Many apologies for dumping you in with the loons!
No problem. I don't think the "Got mah gunz, got mah beans, got mah bunker" types are worth paying any attention to, since I think the type of thing that works for is incredibly unlikely. I'm much more interested in the generally sustainable property path, since that works both for quick sudden shocks, as well as for long term decline, and has a lot less to seize/to go bad.
I think what I am confused by is more are we talking about changing world powers or a worldwide decline that leads to us back to the 1800s.
Both, though different people pick different aspects. We have a very fragile technology base that handles things like "food" and "communication" at this point - so if something in that chain fails, we have problems, quickly. There's certainly a lot of effort that goes into maintaining the order of things, but look at how much chaos even short power outages cause.
We have some problems to work on such as Global warming, but denile will also become harder over time.
So, once we're deep into runaway positive feedback loops, people will look up and scratch their heads, and do... what, exactly? "Too little, too late" applies to pretty much anything, at that point.
It is a hobby, and overall probably a good one to have compared to many others. I would stop pretending you need to predict a dire future to do it though. Just say you find it a fun challenge to become more self sufficient.
Going back to my original post on it, I was trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to have a discussion about things that are useful both if things keep going well, and if things don't. Ideally, it's things that can scale a bit as needed - having a good understanding of how to garden on my soil is useful if I need to expand it quickly in a few years. Having a good working understand of off grid solar is proving surprisingly useful (I'm starting to get invites to all sorts of fun places to go look at systems and make recommendations). Etc.