Truth be told, I’m more than a little fed up.

I’m a blogger. And I blog about survival, preparedness, and gear.

But when I tell people this, I get glazed eyes and blatant disinterest.

I start by saying I’m a blogger, and while there used to be a stigma around that statement alone, I find the negative stigma around blogging for a living has been dissipating in recent years – at least a little bit. When I tell people what I do, some even begin to get a touch excited, curious to learn more about my “odd” job.

I wish things were the same when I then went on to specify which industry I blog in.

It’s depressing: survivalism is cool shit! Anyone who watches Castaway, Unbroken, or even the first few episodes of Dual Survival should plainly see that.

And prepping is something that I feel absolutely everyone with any true concern about their future will naturally do, whether or not they call themselves preppers. It’s not particularly a “cool” thing to be interested in, at least in my opinion; prepping is just a particularly important thing to do.

So it drives me absolutely mad when I get hit with the glazed eye look – where the individual in question is ultimately doing their very best not to obnoxiously glare at you with an almost palpable degree of cynical judgement – and a low pitched, “Oh…,” to signify that the conversation is now over and all intrigue has been killed off because… My god – you’re a prepper?! You must be crazy.

Drives. Me. Nuts.

I’m not the preachy type. I never was and never will be. Way I see it, if someone is completely apathetic to what I have to say on a topic, I’m wasting my breath by trying to make a convert out of them. These people I will never bother to “bring to the light,” so to speak, nor will I ever succeed if I do try. They’ve stuck themselves up on a high horse of “normalcy,” and the way they see it, they’re not coming down into my world of “bat shit crazy” – not for anything.

It’s preposterous, and as I’ve already said, I’m more than a little fed up with it. I’m not ashamed of being into survival and preparedness – rather, I’m enraged that such an absurd stigma has managed to gather around the terms “prepper” and “survivalist” from the “common folk.” It’s frustrating as hell, especially in a modern world that seems to pride itself on accepting the quirky and different.

I know some will think, “Ignore them.” And with that I mostly agree.

Others often feel it is their duty to make converts out of these everyday people who practically scoff at survialists and preppers from the sidelines; and oftentimes, I wish these people didn’t. I feel the more they push, the further these types will get into their thinking that we’re all a bunch of crazies – which is obviously not true, though I doubt I had to clarify if you’re reading this article in the first place.

Those who do not consider themselves into survival and preparedness seem to be pegging us in the worst possible spot with their glazed eyes and glares – as if to say, “Why the hell would you want to be passionate about your skill set and your future?” I mean a musician is allowed to be passionate about his life calling and work, but survival and prepping? You might as well have told these people you dig up corpses for fun – you’d be getting the same awkward remarks and judgmental glares.

But why?

As a dear friend we’ve made through this blog who goes by the username of “dan seven” pointed out in a recent comment he made on this post:

Sometimes I think people get hung up on a word like survivalist or prepper because it is out of normal ‘identity’ parameters for the comfort zone of others. Difficult to picture an experienced and accomplished ‘backpacker’ or ‘trekker’ or ‘wilderness camper’ raising an eyebrow for saying so.

He’s 110% right. Hell let’s make that 120%.

What kind of backpacker, trekker, or wilderness camper do you know who would hesitate to tell people exactly what he or she was? None. Why? Not one person would glare. Not one person would be judgmental. They’d peg you as the “outdoorsy” type and that would be that.

It’s kind of a cool thing to be interested in the outdoors. But oh my no, not in survival or prepping.

I’m not going to lie. I wish people thought it was “cool” to be a prepper/survivalist. I really do.

I feel like so many people would be better prepared – we’d have stronger families, be living in more secure countries – really and truly all the world would be better off if everyone took this prepper/survivalist thing even a little more seriously.

Could you imagine how much easier life would be if even just all your friends and family were at least partially into bushcraft, wilderness survival, urban survival, and prepping? Could you imagine how nice it would be to not get glared at when you “confessed” to your family that you were a prepper? It shouldn’t have to be so hard. It’s not a sin. Hell, it’s not even a bad thing. It’s something they could literally only benefit from. Yes, your family and friends might be a bit annoyed at the fact that you’re cutting back on movies out and using the savings to stockpile long-term expiry date food, but when you get laid off at work and your entire family still has plenty to eat at home – or when the same thing happens to a friend and you still have enough food to give them – they’d better be grateful for all that hard work you put in allocating finances such a good way in the past.

The world really would be a much better place if people thought it was a positive, not negative, thing to be a prepper. It really would.

But we’re not the ones ultimately suffering for the negative stigma existing. Sure, we get ostracized and looked at like we’re freaks every once in a while; we get annoyed by what are quite frankly uneducated and truly misguided impressions of what we do and are like, but that’s not really any big deal, and I’d argue that the vast majority of us are more than used to having to put up with the “prepper shaming.”

Screw that, we can deal with all that.

Ultimately, the ones suffering for us having such a the negative stigma are those who label us that way in the first place. Why? They’re missing out. They really are.

Missing out on securing a better future for themselves and their family, missing out on peace of mind.. there’s a whole list of things they’re missing out on, and they’ll almost certainly never come around to see things from our side because their heads are too far stuck in the sand to realize that they’re the ones suffering for their prepper shaming.

If they’re the ones doing the shaming, they’re the ones who will be too embarrassed to prep, let alone become a prepper, even when they sort of begin to see how we have a point.

It’ll be way too hard for them to get off that high horse they put themselves on to join us.

And it won’t impact us in the slightest.

We’ll have prepared anyway.

Source:morethanjustsurviving.com