Seems to me the hardest part of really going off the grid is staying unknown to the majority of other people!
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The post-nuke situation doesn't look too bad to me for survival, though. You wouldn't need a great many survival skills.
1) Get a geiger counter and a bunch of 9-volt batteries, or whatever they run on. Essential, as you wouldn't want to survive in a radiation-free area just to cook yourself by entering one.
1) Drive where it's warm most of the year round so making fire/staying warm isn't an issue except for, possibly, scaring away wild or feral animals (and also see below). Of course you'd need to raid a gun store on the way to the south.
2) If you can't find a source of clean natural water at first, live on bottled. My assumptions are based on the fact that you are still alive, which means you haven't caught lethal rads. And wherever you set up also won't, as you're paying attention to your geiger counter. Never venture far from your new base camp without your geiger counter.
3) Live on canned goods and vitamin supplements, which will be in abundant supply, for the rest of your life. Find a pharmacy. Maybe grow some fresh veggies/fruit; find books on how to identify safe berries and, if you're feeling brave, mushrooms. If you don't know how to hunt (like me), learn. Go fishing.
4) Stay the hell away from other people and shoot anyone who comes near you. Live as a hermit. Other people will probably the most dangerous threat you face in the post-nuke world.
5) Hope like hell you never need surgery of any kind. At least, though, with all the empty pharmacies you'll never lack for antibiotics.
Hey, I didn't say it'd be a good life. Just life.
The last thing I worry about in my life time a nuke strike. if it happens it happens and at my age I would just be a burden on what ever society is left.
Trying to survive in unnatural times is a way of life for the below 40 generation.
Who will not survive and who will can be debated.
1st to go-----------
Any one with any kind of handicap, be it needing glasses to see , to diabetics and those on medication daily for heart or lungs. The very young that need infant formulae to the early 20 year olds that get impacted wisdom teeth that are infected. Those who cannot ----Godot, medication has a shelf life of less then a year and Nytro pills only around 3-4 months. Some pain medications will in time change chemically and become very dangerous.----
2nd. to go ----
Our professionals, Lawyers, Doctors in the field of specialization such as face lifts and the head shrinks or therapists for mental problems. Most VETS that have never worked with farm animals and their technicians. Our bankers, sales men and anyone in the computer field or electronics, TV or radio. Those that specialise in the electric run medical devices in hospitals to bartenders. Mechanics that have no idea how to build a field plow.
College grads that majored in most subjects as well as the addicted, the lazy and the street thugs. Most people in the service industry and all our politicians and their trophy wives.
Who will do well to survive
1st the Hookers, they seem to be the number one survivalest of any life or time.
The youth that attended trade schools and are carpenters, stone masons, weavers sheep shearers, well diggers and EMT's. The Professional Herbalists, boat builders, midwives and surgeons.
Pot growers, brewers and bakers.
The potters, glass blowers and those that work with metal . Shoe makers, tailors and naturally a few Clergy that also work at a trade. Those that can tan hides and can make sails for boats and tents for shelter.
The monsters that will for a price do anything, the people with the where with all to buy and sell others as slaves, those who can round up the hungry and attack other people for their goods,.
And so it will begin again, this time not from the start of civilisation but the later times when mankind has left off at the middle ages.
It may not take but 8 generations before the people jump ahead to where we are now and the whole thing will repeat itself again. Why not, as long as no one burns our library's as the library at Alexander was destroyed, just imagine how fast we could have progressed had that not happend.
There are many who believe that as the earth is so very old that this may have taken place before, many times in fact as we cannot to this time duplicate some of the man made things we find today,.
Your Geiger counter will last only as long as you can find battery's to run it, best to just learn to live with radiation as we do now.