material. Other folks won’t even notice. The FBI might call your copy of The Prepper’s Blueprint and your A. American fiction “subversive literature”.
- Your children carry a modified bug-out kit in their school backpacks.
- You can and dehydrate food with the single-minded fervor of an Amish grandmother facing a 7-year drought.
- Calling 911 is not part of your home security plan.
- You spend your days off digging an underground bunker in your backyard.
- You have more than a thousand cheapo lighters that you purchased in bulk, stashed away in the back of your linen closet…and you don’t even smoke.
- You eat a lot of survival food now, so there is no ‘system shock’ when you are forced to eat only the items you have stocked (or that you GROW – hint hint).
- You stock alcohol in mass quantities so you can comfortably numb after the SHTF.
- You stock alcohol in mass quantities – and you don’t even drink. (Barter, baby!)
- You know what? Forget stocking alcohol. You have your own still. You’ll make alcohol.
- You have enough salt to create another Dead Sea.
- You don’t move – you strategically relocate.
- You purchased 50 of these little EDC multitaskers already for stocking stuffers for your friends/family/workmates/neighbor/random stranger.
- Speaking of Christmas, you gave Conflicted to everyone last year.
- When your friends ask about your favorite authors, instead of Hemmingway, Tolkien, or Kerouac, you get a blank stare when you tell them it’s John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman.
- You know exactly how many Mountain House buckets it takes to make a base for a single bed.
- You don’t stock up on milk. You get an actual cow.
- Your family doesn’t dare take something from the food stockpile without marking it off the list.
- Your kids know how to don a gas mask in 30 seconds.
- Everyone in your survival group carries the same firearm so that ammo is standardized.
- You have non-electric versions of appliances like wheat grinders, washing machines, and coffee makers.
- You yell at the TV every time a commercial for Doomsday Preppers comes on. Oh. Wait. You don’t have a TV. But if you did, you’d yell, because you know how positively ridiculous and unrealistic that show is.
- Your family is no longer surprised when you announce, “Hey, we’re going to learn how to make (insert anything here)!”
- You have more how-to books stored on hard-drives than most public libraries have on the bookshelves.
- Your children have a plan in case they need to bug out from school.
- Alternatively, you homeschool and bugging out is part of the curriculum.
- You have more than three ways to cook dinner if the power goes out: a woodstove, a barbecue, a sun oven, a fire-pit, and/or a volcano stove.
- First Blood and Red Dawn are basic training films for your family.
- You have long since accepted the idea that if you’re not on someone’s list, you’re probably not doing it right.
- Your 7-year-old knows Morse code.
- You’re secretly disappointed when the electricity comes back on after only a few minutes.
- You know more ways to make a homemade knife than the entire population of your local prison combined.
- You don’t just rotate food, you rotate ammo.
- You know the distance from your door to your front gate is precisely 207 yards.
- Moving to a new house is no longer “moving”, but “strategic relocation“.
- You have mapped out at least 3 different routes by car and 2 different routes on foot to get to your bug-out location.
- You know the difference between “Tyvek” and “Tychem” suits, and in which instance they should be used.
- Ditto the finer points of N-95 vs. N-100 masks.
- You watch The Walking Dead in order to critique their survival tactics. (And you were secretly delighted to see Beth building a fire in a Dakota pit.)
- Speaking of fire, you can start one in at least 3 different ways, and you always carry a lighter, a fresnel lens, and a magnesium firestarter.
- You have two (or more) of everything important, well, because “one is none.”
- You have a decoy food supply.
- Your kids think it’s a fun game to see who can find the most potential weapons in a room.
- Even your dog has a bug out bag
– which she carries herself.
- You have elected NOT to purchase greater armament because you plan on upgrading with your future assailant’s weaponry.
- Your EDC includes a knife, firearm w/extra mag, flashlight, mylar blanket, Chapstick, and an ounce of silver — and that’s just for when you’re walking the dog.
- The trunk of your car has enough supplies to carry the family through an entire week during a major blizzard.
- One criterion for your new winter coat is that it fits over your body armor.
- Your neighbors separate their compost for you into a) chicken food b) garden food and c) other
- You scour travel size aisles because they fit better in bug-out bags and they make great barter items.
- You check out the garden center and pest control section for potential weapons.
- Your subscribed channels for YouTube and bookmarks now contain more prepper and alternative media sites than cute animal sites.
- Christmas and birthday gifts have a prepper theme.
- You actually know what the letters “EMP” stand for.
- Every time there is a small household “disaster” like a power outage or local water “boil order” you just grab your emergency supplies and remind dubious family members. “See, told you it pays to be prepared.”
- Your freeze-dried food has a longer expiration date than you do
- You know how to make bows out of skis and arrows out of garden bamboo.
- You have (or are seriously considering, buying) an old armored personnel carrier to turn into your RV.
- You know that Falling Skies has better idea for post-apocalyptic survival than The Walking Dead or Z Nation but you still watch them all just in case
- Your friend asks “Do you have enough bullets?” then you both laugh and laugh because you know you can never have enough.
- You changed your home page from MSN (or any other propaganda media) to Drudge Report or SHTFplan.
- You have no problem knocking on strangers’ doors to ask for fruit tree cuttings
- You have vacuum packed underwear in a plastic tub stashed somewhere in your house
- You just might have more medical supplies than the local ER.
- The Co-op and Costco recognize you but pretend not to. They know better than to ask questions about your purchases.
- If you’re a man you are no longer embarrassed to buy tampons and sanitary napkins because they make great bandages.
- If you’re a woman you know you don’t need to buy tampons or sanitary napkins because so many other options exist.
- You actually own a toilet seat that fits on a bucket.
- You have enough wood cut and stacked to form a barricade around your whole property.
- Admit it. Every time the power goes out, you go see if your car starts so you can get the jump on hunkering down or buying out the store with case in the event that this one is actually an EMP.
- You have considered filtering water with a coffee filter or a t-shirt.
Do you have more prepper signs to add?
These signs that you might be one of those “crazy preppers” are consolidated from the hive mind of two previous articles and comments from the readers. (Find them here and here.) Do you have more signs to add? Share them in the comments section below.
About Daisy
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company. She lives in the mountains of Virginia with her family. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.