Should You Dig In Or Bug Out?

This article was written by Tom Chatham and originally published at Project Chesapeake /

Alt-Market.com

Should you dig in or bug out? That is a question many people will have to ask themselves at some point in the future. That answer will be different for many people due to a range of circumstances and conditions.

What is right for one person and location may be lethal for someone else in another location. That is why you need to have situational awareness and critical thinking ability. You need to analyze the threats and determine the best course of action in that time and place. What once was a safe location could quickly become a death trap if you fail to see the changing situation. This is why normalcy bias kills.

Just like a person who loses their job and decides to stay where they are and continue life as normal while watching their savings quickly depleting. They fail to look ahead and contemplate the dangers if they take no action. If they did an honest assessment and determined they probably will not find a new job before they run out of money and lose their home, they would come to that conclusion while they still had resources to work with and determine a safer course of action.

Your knowledge, location and preparedness level will largely determine what you should do at any given time. When disaster arrives what you do and when you do it will determine how well you overcome the problems and make it to the end.

If you live in a large city and something happens that destroys basic services and the ability to care for your family, you may not have much time to act. In some situations you must act before the disaster strikes if you are to have any chance of getting through it. Hurricane Katrina is a good example. Martial law that cuts off cities from surrounding areas is another.

In most survival situations your chances of survival in a rural area is about 10 times better than in a city. That is because you have lower population density and you are surrounded by the resources you need to survive. That means fewer people competing for those resources. You also have the space to produce more resources that you need over time.

Even in the country you will face dangers and have to determine if you should stay in place or move to another location. Fires, floods or roving bands of survivors from other places may make a rural location unsafe. You need to see those dangers coming before they happen and decide your best course of action.

In the end, your knowledge, location and preparedness level will help you decide what you should do before you find yourself in a situation you cannot get out of. There are many unknowns when a disaster happens. Being prepared and having thought through some of those potential problems reduces some of those unknowns so that you can make good decisions. The better informed that you are, the better your decisions will be.

The decision to dig in or bug out will be a pivotal moment in your life because it will have serious repercussions on future events. You need to make decisions that greatly enhance your chances to survive not put you in more danger. You need to expand your comfort zone to allow you to think outside of normal situations and doing so will help eliminate your normalcy bias and give you the best chance to make good decisions in a timely manner. When the worst happens, you may not have the benefit of someone else telling you what to do, it will be up to you to make those decisions. Once you make a decision you will have to live with it.

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