This boggles my mind because you know how incapable you are during a crisis, and yet you seem content in that state.

Help me understand the cognitive dissonance and how you deal with it

As someone who would consider himself in the same situation, I don't see dissonance, but pragmatism.

The scenario isn't a temporary crisis, it's total collapse, end of the world stuff. Why would I be so keen on surviving that? What for? Everyone and everything I enjoy in life would be gone anyway.

It's like the billionaires' apocalypse bunkers. What do they think they would be doing all day, and to what end? Even if they managed to secure enough clean air, clean food, and clean water, how many years are they planning to spend in their bunker pool, or watching their local movie library until the TV breaks? What's the end goal there?

I get that survivalists have a whole subculture, and it's an interest and hobby people enjoy doing, that's cool. But I think even they, if this happened and their skills allowed them to survive, would pretty soon start wondering why they would want to try to survive by all means possible in a barren, empty, dead world. If the survivalism is a fun hobby for someone, sure, but to force oneself to learn those skills for a potential apocalypse scenario doesn't seem to me like a reasonable thing to invest time in at all.

Even knowing how those things work, it might not be viable if you're in a large city.

Which is why you make plans for how to leave the city and go to someplace safe.

You would work with your friends and family on that kind of disaster preparedness exercise.

This is extremely common to the point where literally anyone can become CERT trained

https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/individuals-communit...

> how to build shelter, what things I can eat, how to catch stuff, make tools, etc...

None of GP's examples appear to be covered by that training