@alxd

Strikes me how this whole discussion leaves out indigenous and other traditional communities that are living without most Western stuff because they've never had it. Who have lived that way through very hard conditions, stuff like colonization, and now the climate apocalypse that is already on in their regions.

Isn't that the natural place to look / learn / do basic research if you want to start spinning fantasies about what living "off the grid" (without present Western infrastructure) means? What survival and resilience without such infrastructure requires?

I don't know much about the matter, but I know that societies that survived for long in harsh conditions are not individualistic; they didn't and don't survive as nuclear families. Quite the opposite. And from all I know, a lot of energy goes into developing and continuously maintaining and caring for communal life / social relationships for it to be successful.

So I'd say, yeah the prep is emotional and that includes emotionally going beyond individualism, beyond "me myself & I (& perhaps my nuclear family) in a bunker". That latter vision is absurd given (pre)history, by which I mean evolutionary time spans. Some of us could only stop living in extended communities because of this recent increase in automatised infrastructures making more direct and basic cooperation unnecessary (for some!).