Ask ten people what a prepper is, and you might get ten different answers.
Some will picture somebody with a basement full of canned food, ammunition, and enough batteries to keep the flashlights running until the next century.
Others might imagine a person living off the land, raising chickens, growing vegetables, and producing much of what their family needs.
Then there’s the fellow with a generator, extra groceries, emergency supplies, and a plan for getting his family through the next hurricane.
And somewhere out there, I’m pretty sure that somebody is still preparing for the zombie apocalypse.
But seriously, the term prepper covers a surprisingly diverse range of people.
Some are concerned about natural disasters. Others worry about economic instability, infrastructure failures, or major disruptions to society. Still others simply enjoy developing the skills and independence needed to handle difficult situations.
That got me wondering.
Are there actually different types of preppers? And if so, what separates one from another?
First, What Exactly Is a Prepper?
For this discussion, let’s call a prepper someone who deliberately prepares for emergencies, disruptions, or circumstances that could interfere with normal life.
That definition is intentionally broad.
You don’t need a bunker, a year’s supply of food, or thousands of dollars in equipment.
You don’t even have to call yourself a prepper.
There is no single, universally accepted system that divides preppers into official categories. Researchers and preparedness enthusiasts have developed different ways of describing them.
The following seven approaches aren’t meant to put people in boxes. They simply illustrate some recognizable differences in how people approach preparedness.
And there’s plenty of overlap between them.
1. The Everyday Preparedness Prepper
This is probably the most practical and least dramatic approach.
These people prepare for problems that might reasonably affect their everyday lives.
Severe weather, temporary power failures, water interruptions, medical emergencies, unexpected expenses, and unemployment are examples.
Their preparations might include emergency supplies, backup lighting, generators, first-aid training, financial reserves, insurance, and plans for communicating with family members.
Many wouldn’t consider themselves preppers at all.
They’re simply trying to make sure their household can handle a little adversity without everything falling apart.
The strength: Their preparations address recognizable needs and often provide benefits even when no major disaster occurs.
The limitation: Preparations designed around temporary disruptions may prove inadequate when circumstances become more severe or prolonged.
There’s nothing particularly glamorous about this approach.
But being able to keep your household functioning during an extended power outage is a pretty good accomplishment.
2. The Scenario-Based Prepper
Now things start getting interesting.
Scenario-based preppers organize much of their planning around a particular event or category of threats.
That might be an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), a major hurricane, economic collapse, civil unrest, a pandemic, nuclear emergency, or long-term failure of the electrical grid.
The starting point is usually a question:
What would happen if this particular event occurred?
They examine the possible consequences, identify vulnerabilities, and develop preparations intended to address that specific situation.
There’s considerable value in that approach.
Someone preparing for hurricanes along the Gulf Coast faces different challenges than somebody preparing for earthquakes in California.
Specific hazards may require specialized equipment, protective actions, knowledge, or evacuation procedures.
The strength: Detailed scenario planning can reveal dangers and requirements that general preparedness might overlook.
The limitation: Concentrating too heavily on one threat can leave other vulnerabilities unaddressed.
There’s also the question of priorities.
If someone spends substantial money preparing for an unlikely event while neglecting basic water, medical, communications, or financial needs, it might be worth examining whether those resources have been allocated wisely.
That doesn’t make specialized preparation wrong.
It makes prioritization important.
3. The All-Hazards or Capability-Based Prepper
This approach interests me considerably.
Instead of organizing everything around a particular event, these preppers emphasize capabilities that would be useful across multiple emergencies.
They ask questions such as:
Can I provide safe drinking water if the normal supply becomes unavailable?
Can I prepare food without electricity?
Can I communicate if the cellular network fails?
Can my household maintain sanitation, meet medical needs, obtain reliable information, and evacuate if necessary?
And what happens when an emergency lasts longer than expected?
Notice that those questions don’t depend entirely on what caused the problem.
A hurricane, ice storm, cyberattack, or major infrastructure failure might produce some of the same practical consequences.
Different events. Similar problems.
The reasoning is that developing broadly useful capabilities may provide more value than preparing exclusively for one particular scenario.
The strength: Supplies, skills, procedures, and backup capabilities may serve several purposes across many different emergencies.
The limitation: General capabilities cannot address every specialized hazard, and some emergencies require entirely different protective actions.
This approach shouldn’t be confused with ignoring specific threats.
An effective all-hazards foundation still needs to be tested against realistic situations, including hazards that could make ordinary preparations ineffective.
Which brings us to an interesting question:
Should we establish our broadly useful capabilities first and then examine specialized scenarios?
Or should specific scenarios drive the planning from the beginning?
I’m not convinced there’s one answer that works equally well for everybody.
And that’s part of what makes the question interesting.
4. The Homesteading and Self-Reliance Prepper
Homesteaders and self-reliance enthusiasts emphasize the ability to produce, maintain, or repair things they would otherwise depend on someone else to provide.
Gardening, raising livestock, preserving food, maintaining water systems, producing energy, and repairing equipment are familiar examples.
For some, this is primarily a lifestyle choice.
Others consider these capabilities essential to their long-term preparedness.
And some are both.
There’s something appealing about being able to grow food, repair equipment, or keep a household operating without depending entirely on outside services.
But homesteading doesn’t automatically make someone a prepper. People pursue that lifestyle for many reasons unrelated to disasters.
The strength: Productive skills and resources can reduce certain dependencies and support long-term resilience.
The limitation: This approach can require considerable property, money, labor, and specialized knowledge. It may also leave a person heavily dependent on one location.
And sometimes remaining at that location simply isn’t the safest option.
5. The Survivalist or Skills-First Prepper
Survivalists and preppers frequently overlap, although the terms aren’t always used in exactly the same way.
Some survivalists concentrate on wilderness survival, navigation, shelter construction, firecraft, water treatment, and operating with limited equipment.
Others emphasize self-reliance during prolonged disruptions to normal society.
The common thread is often an emphasis on personal capability, adaptability, and the ability to function under difficult circumstances.
A skills-first prepper might ask:
What happens if I lose access to my equipment and supplies?
That’s a worthwhile question.
A generator can fail. A vehicle can become unavailable. Supplies can be destroyed or left behind.
Skills and experience can help a person adapt when carefully developed plans no longer fit the circumstances.
The strength: Practical knowledge, judgment, and demonstrated skills may remain useful when equipment or supplies are unavailable.
The limitation: Individual survival skills don’t necessarily provide everything required to sustain an entire household through an extended emergency.
Being able to survive outdoors is valuable.
Keeping a family functioning through weeks of disrupted services presents another set of challenges.
A well-rounded preparedness plan may require both.
6. The Equipment and Technology Prepper
I suspect quite a few readers will recognize themselves somewhere in this category.
Radios, generators, solar panels, batteries, water-filtration systems, emergency lighting, specialized tools, and other equipment can become a substantial part of preparedness.
And let’s face it. Some of this equipment is pretty interesting.
Technology can provide capabilities that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve.
But there’s a difference between possessing equipment and being able to depend on it.
The strength: Properly selected, maintained, and understood equipment can significantly improve a person’s ability to manage disruptions.
The limitation: Equipment ownership can create a false sense of readiness when the necessary knowledge, maintenance, procedures, and practice are missing.
A radio sitting in a box doesn’t guarantee communications.
A generator that hasn’t been maintained isn’t much comfort during a power outage.
And buying additional equipment doesn’t automatically correct a weakness in planning.
Sometimes another piece of gear really is the answer.
Sometimes it isn’t.
The challenge is knowing the difference.
7. The Organized-Group Prepper
This final approach involves people who deliberately organize with others to improve their collective preparedness.
I’m not simply talking about joining an online preparedness forum or social club.
Those communities can be excellent places to exchange information, learn new skills, and develop relationships. But participation doesn’t necessarily establish any obligation to provide assistance during an emergency.
Organized-group preparedness goes further.
For example, a group of neighbors might agree to check on one another after a storm, establish alternative communications, or help families with transportation and other immediate needs.
A more structured arrangement might be a Mutual Assistance Group, commonly called a MAG.
MAGs generally consist of individuals or households who establish some level of commitment to working together.
Depending on the group, that might involve agreed responsibilities, member selection, regular training, resource sharing, communications plans, and arrangements for assisting one another during emergencies.
Some MAGs are relatively informal. Others are substantially more organized.
Their objectives and organizational practices vary, and a MAG isn’t automatically a militia or a security organization.
What distinguishes this approach from a general preparedness community is the deliberate expectation of cooperation beyond simply exchanging information.
The strength: An organized group can combine skills, resources, labor, knowledge, and capabilities that individual households might not possess independently.
The limitation: Group effectiveness depends on trust, reliability, compatible expectations, practical coordination, and members actually fulfilling their commitments.
A group that exists only on paper—or whose members have never practiced working together—may provide considerably less support than everyone expects.
And there is another consideration.
A general preparedness community and an organized mutual-assistance group can complement one another without being the same thing.
One may provide education, discussion, and access to useful information.
The other may establish specific relationships and arrangements for practical assistance.
Both can be valuable, provided we understand what each actually offers.
So, Which Approach Is Best?
That’s where I think the conversation becomes most interesting.
I don’t believe these seven approaches can reasonably be ranked from best to worst.
For one thing, they’re not mutually exclusive.
Someone might maintain everyday emergency supplies, develop outdoor survival skills, grow a garden, operate amateur radio equipment, and participate in a mutual-assistance group.
Another person might emphasize financial resilience, medical preparations, and evacuation planning because those are the most important requirements for their particular household.
Neither individual necessarily fits neatly into one category.
The more important question may be whether their preparations match their circumstances and the problems they’re likely to face.
Geography matters.
Family responsibilities matter.
Medical needs, finances, physical capabilities, available space, and existing skills all matter.
And so does the amount of time and money someone can reasonably devote to preparedness.
There are no unlimited budgets, and few of us have unlimited time.
Every preparedness decision involves priorities.
Are We Preparing for a Disaster or for What Happens Afterward?
This is the question I keep coming back to.
Think about two very different events.
One is a major hurricane.
The other is a widespread failure of the electrical grid.
The causes are different.
But both might result in loss of electrical service, interrupted communications, limited fuel availability, closed businesses, problems obtaining drinking water, and reduced access to medical services.
A number of preparations could be useful in either situation.
That suggests a simple way of examining preparedness:
Cause → Consequence → Capability
The cause is the event.
The consequence is what changes because of that event.
The capability is what allows us to respond effectively to the resulting problem.
But there is an important qualification.
The cause can also determine the safest course of action.
A hurricane may require evacuation. A tornado may require immediate shelter. A chemical release may require specialized protective measures.
The same general supplies don’t necessarily produce the same solution in every emergency.
That’s why I find it worthwhile to consider both the common requirements and the unique demands of specific threats.
Perhaps the most useful approach isn’t exclusively scenario-based or exclusively capability-based.
Perhaps it involves establishing useful capabilities, understanding the threats we actually face, and examining how well those capabilities would perform under different circumstances.
That seems worth investigating.
But I wouldn’t declare it the winning approach without examining the evidence and its limitations.
Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question
After looking at these different types of preppers, I wonder whether we’ve become a little too concerned with what people call themselves.
Survivalist.
Homesteader.
Prepper.
Self-reliance enthusiast.
Whatever label somebody prefers.
Labels can be helpful when discussing different approaches, but they don’t tell us whether somebody is actually prepared.
A person with modest supplies and well-practiced plans might be better positioned for a particular emergency than someone with a tremendous amount of expensive equipment.
On the other hand, that equipment might prove essential when circumstances demand capabilities that basic supplies and skills cannot provide.
It depends on the situation.
Which brings me to the question I think matters most.
Are our preparations actually improving our ability to deal with the circumstances we’re preparing for?
That seems more important than deciding which category we belong in.
And it strikes me as a pretty good place to continue the conversation.
Bobby Bama
I’m curious how others approach preparedness. Are you mainly concerned with particular scenarios, general capabilities, practical skills, self-reliance, or working with an organized group? Maybe it’s a combination. And has your approach changed as you’ve gained experience?