Self-sufficiency or Community-sufficiency?

I've notice there is a lot of fear based mongering going on the last few years, and the beginning of 2023 here is no different. I've seen everything hyping up, from people having "bug out bags" to people who are stocking shelters with freeze dried foods and other necessities, people stock piling seeds, etcetera so they can survive 'hidden' from the world. It makes me wonder what these peoples plans actually are? I'm not saying don't get prepared, but if you have never grown a garden and you have no idea how to seed-save and store them properly what do you expect to happen when your in a survival mode and relying on that. Trying to learn any skill while under immense pressure of survival is going to be 1000 times harder, not to mention it wouldn't just be one skill. You cannot just continue to plant in the same spot year after year and not give anything back to the soil, or eventually you will just deplete your soil and have to start over again. I've always been intrigued by the thoughts of people and how it really does shape those around us. As a family who does grow a lot of our own produce in our gardens, we preserve food, we seed save, we have animals for eggs and meat, we create our own compost. We could and do grow most of our own food on our property. But it is a lot of work and we still source out things from other local people. We do not grow our own poultry feed we buy that from a local ish farmer, we do not have our own bees for honey we buy from a local bee keeper. We have even got compost from local farmers because we didn't create enough for our garden, we get our animal bedding from a local wood cutter as well as a local farmer, we get our wood for building from a small local mill. We are still really reliant on our community and without our community we would struggle greatly! My husband and I are young yet, we do have four children who are great helpers, but I also have serious health issues and I know if we had to do everything ourselves we would burn out really fast and once you burn out ALL that work still needs to keep happening in order to survive so you will never get the chance to recover. For myself, I would rather have a community around us than be all on our own. People who are just planning on doing everything themselves are going to suffer from burnout big time. It's very hard to do everything needed and still have energy left for other aspects of life. When you are run down and only survive at that point then what is the point in living anymore? For myself and our children I would rather have a community where we could all help each other through bartering or trading and we would then be thriving instead of just surviving. I personally do feel that thinking you can live all on our own, just your immediate family, cut off from the rest of the world is not sustainable long term for most people. If you have a large immediate family, a lot of land, and a lot of money to put into infrastructures then perhaps my opinion would be different. But for the majority of us it would be near impossible to thrive in an isolated life-style of just living off the land in some bush somewhere hidden. I think it's clear what my opinion on this is, community-sufficiency is better. I feel we should all be creating community close to our own locations. I'm not bashing the internet, it's a wonderful resource for meeting people, but we need those close connection as well. We don't need to only rely on ourselves, we can seek out and foster relationship now with those who are like-minded and start bartering and trading and start helping each other now! If we have a strong community filled with people who all have things to barter and trade, this could be skills and knowledge too not just products, then our community would be stronger as a whole. I think people should sit down and think about what they could do for a community, are you a teacher? Perhaps your skills and knowledge could be used for tutoring in trade of veg or meat. Are you currently located in town but have all the knowledge from past experiences of canning and preserving food? You could be teaching others who do have larger gardens and veg in trade for canned goods or fresh veg. We all have something that we can offer to our communities we just need to start thinking and branching out and attempting to create those relationships while building on the skill sets that we do have.

It's not easy to create community and it will not just fall into our laps, we need to intentionally seek it out and foster it. This makes me think back to last year packing up all our poultry butchering equipment and children and heading to our friends house to help them butcher their birds. Was it easy? No, but helping others creates stronger bonds, in turn this friend of our sent us home with more birds to butcher for ourselves. We have people come help us butcher on farm and they head home with meat for their own freezers and/or knowledge if they didn't already posses the skill set for poultry butchering. We are trying our hardest to create and be part of our local community because I honestly do believe that we will be stronger together if anything was to happen in the future. I can tend to be a bit of a worry-wart at times and as these post of people's plans to 'bugging out' with their small pack of supplies out of town keep popping up... it makes me worry what the intention of those people truly are. The people who do not have a community already, are they planning on just traveling to crown-land or trying to take from others because not everyone has open unowned land close to them. But if they were part of a community and had something to offer they wouldn't need to take from others, they could be trading. A flock/pack is only as strong as its weakest member and sometimes the stronger members will take out the weaker ones for the bettering of them all. I would really hate to see our world fall into that instinctual survival mentality. When we could be helping to build everyone up now, everyone has something they can offer to others. My hope is only to spark people to start creating a community for themselves, get involved now. Humans are social creatures, so even if nothing happens in the future no harm is done. Reach out to local people who seem like-minded to yourself and start fostering relationships!