(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The more dependent you are, the less free you are. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how our system is designed to beat us down and make us weak and dependent, because when we are weak and dependent we are easier to control. Most of us don’t even realize why the majority of the population is so sick, exhausted, depressed and confused much of the time. Our bodies, our minds and our spirits are constantly being poisoned by the system, and those that are in control of the system know exactly what they are doing. If you do not choose to break free, you could end up under the oppression of their system for your entire life.
Of course for many people inertia seems like the easiest option. It is just so easy to keep doing what you have always done, and that is especially true once you get older.
But what are you going to do once the system that you have become so dependent upon starts to crumble all around you?
Over the past several years, our world has been getting increasingly unstable. Major wars have erupted, the cost of living has become very painful, pestilences have been raging all over the globe, and historic natural disasters have been hitting us one after another.
The chaos that we are experiencing now is just going to intensify in the months ahead. So what will most people do when the system that they depend on for their survival is shaken to the core?
The following are 12 simple things that you can start doing right now to become more independent of the system…
#1 Become Less Dependent On Your Job
For most people, having a job essentially means living in a state of “just over broke”. The truth is that it is incredibly difficult to become financially independent working for someone else. Of course most Americans would not be able to survive without a job, but you don’t want to settle for just surviving. I know that it can be exceedingly difficult to find the energy for a “side hustle” while you are working a full-time job, but a “side hustle” can eventually evolve into a full-time income. If you want to live free, it is so important to explore alternate sources of income and different ways to build wealth. And the truth is that any jobs we have now could easily disappear when economic conditions take a turn for the worse. But if you have put in the effort to build up a “side hustle”, at least you will still have that.
#2 Get Out Of Debt
The borrower is the servant of the lender. If you want to live free, get out of debt. No matter how far you try to run, your debts are going to continue to hang over you wherever you go. Getting out of debt can be completely and totally liberating. It will give you much more freedom and will make you far less dependent on your job. In fact, many Americans are already moving in this direction. Why not join them? When things start really falling apart and it is difficult for anyone to find a good job, the last thing you will want is a huge amount of debt hanging over your head.
#3 Reduce Expenses
For decades, most Americans have been living far beyond their means. In the future, times are going to be really tough and we are all going to have to learn to tighten our belts. Do you and your family waste money right now? If you can eliminate that, you can live on a smaller income and you will have more money to invest in the things that are really going to matter.
#4 Purchase Land
Real estate is a lot more expensive than it once was, but the truth is that you don’t want to wait forever to get your hands on a piece of land. When the system completely crumbles, you don’t want to be stuck in a heavily populated area with no place to go. You always want to have somewhere that you can “bug out” to if things hit the fan. In addition, owning real estate is a great way to build wealth. In some of the most desirable areas of the country that are not heavily populated, real estate prices have doubled or even tripled in recent years.
#5 Learn To Grow Your Own Food
Another reason why you want to purchase some land is so that you will have somewhere to grow your own food if that becomes necessary. 100 years ago, almost everyone knew how to grow their own food, and most people also knew how to raise farm animals. Today, relatively few Americans have those skills. A great way to begin is by starting your own “survival garden”. If you are not already doing this, why not start this upcoming spring?
#6 Find A Reliable Source Of Clean Water
Do you know what they are putting into your water? In many parts of the country, tap water is absolutely teeming with all sorts of nasty stuff. Drinking pure water is an easy change that anyone can make, and it can have a dramatic impact on your health. In addition, water is going to become a very, very valuable resource in the years to come. It will be absolutely key for you and your family to have a dependable source of clean drinking water. If you do not have water, you will not be able to survive for long.
#7 Explore Alternative Energy Sources
Have you noticed that your power bill just keeps going up? In some states, people are being hit with power bills that exceed $1,000 a month. Of course you may not be able to depend upon the power company at all once things get bad enough. The truth is that there are very good reasons why so many Americans have been trying to go “off the grid”. Without power, life gets really difficult very quickly. But if you are generating your own power then you won’t have to worry about that.
#8 Store Supplies
Every time there is a major disaster or emergency, store shelves get empty really fast. If an extended national emergency results in supply chains being disrupted on a long-term basis, you may have to get by on what you already have in your home. So do you and your family have enough food and supplies to survive for an extended period of time? If you don’t know where to start, there are guides that can help get you started. In America today, there are millions of “preppers”, and the “prepping” industry has been thriving. But of course most of the population just assumes that they will always be able to depend upon the system for what they need, and someday those people will be in for a very rude awakening.
#9 Protect Your Assets With Gold And Silver
Our leaders have been flooding the system with money for many years, and so it was only a matter of time before we experienced rampant inflation. The cost of living has been absolutely soaring, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. One way to protect yourself is by getting some gold and silver. In the future, your paper money may not buy much for you at all, but if you have some gold and silver coins you can always exchange them for the things that you are going to need.
#10 Learn Self-Defense
Do you remember the riots that happened all over the country just a few years ago? Well, the truth is that what we will see in the future will be far worse than that. When people get desperate enough, they will literally do just about anything to survive. Just think about it. What do you think is going to happen once people living in densely-populated areas have been without food for two or three days? Now is the time to think about how you will defend your home and your property from crazed looters. It is not a fun thing to think about, but unfortunately we are heading into times that will not always be pretty.
#11 Keep Yourself In Good Physical Condition
As Americans, we live such “cushy” lives. But when times get hard, things will not be so cushy. In fact, the years ahead are likely to demand quite a bit of physical activity. So keep yourself in good physical condition now. In the future, you will be quite glad that you did.
#12 Make Deep Connections
It is really, really hard to “survive” all by yourself. Those that will thrive the most in the future will be those that have a community that they can depend upon. The truth is that we are always at our best when we work together. It is time to build deep connections with family and friends, it is time to make new connections, and it is time to focus on what is truly important. In the times ahead the world will be a very cold place, and a little love and teamwork will go a long way.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
