Maintain the balance between dark clouds and the rainbow

Prepping is a weight....

There is no question that thinking about the worst situations in order to realistically prepare for them is a burden, and can be depressing.  That weight actually increases as you get deeper into prepping, because you become aware of threats you didn't even know existed.

Until movies like Outbreak and Contagion, I would be willing to bet the average person had no clue what a pandemic was.  In fact, I bet most still don't.

Ask a guy on the street what a coronal mass ejection is, or how easy it would be for an Electro Magnetic Pulse or cyber attack to shut down the national power grid.  Then ask him how long it would take for the power to come back.  You would be amazed to find how many people think a day or two.

Simply put, you know too much for your own good.  In one of my favorite movies, Men in Black, agent K says the following...

"There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!" 

But this is the life preppers have chosen.  It is the path we walk, and after you start, guess what, you can't unlearn something, and try as you might, you can't go back.  There is no reset button, no do over so you can take the blue pill.   You know what you are facing...

So how do I do it?  How do I maintain a balance? How do i manage to live a happy and relatively content life while maintaining a watchful eye on the dark clouds on the horizon?  I "force" breaks in my thought pattern.  I make myself enjoy the rainbows.   Sure I watch the news, but i force myself to turn off my brain and play catch or play xbox with my son.  I ask my daughter to cook dinner WITH me and enjoy the time together.  I'll go roller-skating, not as a family (we do that too), but just my wife and I on adults only night.  Where we can have fun together just the two of us.  We cook a big breakfast as a family Sunday mornings with everything we all like.  Pancakes, cheese eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, fruit, you name it... and then we go to church and pray, together.

My point is, don't burn out, don't get frustrated.  Work hard at prepping, work efficiently at prepping, but equally as important is that you put it all down, and carve out time to mentally recharge and decompress.   Make sure the life you are living is worthy of the effort you spend prepping so you can continue to live it.