I Don’t Want to Say I Told You So…
Mainly because saying “I told you so” is one of the least attractive things a man can say, ranking somewhere between “have you heard my prog-rock demo?” and “The Big Bang Theory is much funnier than Friends.”
Nonetheless...
A year ago I wrote a blog post about preparing for a world that seemed to be inching, blindly yet belligerently, towards a really nasty cliff edge. When I posted it, I half expected people to read it and conclude I was one step away from lining the skirting boards with tinfoil and muttering about fallout patterns. Yet here we are, twelve months later, and the world has done very little to reward complacency. If anything, it has promoted my cranky rantings from the realm of the absurd to something more like prudent contingency planning. As I write this, America is actually at war with Iran... for no apparent reason!
On a positive note, what I’ve learned in the year since is that preparing for disruption has an interesting side effect: even if the worst never happens, you still end up improving your life by acquiring a whole new bunch of skills and knowledge.
Though my starting point was “I should probably have enough food, water and basic kit to sit tight for a while if the world goes belly-up”, this soon morphed into a broader fascination with resilience in the everyday sense. I haven’t bought a leather trench coat, a crossbow, or anything that would look good on the cover of Prepper Monthly, but I have started to look at the practical systems that matter to my day-to-day existence and gradually sought to improve them to make life smoother for those times when it decides to be a nuisance.
I’ve developed the habit of asking a certain type of question and then coming up with a solution. For example, how would I turn on the air-conditioning if the remote control broke? Answer: either use a universal remote or rig up an IR interface that can be wired up and triggered by an app on my phone.
Soon I found that the search for these sorts of answers pulled me into a rabbit hole that led to home networking, local servers, Home Assistant, IoT gadgets, backup power, battery banks, smarter lighting, better monitoring, and the general art of making a house behave less like a random collection of temperamental appliances and more like a military command centre.
I’ve rediscovered skills that I’d forgotten I had, like soldering and decoding resistor colour codes. While normal people are recycling jam jars, I’m stripping components out of old electronic equipment and mumbling things like, “That bit of wire might come in useful.”
There is, it turns out, a lot of overlap between “mildly anxious middle-aged prepper” and “bloke who gets excited about network topology.” Once you start asking sensible questions like “What happens if the power goes?” or “What happens if the internet dies?” or “What happens if some essential service I’ve lazily assumed will always exist suddenly doesn’t?”, you find yourself building useful things. Not bunkers, maybe, but infrastructure.
So now I find a lot of reassurance not merely from the tins in the store-cupboard, but in knowing how my own home works. I like knowing which devices matter, which ones are fluff, what can run locally, what depends on the cloud, what can be automated, what can be monitored, and what can be made robust for relatively little money. There is something deeply satisfying about replacing vague dependence with practical understanding. It scratches the same itch as stockpiling, but in a more technical and, dare I say it, more interesting way.
And the lovely thing is that none of this only applies to war, or civil breakdown, or whatever flavour of geopolitical idiocy happens to be trending this week. It applies to everyday disruption too.
Case in point: the power outages we had during the storm season just after Christmas.
A year ago, that sort of thing would have irritated me. This time round, I largely breezed through it. Not because I had built some apocalypse compound on the South Island of New Zealand, but because I had quietly, bit by bit, made life more resilient. I had backup options. I had lighting sorted. I had ways of keeping key kit going. I had thought in advance about communications, charging, local control, and the boring but vital question of “what stops working first?”
That is the real dividend of all this stuff. You don’t need World War Three for it to pay off. A storm will do. A router outage. A brief blackout. A flaky service provider. A burst of bad weather. The future always arrives dressed as an inconvenience before it turns up in uniform.
And maybe that is the point.
Preparedness is often mocked because people imagine extremes. They picture conspiracy cranks, underground bunkers, and fifty kilos of dried lentils. What they miss is that resilience is simply competence with a torch in its hand. It is understanding systems. It is reducing single points of failure. It is making sure that when something goes wrong, your first reaction is not blind panic but mild annoyance.
If I have become more interested in technology over the last year, this is why. Not because I’ve fallen in love with gadgets for their own sake, though I admit I’m not entirely immune to a blinking dashboard. I actually spent the best part of a morning figuring out how to get my servers, of which there are now four, to power down gracefully and come back online automatically when there is a power outage. The answer involved a magic packet and the status of a smart socket attached to the fridge. (Long story). It’s because technology, used properly, can make a home less fragile. Home Assistant, local networking, IoT sensors, backup power arrangements, all of it is really just practical anti-chaos engineering. It’s a way of pushing back, however modestly, against the modern habit of building everything on assumptions of permanent stability, which where I live feels like a somewhat fragile position.
And that brings me back to Spain.
Looking back, one of my better life decisions has been moving here in the first place. Spain stayed neutral in the First World War and remained nominally neutral in the Second, even if Franco’s sympathies were hardly mysterious. More recently, Pedro Sánchez has made a habit of resisting pressure to follow the most excitable military drumbeats, including pushing back on NATO’s 5% spending target and, this month, refusing to let U.S. forces use Spanish bases for Iran-linked strikes.
That, for once, is exactly the sort of national character trait I’m happy to lean into.
So no, I don’t want to say I told you so.
But I will say this: thinking ahead has served me rather well. It hasn’t made me richer, cooler, or more relaxed, but it has made me more resilient. And in an age where fragility is built into almost everything, that feels less like eccentricity and more like common sense.
Maybe the biggest lesson of the last year is that preparing for catastrophe is not really about catastrophe at all.
It’s about building a life that copes better with wobble.
And, in the 21st century, we seem to have wobble in abundance!