Feeling unsafe is probably not a free action though; as far as we can tell cortisol has a deleterious effect on both physical health & mental ability over time, and it becomes more pronounced w/ continous exposure. So the cost of feeling unsafe all the time, particularly if one feels less safe/more readiness than the situation warrants, is to hurt your prospects in situations where the threat doesn’t come to pass (the majority outcome).
The most extreme examples of this are preppers; if society collapses they do well for themselves, but in most worlds they simply have an expensive, presumably unfun hobby and inordinate amounts of stress about an event that doesn’t come to pass.
Yeah, things close to full-blown doomsday doesn’t happen very often. The most common is probably literal war (as in Ukraine and Syria) and the best response to that on an individual level is usually “get the hell away from where the fighting is.” Many of the worst natural disasters are also best handled by simply evacuating. If you don’t have to/didn’t have time to evacuate and you don’t die in the immediate aftermath, your worst problems might be the local utilities shutting down for a while and needing to find alternative sources of water and heat until they’re fixed.
The potential natural disasters for which I think doomsday-level prepping might actually make a difference are volcanoes and geomagnetic storms, because they could cause problems on a continent-wide or global scale and “go somewhere unaffected” or “endure the short-term disruptions until things go back to normal” might not work. Volcanoes can block the sun and cripple global agriculture, and a giant electromagnetic pulse could cause enough damage to both the power grid and to natural gas pipelines that it could take years to rebuild them. (Impacts from space might also be on the list, depending on the severity.)
Feeling unsafe is probably not a free action though; as far as we can tell cortisol has a deleterious effect on both physical health & mental ability over time, and it becomes more pronounced w/ continous exposure. So the cost of feeling unsafe all the time, particularly if one feels less safe/more readiness than the situation warrants, is to hurt your prospects in situations where the threat doesn’t come to pass (the majority outcome).
The most extreme examples of this are preppers; if society collapses they do well for themselves, but in most worlds they simply have an expensive, presumably unfun hobby and inordinate amounts of stress about an event that doesn’t come to pass.
Yeah, things close to full-blown doomsday doesn’t happen very often. The most common is probably literal war (as in Ukraine and Syria) and the best response to that on an individual level is usually “get the hell away from where the fighting is.” Many of the worst natural disasters are also best handled by simply evacuating. If you don’t have to/didn’t have time to evacuate and you don’t die in the immediate aftermath, your worst problems might be the local utilities shutting down for a while and needing to find alternative sources of water and heat until they’re fixed.
The potential natural disasters for which I think doomsday-level prepping might actually make a difference are volcanoes and geomagnetic storms, because they could cause problems on a continent-wide or global scale and “go somewhere unaffected” or “endure the short-term disruptions until things go back to normal” might not work. Volcanoes can block the sun and cripple global agriculture, and a giant electromagnetic pulse could cause enough damage to both the power grid and to natural gas pipelines that it could take years to rebuild them. (Impacts from space might also be on the list, depending on the severity.)