Most cultures have a harvest festival, 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 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 ...

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Schelling Day

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