How Did You Prepare This Week? A Practical Update.

These days, you can doomscroll forever.

I’ve done plenty of it myself.

I’ve also prepared.

At a certain point, you’ve acquired enough information on any given day to know what’s going on. It’s simply not necessary to spend more time looking for more doom, because you already have enough for your mind and body to handle. Still, you see some real wakeup calls. For example, people are now straight up deleting their gmail accounts for the exact reason you might’ve guessed. As one Substacker writes, “Given their immediate use of the Gulf of America in Google maps, how long do you think they would refuse to give your private email data to this administration? I wager they will hand it over the first time anyone asks.”

Yep, exactly.

So, that’s where my mind goes these days—the most concrete, practical things we can do to stay a little safer, for now.

Over the last few years, I’ve learned that prepping isn’t a destination. It’s a journey, and while you get closer, you never fully arrive. That inspired me to start a kind of weekly column in addition to the reading lists and deep dives on things like growing food, where we talk about what we actually do, week by week, to put ourselves in a better position to be useful during a crisis. That might make prepping feel less overwhelming for all of us.

I’ll go first.