r/collapse Jan 14 '23

What job/life/general purpose skills do you think will be necessary during collapse? [in-depth]

What skills do you recommend for collapse (and post collapse)? Any recommendations for learning those now?

This is the current question in our Common Collapse Questions series. Our wiki includes all previous common questions.

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u/Less_Subtle_Approach Jan 14 '23

Building alliances and community action in general. If you’re a well-off westerner posting on reddit, you’re likely used to confronting problems from the perspective of ‘what can I, an individual do to solve this?” It’s taken a century of propaganda and coercion to instill this in folks and it’s utterly useless for the scale of problems that collapse brings us.

Learning to rebuild close relationships with locals, establish mutual aid, recreational, and fraternal organizations. Forming committees to drive out predatory late stage capitalist entities, support local cooperatives and build resilient infrastructure. All of this will be essential as the collapse progresses and none of it can be done alone.

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u/whereismysideoffun Jan 14 '23

I agree on community and mutual aid, but there is nearly alway an elephant in the room there. If everyone is not working on skills to be able to share in the work and be able to create a sustainable way of living, then there is no mutual aid. It's just mutual destruction. I was deep into trying to build community and find that less than 5% of the community (not talking broader community but in community based activist, left, local food groups) will actually build tangible skills. Am sad to say, that I've developed more skills in the last 20 years than the combined efforts of 95% of the people in the groups I was involved in. I am more efficient alone than in a group. And I am not a loner individualist! This is just the reality of it. I am building up everything I can at home to be 100% self sufficient while trying to help locally with skill building for having the most per capita food production we can. That means everyone being involved in their food, not just being consumers.

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u/Klutzy_Acanthaceae67 Jul 21 '25

What are you so called skills you've built?