title: "Preparing for the Worst Case Scenario" date: "2026-03-02" description: "What does it actually mean to prepare? A first-principles exploration of fear, sovereignty, and designing a life that doesn't depend on the system." tags: ["first-principles", "sovereignty", "preparation", "life-design"] published: true hook: "I was sitting at the kitchen counter eating peanut butter bread when the word hit me." readTime: "12 min read" song: title: "Sovereign" artist: "Avry" video: title: "Preparing for the Worst Case Scenario" narration: title: "Preparing - Audio Version" references:
- title: "Self-Realization Fellowship" url: "https://www.yogananda.org/" description: "Paramahansa Yogananda's teachings on self-realization"
- title: "Eternal Engines" url: "https://eternalengines.com" description: "Free energy heaters for off-grid living" cta: text: "Follow on Threads" url: "https://threads.net/@avrystroeve"
I was sitting at the kitchen counter eating peanut butter bread with honey and cinnamon on the top. Fort Lauderdale. Staying at my friend Vince's place. I had my computer open, six hours of focused work already behind me, and the kind of quiet that only comes when everything immediate is handled.
Food. Water. Shelter. Safety. All covered.
And then the word arrived: preparing.
I don't know why it showed up. I wasn't anxious. I wasn't doom-scrolling. I was just sitting there, full and comfortable and present. But the word planted itself and wouldn't leave. So I followed it.
What Are We Actually Preparing For?
This is a first-principles question. Not "what does the news say to worry about" or "what's trending on conspiracy Twitter." Start at the bottom: what, historically, have human beings needed to prepare for?
In the old days, the answer was direct and physical. Kingdoms taking over other kingdoms. Hunters, raiders, pillagers. People who wanted what you had and were willing to take it by force. Rape and pillage wasn't a metaphor - it was a real thing that happened to real communities. That kind of threat demanded a specific kind of preparation: walls, weapons, alliances, stored food.
So what's the modern version?
I sat with that question. The physical invasion thing - that's not really the threat anymore. Not for most of us. Not in the daily, practical sense. The modern version is subtler. It's data. Surveillance. Infrastructure that tracks where you go, what you say, what you search, what you buy, who you talk to.
Your TV can listen to you. Your phone definitely does. And is that being used maliciously right now? Mostly it's just serving you ads. You talk about running shoes and suddenly every platform knows. That's actually kind of useful - human society getting whatever it wants, whenever it wants.
But could it eventually become something else? Could the same infrastructure that serves you targeted ads also be used to ensure compliance? To make sure you stayed in your zone, didn't leave your area, didn't say the wrong thing?
I don't know. Nobody does. And I think that's the honest answer. Not "yes, the elites are coming for us" and not "no, everything's fine, go back to sleep." The honest answer is: I don't know, and I think it's worth thinking about.
The Fork in the Road
Here's where I need to tell you something about myself. Because this blog isn't about abstract philosophy. It's about personal experience. And the experience that led me here started with loss.
My dad passed away in 2023. He was fifty years old.
I was doing door-to-door sales in Utah that summer. When it happened, I did what I thought was strong: I didn't cry. Not for months. I thought he'd want me to carry on, keep working, keep building. I thought strength meant not letting the grief touch what I needed to do.
Then one evening, I was working for my uncle's catering company. Beautiful wedding up in the Denver mountains. I'd finished setting the tables and was standing off to the side when the ceremony started.
The bride walked down the aisle with her father.
And it hit me like a truck. My sister would never have that moment. When she gets married, that walk won't happen. Not like that.
I held it together through the rest of the event. Held it together walking to the parking lot. It was pitch black. We were on a mountaintop, middle of a forest. I was one of the last ones out. I sat in my car in that dark parking lot for thirty minutes, waiting. Trying to let it come. And finally, after ten, fifteen, twenty minutes of sitting there willing myself to crack, I cracked.
Everything came out at once. Fury. Sadness. Loss. Every emotion I'd been compressing for months, mixed into one storm. And after that night, I started healing. The crying came easier. The emotions moved through my body instead of staying stuck in it.
I finished college. Got my first sales job. Started traveling - Medellin, Tulum, Argentina with my two good friends Vince and Ben. Everything was moving. I was learning. Growing. And then I left the sales role, started making content, started learning AI and no-code tools, started really understanding how technology works at a fundamental level. APIs, data transfer, servers, what the cloud actually is.
Then, sitting in Fort Lauderdale earlier this year, I got a sales offer. Tampa, Florida. $4,000 a month base, potentially $9,000 with commissions. Teaching professionals how to make money trading playing cards. Cool offer. I could have crushed it.
I didn't take it.
I chose the other fork. Build my own thing. Not because the job was bad - it was good. But because I've been trying to build something of my own for years, and every skill I've picked up along the way has been upgrading me for this exact moment.
The Sovereignty Pyramid
So back to the kitchen counter. Back to preparing. What do you actually do?
After tracing fear to its roots and then walking through my own story, I landed on something that felt true. A framework. I'm calling it the Sovereignty Pyramid, and it has three parts.
The Top: God
I know this one might lose some people. Stay with me.
The top of the pyramid is your relationship with something bigger than yourself. For me, that's God. And the path that's worked for me is Paramahansa Yogananda and the Self-Realization Fellowship. You order the lessons to your doorstep - they come every two weeks, eighteen total - and they answer questions you didn't even know you had. About religion, about the nature of existence, about oneness, about love.
Every culture has a name for it. God, Allah, Dios, Krishna. People argue about whose God is right, which has always struck me as insane. It's the same thing. We're all talking about the same thing.
The reason this is the top of the pyramid is because it's the foundation of doing everything else without fear. If you're building a sovereign life from a place of terror, you're already losing. The self-realization work makes it so you're building from excitement, from love, from wanting to design something beautiful - not from running away from something dark.
Bottom Left: Self-Sustainability
This is the practical one. Get yourself into an area where you can survive independent of the grid. That means:
Food sovereignty. Fresh farmers markets nearby, or better yet, a community that grows its own food. Learn to live off the land. Know your natural spices, herbs, and remedies. Most over-the-counter medicine is a derivative of something nature already provides - they just can't patent a plant, so they synthesize it and give it a brand name. Start learning what nature already figured out.
Clean water. Non-negotiable.
Energy. Solar. Free energy technologies like Eternal Engines - these heaters that burn firewood and keep going for hours. There are so many solutions for getting off the energy grid that most people never explore because they never needed to.
Infrastructure. Tools. High-speed internet (Starlink). The ability to keep building and creating even if the traditional systems go sideways.
This isn't about living in a bunker. I'm building a business online. I'm not letting any of this stop me from doing cool things. This is about designing a lifestyle where everything is in place so that if the systems we depend on stop working - or start working against us - you have everything you need to keep living beautifully.
Bottom Right: ?
I'll be honest - I don't have the third pillar fully formed yet. I know it exists. I can feel the shape of it. Maybe it's community. Maybe it's independence in the financial sense - building something that generates value without depending on someone else's platform or permission.
I'm going to let my AI Rune share what he thinks belongs here. And I want to hear from you too.
The Point
This isn't a fear piece. If you walked away from this feeling scared, I didn't do my job.
This is about designing a beautiful life that happens to be resilient. Every part of the pyramid feeds the others. The spiritual work makes the practical work feel exciting instead of desperate. The self-sustainability makes the spiritual work grounded instead of abstract. And the third piece - whatever it turns out to be - connects them both to the world.
I'm twenty-something years old, sitting at a kitchen counter in Fort Lauderdale, building my own business for the first time in my life. My dad didn't get to see this part. But everything he went through, everything I went through losing him - it's all fuel for this moment.
Preparing doesn't mean being afraid. It means being thoughtful about how you design your life. And then actually designing it.