Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly. – Marcus Aurelius
Solidarity Prepping is the radical alternative to the spirituality grift economy. They will take your money and tell you:
“Next, we need to show people that there is a door and that they have the keys or the runes or whatever it takes to open that door. We need to give people that sense that they are not powerless either individually or collectively. That together we can still lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave behind.” Accidental Gods
This is a lie, because they are also busy telling us that complex life is going extinct. They are gaslighting you while projecting onto their critics to the point that they probably believe their own propaganda.
These are the people who think another world is possible; they say things like “I believe in Solar Punk” and are doing the hard sell on Toxic Optimism at the same time as neocolonial theft of indigenous spiritual culture and selling it to their gullible white followers as “Celtic” Tradition and maintaining the world out of balance in exchange for wealth
Solidarity Prepping is founded on NVDA, Survivalism, Collapse Club, Just Collapse, Sufi philosophy, and Radical Acceptance.
Radical Acceptance comes from the Sufi concept of “die before you die”: letting go of your ego and worldly attachments while you are still alive.
I accept that these ideas are difficult to swallow, distressing and heartbreaking, and that climate grief is a real and difficult emotion to cope with, but it is not helped by people who own a smallholding and grow their own food telling you that preparation is a futile exercise.
So Where Do Wilderness Survival Skills Fit In?
The Shamanic Grift seems to be all about “how things feel”. If you know how things feel, you can talk about them. Connecting to nature, however, is different: the now-discredited Michael Harner said “he” connected people to nature through ceremony and “Core Shamanism”. The image below is how many people visualize the interconnectedness of nature. In fact, visualization and guided meditations are central to the shamanic journey. Visualizing roots from your feet to the core of the earth and tendrils from the top of your head to the universe, with the heart at the center, reflects the homocentric nature of neoshamanism and its separation from nature. You cannot connect and disconnect from the web of life. We are all part of nature, whether we like it or not, but when we are immersed in it, we don’t connect to nature; nature connects to us via the limbic system.
In nature, the brain is bathed in serotonin, which sharpens the senses and relaxes the nervous system. Serotonin is at 1-2%, compared with the vast quantities (90%) produced by the gut during digestion. The brain synthesizes 1-2% of it in the brainstem’s raphe nuclei. It acts as a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood, sleep, and memory; in nature, its role is more complex. Serotonin reduces our response to punishment or negative outcomes without blocking positive rewards. It improves our ability to manage actions when facing threats or difficult situations. Elevated levels assist different types of memory function during high-stress events. Serotonin is the natural drug that helps us process the dangers of predation.
Nature boosts serotonin: Natural daylight hitting your eyes and skin triggers serotonin production through brain pathways.
Green Spaces: Fresh air and outdoor movement raise brain oxygen and neurotransmitter levels.
Soil Microbes: Contact with beneficial microorganisms in natural dirt stimulates chemical balance.
How Does it feel? You cannot feel your brain producing serotonin because the brain has no sensory receptors to detect internal chemical reactions as they happen. Instead, you only feel the general results of that chemical activity, such as a better mood or calm energy. Or, as Gail Bradbrook says, “It charges my batteries.”
I find it interesting that some shamanic practitioners are constantly telling us how their brain works, mainly their thought processing, in a general sort of pseudo-neuroscientific manner. But they never talk about the brain’s interaction with nature, or how the relationship among the brain, soil bacteria, and serotonin helps explain why digging and gardening are so good for treating generalized anxiety and climate grief. This refusal to accept peer-reviewed medical science in favor of mixing out-of-context indigenous ideas with psychotherapy (mental health counseling), New Age beliefs, drumming, meditation, and symbolic journeys to help people feel better emotionally or spiritually is dangerous because some neo-shamanic healers reject evidence-based medicine (treatments proven by science and clinical tests) in favor of their brand of unregulated healing. Relying only on spiritual rituals for serious physical or mental illnesses is dangerous, and patients who delay real medical care risk worsening their conditions or missing life-saving treatments.
Survival Skills, Serotonin and Dopamine: Decolonizing the Brain
Learning nature-based skills engages dopamine and serotonin to boost motivation, focus, and reward processing through multisensory environmental feedback: The Role of Dopamine in Ancestral Skill Acquisition
- Reward and Prediction: Dopamine acts as a primary learning signal, releasing when you experience unexpected successes or progress during hands-on tasks
- Motivation and Action: Pushes you to initiate effort, persist through trial-and-error (such as tracking, foraging, or woodworking), and convert intention into movement
- Reinforcement: Helps your brain lock in successful physical or navigational patterns by encoding prediction errors.
Learning navigation skills can physically and functionally change the brain, particularly by strengthening the hippocampus and improving connectivity between brain regions.
- Hippocampal Growth: Extensive spatial training, such as the intensive memorization undertaken by London taxi drivers studying The Knowledge, increases volume in the posterior hippocampus, the brain region responsible for spatial memory.
- Enhanced Connectivity: Short-term or new navigation training may not immediately increase physical tissue, but it strengthens the “highways,” or functional communication, between the hippocampus and other cognitive networks.
- The Impact of GPS: Constantly relying on turn-by-turn digital directions reduces the hippocampus’s active engagement, which can weaken spatial memory over time. Turning off the GPS and reading a map forces the brain to build and use mental maps, protecting cognitive health.
“Rather than aiding our ability to navigate, GPS navigation is designed to relieve us of our involvement and disengage us from our surrounding environment. After all, GPS navigation is a form of destination-oriented transport in which humans become a “passenger of their own body”, as opposed to wayfaring, which embeds us into the environment as the driver, in order to find the destination.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8032695/
The neoshamanic practitioner who claims that we are “not going to learn survival skills because no one is going back, we can’t,” rejects neurodecolonization: the practice of using ancestral, contemplative, and mindfulness traditions to rewire neural pathways shaped by the trauma and stress of colonization and capitalism.
- Reclaiming Neural Networks: It seeks to deactivate stress-based, survival-driven brain patterns linked to systemic oppression and build healthy, empowered responses.
- Ancestral Wisdom: Practices include traditional meditation, storytelling, movement, and reconnecting with indigenous or ancestral diets that support gut and brain health.
- Overcoming Resistance: Proponents note that deep learning requires bypassing the “reptilian brain”—our mental bodyguard—which often treats unfamiliar or threatening historical truths as physical threats, inhibiting true cognitive healing.
I think the accusation that survival skills are dystopian stems from obsessive ritualization and from exposure to survival skills that have stagnated as a result of that ritualization. Ritualization of survival skills often stems from the Dunning-Kruger effect in survivalism: the under-skilled practitioner fails to recognize their inadequate learning and creates a ritual around it because they do not realize they are under-skilled. The indigenous medicine person, however, is already highly skilled before entering the wilderness, so the learning of ritual is genuine and rooted in tradition rather than a failure to apply skills properly.
Solidarity Prepping’s core skills are survival skills coupled with backwoods Engineering, carpentry, plumbing, building, and community action around climate adaptation, and accepting that extinction may be a very real possibility. Solidarity Prepping encourages communities to work cooperatively. Survival skills matter because they foster resilience and individual resourcefulness. During natural disasters like Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, residents equipped with practical survival, self-sufficiency, and traditional skills—such as off-grid communication, chainsaw operation, and timber processing—fared much better during extended utility and supply disruptions.
Key Survival and Resource Skills in Action
- Independent Communications: Survivalists and tech-savvy locals deployed satellite tools like Starlink units & Meshtastic to re-establish emergency links and coordinate aid distribution when cellular networks completely failed.
- Debris and Fuel Management: Community groups used local forestry and carpentry skills to clear massive tree blockages, process fallen timber into firewood, and create local firewood banks to heat homes.
- Traditional Self-Reliance: Knowledge of historic food preservation, foraging, and alternative energy or livestock care helped bridge long gaps when grocery supply chains and municipal water systems were severed.
- Structural Resiliency: Older homes built with traditional placement and heavy-duty materials often withstood extreme conditions better than modern builds sited too close to vulnerable waterways.
Solidarity Prepping is inclusive and antifascist, but I do not tolerate fools. Survival skills are not part of this, because I expect to hunt and gather; suggesting otherwise is a psychological projection.
Rejecting ancestral skills on the grounds that we will somehow return to the Stone Age is lazy and cliché.
Who are you trying to convince? Because the mantra isn’t working on me.
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