Skills vs. Gear – What to do first? Part 2

We want to talk to you about the instance when you have had that downturn in the economy or in society and you are looking at truly starting from ground zero.

Once you have secured the short term survival that you have a decent water source, food stuffs, and covering that keeps you out of the elements, the Basic Life Hacks built one on another will get you from the Surviving Mode to the Thriving Methods and Level building towards Driving your self-sufficiency once again.

Surviving – beyond water, food, and shelter there are a few more things to take into consideration. The measures you need to take for the preservation of health, establishment of communications and the mental/emotional and spiritual maintenance follow soon after.

Healthwise: plentiful water and good food definitely help in this regard, however, the skills of first aid, CPR, treatment for shock, the setting of bones, keeping infections away etc. are all the crucial skills you need to develop here.

Communications-wise: Basic body reading skills, facial recognition exercises, and persuasion skills work and are as important as to know how to utilize a HAM radio for distance communications. Knowing how to effectively communicate with those remaining neighbors can be life or death.

Mindwise: Keeping our head on straight, in an emergency or in a perilous situation is worth so much to your and your family’s survival. Knowing what to do and when to do it coupled with how to do the life-saving skills are vital to that survival. Keeping your mind sharp and functioning on your highest level possible is a must.

Other things that you need to do to ensure your survival in the first stages of a drastic downturn in your world. Focus on the skills you will need first:

• Competent weapon use and maintenance
• Effective self-defense skills, including using stealth to move back and forth from one destination to another.
• Efficient property defense (land or possessions)
• Higher level of health and sanitation measures to prevent disease
• Basic shelter building and maintenance
• Basic tools design and creation
• Alternate water strategies
• Knot tying skills that assist in all that you can do

Thriving – Once you have established yourself in the place of choice you need to start building upon those basics you have secured previously. This in mind, we are now looking to go from living day to day on to a week to week or even month to month basis.

The following are skills you can learn sooner than later:

• Making of tools to last – cutting tools, axes, picks wedges, etc as well as blunt instruments like hammers or shavers.
• The building of cooking implements – such as kiln pots, and pans (clay or otherwise) and tools that make food prep easier to perform.
• Cooking and heat generation stations – using the materials that you can find to build ovens, smokers, chimneys etc. that will allow you more options when it comes to fire, besides just the campfire variety.
• Higher level health knowledge is important at this stage. Beyond that of a scrape or a boo boo, being able to take care of the serious issues due to health and preserving life are needed (midwifery skills for example)
• Better shelter systems – with the shelters utilizing more sophisticated methods for sleeping, resting, out of the weather activities.
• Gathering tools for water, food and other materials deemed necessary to support you in the thriving part of it all. buckets, carrying apparatuses, and weight bearing equipment.
• Food Storage – bringing it from a day to day to a week to week measure at least so that you can continually know what can be possible in the near future for your food needs.
• Woodworking Skills – unless you are a miner and a blacksmith, these tools, and self-made gear will be primarily made from wood based sources. Know how to work the wood to you best advantage now so the learning curve isn’t as steep in the future.
• Clothing making – Depending on the circumstances you find yourself in, you will need to know how to make clothing. Whether if it’s taking from what’s now existing and patching, repairing or putting it together all the way of starting from the very basics of cotton, wool or leather. You need to start putting a needle to cloth and building your skill on the clothing arts to keep things thriving for you then.

You need these skills to facilitate the next level. That of Driving what you need to live in this new reality.

Driving – This is when you have settled in a bit. That your most immediate needs are taken care of, and the threat of ruination has for the most part been chased away or dealt with. This could be as little as a few months to a year or two from the life altering event you experienced.

• Growing of food building gardens, crops, and growing spots that you can nurture more than the naturally growing fauna around you (Hey What ’bout Aquaponics?).
• Seed-finding and preservation are also a needed skills, you must first have the seed or seedling of which you want to grow and eat.
• Animal husbandry – keeping and domesticating animal life for additional help with laborious tasks, and for sources of protein.
• Butchering and dressing of those animals for food storage, preparation, and usage.
• Hunting, Fishing and Trapping all make things better not only for what you fill your stomach with but also assisting in the making of clothing for warmth and utility.
• Foraging and plant knowledge of what can assist you getting the nutrients you need, but also can assist in herbal or medicinal purposes as well. Knowing which type of plant has which elements that play a part in preserving health is very important to know to become your very own apothecary.

Now having these skills will also assist the time of when you will be able to get start and accomplish the activities these skills present you. Your own confidence is built one day at a time when it comes to taking care of yourself and your own. Even if you aren’t starting from scratch, from a disaster or social strife. Perhaps, it is a layoff or lull in the economy. Each one of these skills will come in handy no matter which circumstance you find yourself involved.

It is our purpose with the Life Hacks sections of ThatAquaponicsGuy to go into more depth and detail with each one of these over the course of time in article and video formats.  Stay tuned for those additions!