Stuff to Buy Before Everything Goes to Shit
You are not going to be the guy with the bunker. You are going to be the guy with a phone at four percent and a bag of shredded cheese. Here are eight emergency supplies that fix that, ranked by how you die without them.
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What You Actually Need in an Emergency Kit
One size. No decisions to make. You will not be killed by a bomb or a mob or a guy in a gas mask — you will be killed by diarrhea, like a Victorian toddler, four days in, because you drank out of a creek that had a raccoon in it. Buy the f-ing straw.
Buy on Amazon →| What | How You Die Without It |
|---|---|
| Water Filter Straw | Dysentery, day 4 |
| Hand-Crank Radio | Walking the wrong way |
| Headlamps (2-pack) | The stairs |
| Actual Trauma Kit | Bleeding out, politely |
| 20,000mAh Power Bank | Nobody knows where you are |
| A Real Knife | Slowly, and stupidly |
| Mylar Blankets (10) | Hypothermia in a Honda |
| Freeze-Dried Food Bucket | You don’t. You just get mean. |
Water Filter Straw
Filters a thousand gallons, weighs two ounces, costs less than the lunch you’re going to regret today. Every fantasy you have about the apocalypse involves you doing something cool with your hands. The reality is that you will be squatting behind a Chevron with your pants around your ankles, dying of a parasite named after a Greek guy. This is the cheapest way to not be that. Throw one in the car and one in the closet and never think about it again.
Buy on Amazon →
Hand-Crank Emergency Radio
Solar, hand crank, charges your phone, has a little light on it. Its real function is to be the one object in your house that still works, which is worth more to a human nervous system than anything it will ever actually broadcast. What it will broadcast is a man in Idaho reading a list of county names for six hours. You will listen to all of it. It will be the most connected you’ve felt in years.
Buy on Amazon →
Headlamps, Two-Pack
Not a flashlight. A flashlight occupies a hand, and both of your hands are going to be busy doing something you’re bad at, in the dark, for the first time. You get two, which means one for you and one for the person in your house who will otherwise be using their phone flashlight and burning the only battery either of you has. You will look like an idiot. Everyone with a working light source looks like an idiot. That’s the deal.
Buy on Amazon →
A Trauma Kit, Not a First Aid Kit
The plastic tin under your sink is not a first aid kit, it’s a craft supply. This one has three hundred more bandages than that, which is not the point — the point is the tourniquet and the trauma shears buried in the middle of it, the two things that matter when something goes actually wrong and the two things you don’t currently own. Watch one ten-minute video on the tourniquet, because owning one you can’t apply is just an expensive strap. This is the most useful object on this list and the one you’re least likely to buy, because thinking about it is unpleasant. Buy it anyway.
Buy on Amazon →We do this every week
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20,000mAh Power Bank
Five or six full phone charges. In every actual disaster of the last twenty years, the phone was the thing that mattered — not for calls, which won’t go through, but for texts, which will, and for the map you downloaded, and for proving to one person somewhere that you are not dead. Charge it once a month. Put a reminder in your calendar right now, because you won’t, and then it’ll be at eleven percent on the one day it counts.
Buy on Amazon →
The Knife You Are Actually Going to Buy
Black blade, serrated spine, aggressive little pocket clip. It looks like it was designed by a man with strong opinions about ammunition. You told yourself you wanted something practical and Scandinavian with a wooden handle, and then you saw this one, and something happened in your chest that you are not going to examine. Fine. It’s cheap, tens of thousands of people have bought it, and it will cut a rope, a seatbelt, a box, and an apple. You are not fooling anyone, including us. But you will have a knife.
Buy on Amazon →
Mylar Blankets, Ten-Pack
Ten of them for less than the cost of a sandwich each, and every one folds down smaller than a deck of cards. They look like a joke — they look like something you’d get at the end of a fun run — and then it’s forty degrees and you’re spending the night in a Honda Civic and this crinkly little sheet of space garbage is the difference between miserable and hospitalized. Put one in every car, every bag, and the junk drawer. They cost little enough that you can afford to be stupid about it.
Buy on Amazon →
The Freeze-Dried Food Bucket
Thirty years of shelf life and it tastes like a stroganoff that was described to a chemist over the phone. Yes, it’s the most expensive thing here, and yes, that’s roughly a dollar a day for the next four decades of not thinking about it. Nobody starves in the first two weeks of anything — this isn’t about calories, it’s about not having to make a decision about food while everything else is on fire. Buy one, shove it in the garage, forget it exists. In fourteen years you will find it while looking for something else and feel an enormous, unearned sense of competence.
Buy on Amazon →We start from the failure, not the feature. For every slot on this list we asked one question — what actually kills you, or leaves you helpless, if you skip it — then found the cheapest, most idiot-proof thing that answers it. We favor gear that needs no manual, no subscription, and no practice you will never actually do. Nothing here is paid placement: the only money involved is the affiliate commission, and it does not move the rankings.
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Our picks are editorial opinion, not professional, medical, or survival advice; when a decision actually matters, use your judgment and talk to a qualified expert. Prices are approximate and change constantly — check the retailer for the real number.
Until next week. Stay weird.