A few months back I came into a bunch of guns through an estate purchase. A few of the guns were superfluous to my needs. For example, I have utterly zero use for .40 Glocks. But, I never say no to paperless handguns at low prices, so I held them figuring I’d sell them somewhere down the line.

Ran into the mailman the other day and he mentioned that one of his coworkers had ‘seen the writing on the wall’ and wanted a good quality handgun. Did I have anything for sale? Why, yes…yes I do. (We’ll ignore the wildly obvious jokes about postal workers and guns for the moment.)

So, made a sale and had a bit of disposable cash. What to do? Well, a pizza was definitely called for. And I picked up a gift for an LMI friend of mine. The rest? Why, it goes to gilding the lily with a trip to CostCo for a few things to pump up the Preponomicon. For example, the local RV place is doing $5 propane fillups on barbecue bombs. So..another 20# was purchased to be filled because you cant have too many fuel options available.The rest goes into the land fund for the anticipated land purchase at the end of the year.

Even without the specter of inflation, pandemic, WW3 v2.0, etc, there is no guarantee that the job you think is secure will be there tomorrow. I’m not saying you need to live everyday like its the last ‘normal’ day…Im saying that you just need to remember that it really could all change tomorrow..from the mundane like a water heater repair or fuel pump replacement…to the big stuff like a job loss or earthquake. Have the mechanisms in place to increase your resilience and you don’t have to live everyday like its the last normal day..you can just live like its a normal day.

What I feel is required to make me feel safe and secure is probably going to be different in terms of items and quantities than what makes you feel safe and secure. But I’ll tell ya, if I lost my job tomorrow I would be annoyed by it…inconvenienced by it…but crippled by it? Nope. The lights would stay on, the water would still be hot, and the calories would remain unchanged. I wouldn’t want to stay unemployed a minute longer than I had to, but I could go quite a few months if I had to.

Those little, personal, EOTWAWKI’s will happen to you far more often than the big ones. For every hurricane, earthquake, or civil war you go through you’ll go through dozens of smaller, personal crises. Normalcy bias and the ‘that never happens’ mentality is what keeps most people from increasing their resilience and survivabilty against these things. “Oh, that never happens” right up until the time it does. It’s only a disaster when you’re not prepared against it.