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The End of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI)

This post is somewhat chilling and may literally scare some readers who may not be mature enough to read it. You have been warned Read on to learn more about thinking about your own TEOWAWKI…

Survivalism and TEOWAWKI

When I was a teenager, I loved playing computer games. The Wizardry, Ultima series of fantasy dungeons and dragons type of role-playing games where where I got immersed into the imaginary worlds created by the developers. As I go older, I graduated towards real time strategy (RTS) Command and Conquer types before adulthood resulted in me having less interest in gaming now that I’m closer to 40 than 20 in age!

One of the better games I played was “Wasteland” by Electronic Arts. It was a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that sees you bring a group of adventurers across the wasteland of Nevada to uncover a mystery and survive against hobos, mutant robots and other nasties.

Why am I talking about “Wasteland” and TEOWAWKI?

The reason why I explore this theme of survivalism and TEOWAWKI scenarios is because they are getting more real in today’s age. We are now as Handy described in his book, “The Age of Unreason” where CHANGE is happening all the time and with increasingly speed and impact. Understanding the possibilities of TEOWAWKI allows us to be better prepared to mitigate its effects and to survive it.

Life is Totally Unpredictable

Games like Wasteland talk about apocalyptic events, where something serious happens that disrupts our way of life as we know it. Hence, “The end of the world as we know it” (TEOWAWKI) is a phrase to denote paradigm changing events. If you are a follower of post-apocalyptic films and books, you will realise that the scenarios played where the earth is close to being wiped out include mega asterioid strike (see films such as “Armageddon“, “Deep Impact“) which incidentally is one of the popular theories about what killed the dinosaurs.

Other films include “The Day After Tomorrow” where extreme climate change causes huge disruptions to life and many people die trying to survive such calamaties. Games such as “Wasteland” or films such as “The Book of Eli“, “Terminator” series of films also use a post-nuclear war  scenario as the cause of TEOTWAWKI.

Increasingly, TEOTWAWKI scenarios are not so far fetched after all. Think back to the financial crisis in 2008 as well as the recent European sovereign debt problems. The financial meltdown of markets in equities, property, bonds and other related assets is very possible in our lifetimes. Even Singapore was not spared the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis as well as SARS in 2003.

In short, ANYTHING can happen and possible TEOWAWKI scenarios can play out whether we are prepared for them or not.

On a personal scale, I’ve experienced my near TEOWAWKI event when my spouse and I almost split up. It totally devastated me emotionally and rebuilt me up from scratch. All sense of self was lost in that episode but the irony is that because we went to the brink to near-collapse of the marriage, we are now somewhat reconciled back and am taking the marriage on a day-to-day basis to bring up our daughter together.

My own personal upheavals has made me more aware of how what we take for granted as the world that we know can totally collapse very quickly.

Preparing Yourself for Your Own TEOWAWKI

I’ve seen the Asian financial crisis with my own eyes and went through the 2003 SARS period. My own personal near armageddon made me more aware about how uncertain life really is and not to place too much hope in our external environment. For one thing, I now trust the stock market much less than when I first started.

While I have been fortunate in making decent returns (exceeding two times fixed deposits interest rates) from the stock market, I know it has been largely luck. Thus, it is challenging to replicate such returns consistently all the time. Hence, my own investment strategy now is not to have anything more than 50% of my investible savings in stocks and shares. I currently have 33% and am not really thinking hard on enlarging it.

The external environment is more challenging to control, hence I reallise I must control myself more. I will continue to invest in building up experiences, skills and knowledge that makes me better able to survive the uncertainties of today’s world. Thus, I need to build up useful skills to help me survive a future where I may not be able to retire with the same lifestyle in Singapore. Hence, my previous post talking about retiring in Thailand because of the lower cost of living in making my retirement income stretch much further in the Land of Smiles

Learning Thai, getting a class 2B licence and continuing with my toastmasters activities are part of building up useful skills for the future. But I am also considering survivalism principles into day-to-day life.

Survivalism

If you are into survivalism, it is about preparing yourself for TEOWAWKI scenarios. While having fallout shelters and being able to survive a global thermonuclear war is possibly out of the question for a place like Singapore, surviving flood or having power cut off for 72 hours may not be such a stretch as recent flooding in Singapore shows that even in our supposedly “first world” country, there can be localised blackouts and flooding.

Hence, I’m going to also start to prepare my 72 hour emergency bag or bug-out bag. If you read the Singapore Civil Defence literature, this is about preparing food, clothing, water, personal hygiene and medical items to survive 72 hours in an emergency before help can get to you. The US FEMA and even our own SCDF has guides to help us on that.

Financial survivalism principles are also important. Your investible savings are actually part of your life energy. You traded your life force through working or running a business to accumulate the savings, thus, it’s useful to think of how you will protect and grow your investible savings. It is with that mindset that I arrived at my internal maximum 50% rule on putting my investible savings into equities.

The more I read about TEOWAWKI and survivalism, the more I realise that most people in Singapore will not be able to fathom the possibility of such scenarios because you can hardly be self-sufficient in Singapore. Not much space to escape to (except perhaps for Ubin residents) and even if you have a fallout or disaster shelter, you