no man is an island, post-apoc version

great (IMO) forum post, quoted here in its entirety:

Prepper culture is basically just an insane fetish. They desperately want the world to fall apart so they can do whatever they want, so they view everything through that lens and thus the world is, paradoxically, always on the verge of falling apart. They watch the news in a constant state of sexual frustration as the world stubbornly doesn't die, relieved only by thinking about how great their personal kingdom is going to be or by buying some insane new prepper shit.

If the world falls apart, all their little bunkers and buckets of survival food and bullets and guns won't matter for shit. If you want a moderately decent life, the number one most important thing will be other people, not driving them off so you can be god-king of your pathetic little plot of land. Doesn't matter worth anything if you have an actual belt-fed heavy machine gun with a million rounds of ammo on a turret with a pillbox protecting your place because if a hundred people band together and want your stuff, you're fucked. All they have to do is keep you awake for a couple days, then walk up and bash your head in when you pass out from exhaustion. In the meantime, the rest of their group is out doing farming and hunting and fishing so some parts of the group can focus on things besides growing food. All you prepped was a great storehouse with possibly a nice food bonus. If you want prep anything of actual value, start piling up books on medicine, agriculture, etc to make sure that it isn't all lost when the internet goes down.

And nobody has enough time to be usefully expert in everything you want for a decent life. Even just to get back to say, 1800s-level living, you're talking farmers that specialize in animals, farmers that specialize in crops, fishers, specialists to convert those products to food/clothing items, the specialty trades for wood/stone/metal crafting, doctors and vets, and the organization to administrate it all. So even a small independent community is going to need on the order of a couple hundred adult specialists, plus their families. Even if you have the skills to make it as hunter-gatherer, you're going to die relatively young and probably from something stupid like a bad cut or a dental cavity.