# Prepsgiving, A Convergently Instrumental Human Practice

Most cultures have a [harvest festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_harvest_festivals), and every harvest festival is basically automatically a Prepsgiving Celebration.

In the northern hemisphere this probably happens in November or October, and in the southern hemisphere it probably happens in May or June. There could be more than one celebration like this, and in the US, I think Halloween and Thanksgiving *both* count as instances.

Depending on how you want to frame it, you could argue that the Idea teleologically causes all these Instances, but you could just as easily claim that the Instances epistemically caused the Idea.

If you think this essay is a good idea, and don't want to change your behavior very much at first, I encourage you to enjoy your harvest festivals more mindfully and simply think of them as instances of this idea, and if this helps nudge the practice into a more personally and locally useful shape, all the better!

If you want to take the practice very seriously, and do it a lot (on monthly, weekly, or daily cadences) then I encourage you to still take traditional harvest festivals seriously and interrupt your *local* routines to integrate in anything that is larger or older or more important, because helping improve people's [situational awareness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness) is one of the virtues of such events.

The name of Prepsgiving is related to Thanksgiving, but the orientation towards time is reversed. Harvest festivals in general, and Thanksgiving specifically, all basically celebrate having successfully navigated a period when people had to think really hard about food to have a good life, whether that was pulling a lot of produce in from a field with complex machinery, or surviving a disruption in food supply lines, or whatever... it happened *in the past* and so looking back you can *give thanks*.

With Prepsgiving, you should also be *looking forward*, so you can *get ready*. Bringing this future orientation to existing events might help you notice the ways in which even just giving thanks for good things that happened in the past can help people be ready to better handle adverse events *in the future*.

There is an interesting pattern to human disaster planning, where we tend to prepare exactly for a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a tornado, or a fire, when we get into it as a individual person, but once we really take serious steps most people notice that there are lots of simple and easy things to do that help with ALL such patterns. In nearly all of those cases, it is useful to have a "go bag" with stuff that would be useful while living in a disaster shelter. In most of those cases "stored water" is probably useful, for example, and this shows up at the top of many preparedness checklists.

Hiking equipment overlaps here a bit, because iodine pills are a very *compact* way to "get access to emergency water".

Prepsgiving isn't one single practice, that works one single way, but is the overall ***convergence*** of "holding a celebration to *think about* and *get better* at the convergences that arise in emergency food logistics across many possible emergencies".

For example, at a good Prepsgiving, there are probably more people rather than less people. This lowers the cognitive burden on average, helps aggregate rare knowledge, gives a chance for children to learn rare food preparation skills from trusted adults by observation, takes advantage of efficiencies of scale in food production itself, helps people become friendly and familiar with more people in their extended social network, and maybe starts to set up a social network in which food bartering could occur where huge [gains from trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gains_from_trade) can be accessed through face-to-face processes if food supplies ever get surprisingly scarce for some amount of time.

Before covid, I always had Prepsgiving "as an idea that I should try to do more, and popularize more", and in the aftermath of covid (but in advance of possible future supply chain disruptions if the world becomes generally more Chaotic) I've actually started a monthly practice on "the third Thursday of every month (unless there's a harvest Festival)". This has been very successful in the sense that it has been *happening*, instead of *not* happening!

Trying to hold one literally "every Thursday night (unless the monthly one is happening)" hasn't worked but from experience I've noticed that it gets closer in tone to a "weekly religious celebration" and, indeed, if you already HAVE a weekly religious celebration involving the sharing of food, you could probably squint and notice the pre-existing convergent arising of Prepsgiving there too.

Any potluck, especially any potluck where you swap recipes, is already a sort of a Prespsgiving.

Something I worry that, in modern times, many parts of the world are getting very urbanized and there is a high mixing rate, and people are less likely to know their neighbors. Indeed, in some places some people seem to act as if the "cooperate / cooperate" dynamic between neighbors is AVOIDING interactions, so that neither of you has a become entangled in a costly way with the other.

I grew up on a goat farm in a small town, and I kinda get these city norms, but also it feels a bit icky to me. I'm uncertain if I should push against them, or apply the "when in Rome" dictum... however, for college and beyond I've found the job and learning opportunities are much better in big cities, and so I have "been in Rome" for quite a while... but I miss the feeling of neighbors who look out for neighbors, and I think that the lack of such neighborly cohesion makes "living in a city" feel more precarious.

As a sort of an antidote to this I recommend, if you're looking to do something monthly, or weekly in a city, consider the list of people you could or would "loan or [borrow a cup of sugar](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MayIBorrowACupOfSugar)" from, and invite those people to a potluck or BBQ or some such, in your home, on a regular cadence (that probably gets disrupted by a harvest festival, but then hopefully resumes when life gets back to normal). Also maybe... if you've got a neighbor where you aren't sure if "staying disentangled" is what a cooperate/cooperate dynamic looks like... maybe just [tell them what you've been guessing they want and then ask explicitly](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/guess-ask-tell-culture) if they would like to come over to a potluck sometime? :-)

I have tried to walk a careful line here, so that this essay could function in a religious society and cause them to feel smug, because they have "already converged on this good idea" and might share the essay for the feeling of smugness it gives them, but also it could work in a more atheistic society to help people notice that there does not HAVE to be a specific worship practice associated with this convergently useful thing to do... 

But also, in polycultural societies where many religions and people exist, you really probably do want to have *metacultural* traditions where the various tribes and subcultures can come together and be friendly and share food. You might not share every belief with your neighbors, but *you do share physical proximity*, and if supply chains get disrupted, you ***will*** share the food shortage as a common plight.

Another cultural quirk I'm explicitly noticing and trying to be friendly with is the idea of "preppers".

Preppers are an apparently cross cultural "kind of person" who thinks about negative irregular events in advance, and gets ready for them "just in case" in a way that often involves stocking up on extra food that will stay good for a long time. (Also they often have less need to hire a handyman, and may or may not be good at personal self defense.)

If you are a prepper, I encourage you to think of the idea of Prepsgiving as a way to get ready in a deeper and better way. Specifically, I encourage you to think about all the foodstuffs you might have "ready to go for TEOTWAWKI" and try to make a list of all the potluck items you could prepare from what you have available, and then figure out which potluck item would be the thing that you could show off the best at a party, and then print up a recipe for that thing that doesn't only list the ingredients and preparation steps, but also lists how long each ingredient is shelf stable, and the best way to get a good price if buying that ingredient in bulk. This kind of "Prepsgiving Recipe" seems like it would be a useful thing to know for yourself, and once you know it, sharing it with others when there is no ambient emergency can basically only count as a win for everyone.

There's a very practical thing going on here, because if a Formal Prepsgiving Potluck like this turns out to be a miserable affair with gross food, then that's something all the people involved can notice and work on and fix. If a Formal Prepsgiving Potluck is a sumptuous feast with amazing food and a bunch of people who care about each other, then there's a lot of possible future disasters that you and your group of people will probably handle with ease and comfort, and even with spare capacity to help others (instead of needing and hoping for charity).

This is a holiday that can always probably get better or be done more, in more clever ways.

The group could be bigger, the food could be more delicious, the ingredients could be more shelf stable.

You could do it yearly, or monthly, or weekly, or hypothetically you could even do it daily. A single person or family who hosts such an event can enable many others to attend, and get some comfort thereby, and having several distinct friend groups (that meet for several distinct reasons that converge in also sometimes doing a Prepsgiving together) just adds to the resilience!

This can also mix with basically any religious practice.

You could do a Kosher Prepsgiving or a Halal Prepsgiving (even if you are not Jewish or Muslim). You could do a Hindi Prepsgiving and ensure no beef (and so on), or a Jain Prepsgiving and ensure <[a huge giant list of constraints that includes no carrots or cabbages](https://jainworld.com/literature/jain-food/)>. You could do a Catholic Friday Prepsgiving with no "[meat](https://www.archspm.org/faith-and-discipleship/catholic-faith/why-dont-catholics-eat-meat-on-fridays/)", or a Vegan Prepsgiving and also cut out the casein and honey and so on, or you could do a Discordian Friday Prepsgiving and make sure to serve hotdogs in hotdog buns in *violation* of [the Discordian commandment to eat no hotdog buns](https://principiadiscordia.com/book/11.php).

(You might notice here that the "more enduring religions with healthier people" seem, if you squint, to have more onerous practices, whereas the more open minded and evanescent religions tend to be easier. Personally, I respect the latter kind of group for *finding* new ideas and the former kind of group for helping to *filter* them. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it it is interesting to think about. (If the human metacivilization improves over time, the ancient religions are probably "exploiting their environment of cultural adaptedness" and the novel religions might be "exploring new multi-person patterns" and you'd expect the cults to have worse outcomes, but also to be the best at reacting to new and real concerns in a world where Chaos was locally increasing.))

If you admire the convergent cultural practice of Prepsgiving, and would like to help it emergently arise in proximity to you, I encourage you to just go with the flow on anything that seems similar to it already.

Instead of *forcing* this new frame on an old thing, I suggest that to "add more of this" into your life, you look for nooks and crannies where it could be added in a way that *harmonizes* with **all the other versions**.

Since most religions already do things like this, I would reserve Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for those versions, and Monday is Monday and focused on the resumption of work, which leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as natural nights on which to perhaps have a Prepsgiving Dinner as a weekly practice. Of these options, I personally think Thursday is best.

If you're going to do it monthly, I would suggest the "the third Thursday of every month (unless there's a harvest Festival)".

If you're lonely and want to flock with new Chaotic Good people, perhaps think of a "spiritually chaotic [Schelling Place](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/wDnFgP6AjQ3BrmALY/schelling-day)". When I'm in St Louis, I drive out to the [Cahokia Mounds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=726O-nwvMqI) on most Third Thursdays with some friends, for example. I have some ideas about where I'd go for Berkeley and NYC 

My attitude towards this idea (like many good ideas) is that it will often be something that we FIND already existing, where the ancient reasons for things to be done in certain ways aren't obvious, and yet "all the people who are winning at life do this thing" and not doing the thing is often associated with less thriving.

It can be quite hard to disentangle the temporally linear or timeless causality in such situations, but if you want to wiggle your brain, then by all means have fun trying! And if you'd rather just have an excuse to [plan more parties](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EqzbyW5EReJ7TNXhK/the-friendly-drunk-fool-alignment-strategy), and feel virtuous for doing so, then that's also a valid approach :-)

![A bowl of dark purple figs harvested and eaten in November of 2023 from a tree in a backyard. Some have green spots. The bowl is metal and on a counter. There's an electric plug in the background and a sign that says "House-elves welcome here!" with a picture of Dobby.](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/468b0d78b88c1f741f63a0d956070508ed96d4f20de57950.png)

A bowl of figs harvested and eaten in November of 2023 from a tree in a backyard.