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Are you a prepper? Find out if you have the prepper signs, attitude and skills.
People come in all types, and preppers are no different. However, regardless the differences, preppers share one thing in common: the desire to be prepared when disaster strike. Whether or not you engage in activities beyond preparedness, this one premise will run through your daily life in a surprising number of scenarios.
Below we have detailed a number of signs, skills, and attitudes that are common among preppers. Though you may not identify with every single one, chances are if your scorecard has more checks than blanks, you might be a prepper.
Signs:
One of the most obvious signs that you might be a prepper is if you have a different plan depending on the emergency. Is your house on fire and slowly filling with smoke? Not to fear, you have already determined the quickest escape route and identified a place where everyone should meet up.
What about a tornado? Again, you have planned this out ahead of time, doing extensive analysis on the structural integrity of your home. You know the most stable point in your house away from all the windows and possible broken glass. Regardless the disaster, you have the best plan of action possible.
Another sign you might be a prepper is if you stockpile emergency supplies “just in case.” Flash floods, by their very nature, give you little to no time to prepare. However, they can leave you stranded for days, even weeks, at a time.
If you are a prepper, this just means you have an extended vacation from work while you rough it out a bit. With stockpiles of canned goods, batteries, toiletries, and simple, yet durable, electronics, you can easily afford to ride out the storm for weeks, maybe months, at a time.
Attitude:
While there is definitely a fringe element alive and well, preppers are not simply crazy, wing-nut, conspiracy theorists. Though, in fairness, you do not have to be conspiracy theorist to see the need to be prepared in case of an emergency.
Regardless the motivation, preppers are all about getting the most out of everything they have. Whether it is space, time, tools, or goods, efficiency is key. A common prepper test is to look at a knife and wonder how different applications it can serve. Then, a prepper will look to see if there is a knife available that can do those just as well while also doing more.
Another attitude common among preppers involves situational awareness. Wherever you go, you make it a point to pay attention to everything, and we mean everything. How many exits are there? How many people are there? Where are the people positioned in regard to the exits? And that is just if a single room.
A fun prepper test is to identify as many different qualities of a space as possible. Other examples of situational awareness will involve analyzing your local area and plotting out the high points, the lines of travel, and the best places to lay low if a disaster happens. Whatever the setting, a prepper’s attitude is one of awareness.
Skills:
This is arguably the surest sign of being a prepper. It is easy to have the mindset of a prepper. It is relatively easy to show the signs of a prepper. However, developing prepper skills takes time and effort. Stockpiling goods requires money, while an attitude is easy to fake. But there is simply no getting around the skills you need to be able to survive for long stretches of time with little to no help.
The most obvious prepper skills to master will involve wilderness survival. Consequently, boy scouts and some of the more rural girl scout troops often produce future preppers. This is a natural occurrence as those children learned long ago how valuable the skills of survival can be when push comes to shove.
Things like knowing how to build a shelter, start a fire, catch and forage food, or find water are some of the most basic skills any human can have. They are the skills that allowed us to become the dominant specie we are today and will serve anyone well in dire circumstances.
Another popular set of skills, though not ubiquitously held among all preppers, are the proper care and use of firearms or other self-defense skills. In the event of an emergency in a populated location–especially if you are cut off from society at large–an untrained populace is liable to descend into chaos.
We saw this first hand after Katrina broke the levees and flooded New Orleans. In this instance, the ability to protect oneself from other people became paramount, and many good preppers took notice and learned how to do so if they did not already know how.
Conclusion:
While preppers may run the gamut of demographics, they all make it a point to have a plan in case of an emergency. Unable to simply take it for granted that we live in a civilized society, preppers understand that the line between civilized and barbarism is one terrible disaster.
In an effort to prevent getting caught out in the cold, preppers will go through what might seem to others like extreme lengths to ensure their safety and long-term viability as well as that of their family–no matter the circumstances. Extensive planning, stockpiling, and skill development are all hallmarks of a prepper.
Source: http://survivalcavefood.com/blog/prepper-signs-attitude-skills/
