Fretting

Whatever acts cannot be destoyed, as long as it acts.

Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibnitz

We go through phases where the world seems to be going more awry than usual. I for one have an ability of looking at the half-empty portion of the glass. But with this awareness comes a tendency of over-analysis and paralysis. In a sense, prepping is a simple way to break this paralysis and get moving. But the simple part of prepping is what folks drift toward (myself included), where you go out and buy some stuff and put it in the basement (BTW I place the ill-considered fascination with weaponry that seems to be endemic in the prepper community part and parcel of this).

The real hard part of prepping is the mental discipline of deciding what to do and what not to do. Making up a completely stocked bug-out bag and then not having a well defined decision tree to execute the plan is getting ready for the prom without getting a date. Having a completely stocked gun cabinet with state of the art hardware without a clear idea of is an appropriate response will get a man  years in prison (and deservedly so).

Boyd's OODA loop is a good place to start your thinking. 

The reason that I like this diagram so much is that it is complicated, it shows that simple, sloppy thinking is the action of a child. Screaming freedom is not the way to structure a movement, the force and direction of a movement is necessarily constrained by complex, often mutually incompatible goals.