Skills Versus Stuff: What’s Better?

So what’ll help you more in an emergency: skills or stuff? If you need to start a fire, what’s better to have with you, the tools to easily start a fire or the knowledge of 20 different ways to get it lit? Should you know how to hunt, fish, forage, and basically make food, or is it better to spend your time stockpiling what you need for an emergency?

It’s this balance that you have to work with in order to build a successful survival plan, and while there are emphatic voices on both sides of this discussion, what you really need to do is take a good look at both sides to help you spend your time and money in the best way possible.

The Importance of Skills

It’s hard to argue against the importance of skills. Knowledge is easily the most powerful tool known to man. Skills are learned, honed, and practiced over and over until they become second nature. Without skills and the knowledge behind them, the idea of true long-term survival is pretty bleak.

While yes, there are many tools, devices, and implements you can buy to make survival easier and more effective, having the base level skills to survive with as few items as possible can’t be stressed enough. Knowing how to make clothing is a far more important weapon to have in your arsenal than having a few boxes full of ready-made clothes.

The skills that collectively are known as bushcraft are meant to make someone able to live off the land. Surviving for a few days is easy when you have a bug out bag, but what do you do when you’re on your own for weeks or even months? Supplies can be lost, tools can be broken, and necessities like fire starters can wear out. What doesn’t wear out is the knowledge stored in your brain. By knowing how to repair or even build and replace a tool, you insure yourself against the loss or failure of an item. When in a world of life or death, this can ultimately mean your survival.

The Necessity of Stuff

The one caveat to the importance of skills has to do with the short term. Sure, knowing how to hunt and prepare a deer or other animal is an important skill to have, but what happens when you don’t see any deer for a week? What about when you’re just starting your survival and need immediate help? This is where having items, or “stuff” on hand can mean the difference between life and death.

Don’t get me wrong, knowing ten ways to start a fire is pretty critical information, but having a fire starter in your pack makes that knowledge mostly unnecessary and will get your fire started in seconds rather than minutes or even an hour. That time might be critical to keeping yourself warm or scaring off wild animals or better yet, starting a signal fire to get rescued.

It seems like an easy win for skills when you think about long term survival, but more often than not, survival is done in small bursts of a few days maybe up to a week. This means that your ability to build a log cabin house with a Swiss Army Knife might not be the best use of your time. Instead, researching tools and learning how to use them might be the best path.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be skilled in a few ways to survive in case your tools are lost or broken, but the odds are if you’re properly prepared, at least some of those tools and “stuff” will be enough.

What’s Better?

So what’s better, skills or stuff? As with most things in life, the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but on a sliding scale. For most people some basic survival knowledge and some key survival tools are the perfect mix to make sure they come out of most emergencies just fine.

On the other hand, if you’re heading on a month-long camping trip to Alaska, you probably want to know some real survival skills to go along with your gear, as there’s not too much of a chance of replacement gear if something breaks when away from civilization.

It seems that stuff is better for the short term and skills are better for the long haul. To decide which is better for you, think about what it is exactly that you’re planning for. Do you want to prep for something that’ll last a week up to a month, or are you planning for TEOTWAWKI? Whatever your plan is, balance your skills versus stuff accordingly and you’ll have the best chance at making it out in one piece.

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source: www.survivalbased.com

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