Because describing how to defend your home against humans can be legally risky, and off-putting.
With the exception of the actually crazy, people aren't actually talking about zombies.
It also injects a degree of humour.
Most prepper guides devote a lot of time to societal collapse, complete self-sufficiency, urban combat, and wilderness survival topics, while dedicating much less attention to more pragmatic risks that one can prepare for without making profound lifestyle changes or buying a farm.
I'd like the other approach more: secret stash, going dark for a year, wait for tribes to stabilize the territory they control, emerge with some useful skill and bargain access/protection of a well armed/established tribe.
Not really - you can always walk away, so at worst you're no worse off than you were without it.
The premise of this piece is to be "rational". To do that you need some idea of the odds. If you think another Tunguska event is something to prepare for, then having a farm is probably no better than playing video games - I can't even guess which would be safer from a random 10+MT event, and playing games is more fun and safer than doing the extra drive back and forth to the farm or operating the farm.
Any sort of real collapse is going to be accompanied by a lack of diesel and there aren't a whole lot of draft animals around, so farming is probably going to involve quite a lot of human labor.
I feel like these are the things that will become scarce and valuable. Or at least help survival (food/water + ammunition). This makes them useful to me and also useful for bartering.
Of course, my stash needs to be safe both from the apocalypse scenario itself (will it still be in usable condition after a nuclear explosion, for example?) and from other survivors. It also needs to be somewhere I can actually get to it (safely). This, coupled with the fact that I would need large enough quantities of these items makes it rather difficult.
But, regardless, that is my I haven't done anything about it and likely never will plan to survive the apocalypse.
The only bit that seems difficult (but again, this is from apocalyptic fiction so grain of salt) is that so many important medications like insulin, antibiotics, and strong painkillers can't just be purchased at generic wholesale and kept for use or trade in major emergencies or times of real hardship. In the stories it's always the pharmacies that get looted first and there's always some chapter or episode where a family member or friend is sick/injured and the characters desperately need to find antibiotics or insulin or the like.
I understand that this is a bit silly going from fiction but those stories are appealing because they get you to think about how you would deal with life-threatening challenges. In a way it's odd that we have all of these important and effective medicines but whether the emergency services and doctors are blown to smithereens, bitten by zombies, or just overwhelmed with patients after an epic earthquake/flood/eruption there's really no way to access them without looting or black market.
I just know that in the event that "shit hit the fan" to use the prepper terminology, I'd prefer to be the guy with a case of antibiotics and painkillers stashed in the basement than the guy hoping I can get treatment at a hospital or local medic.
Which scenario?
If it's a cat 5 hurricane, you can fill up your tub, cooler, washing machine, rain barrel, etc. with plenty of notice. Maybe keep a few collapsed containers around for that purpose.
If you're planning for an earthquake, then bottled water makes some sense.
If you're planning for the social upheaval when the Ogallala Aquifer dries up and America's breadbasket turns to dust, then bottled water is the least of your worries - move now and settle in somewhere wet before the Okies ride again.
If you think global climate change will bring 30' snowfalls and ice storms to your area, then you'll have access to plenty of fresh water - if you have the fuel to melt it, and keep yourself warm.
Without probability estimates, apocalypse scenario planning is irrational.
It's also easier to move around an empty several gallon pot (or just break into a house and grab one) than it is to move around hundreds of gallons of water (a short supply for several people).
(re fire, if you build a stash, you really want there to be trees around, and pretty good annual precipitation)
The emphasis on headshots in zombie preparedness. As an extension of "zombies as human surrogates" concept, there's one group of humans for whom a headshot is the surest way of ending hostilities. Law enforcement/military.
It's not politically correct to openly admit that you're preparing to resist against a military occupation.
In my eyes it's a fine line based on risk management. It makes total sense to protect against probable disasters, accidents, and threats (power outages, burglaries, weather events, medical emergencies etc). Everyone can easily be convinced of this.
It makes some sense to put some resources toward protecting against outlier events (100 year storms, riots / widespread violence, great depression level financial instability etc). People can be convinced of this when it's explained in terms of opportunity cost.
It makes no sense to use resources towards protecting against incredibly improbable events. People that have fallback compounds, bunkers in their backyards, multiple years worth of food, and thousands of rounds of ammunition are literally throwing away money.
Extra credit for installing off-grid solar, and a water reclamation system that can be used for showers and toilet flushing. Both of which also have benefits during everyday life.
Story time: After Hurricane Fran came through Raleigh, I was driving on I-440 and was passing a long line of cars driving really slowly. When I get to the head of it, it turns out they were all following a Triangle Ice truck to it's next stop, so they could load up their coolers and preserve the contents of their refrigerators (the power still being out in parts of the city).
I'll come back and post the link if I can find the reference, but apparently real life zombies are somewhat possible. A few years back (2008ish?), I read an article about a German scientist that was able to alter rabies so that humans don't die when they get it. The resulting claim was that they would become super aggressive and attack others, similar to rabid animals, and would create a zombie-like virus. Granted you won't see humans walking around with half their limbs off after dying, but I thought it was interesting how the claim was that it could essentially create a World War Z type of scenario.
Now idk how much of this is true, but I'm almost certain I read it on phys.org, which if I did, would lead me to believe that it's a valid article. I'll see if I can find the link tomorrow.
Couldn't find the article I read, could very well be that it wasn't on phys.org and was just a bullshit article. However, here is an article where scientists mention that it could be possible to one day exist:
www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112964783/zombie-virus-could-be-reality-exclusive-100213/
The closest thing to a zombie outbreak would be some sort of plague like rabies or encephalitis that makes you lose your mind and then kills you. If it was virulent enough and hard enough to treat you'd end up with huge disruptions but more like any other massive pandemic. The whole bit about victims somehow sticking around for months or years, waiting to infect more people is just impossible as far as I can tell.
I basically tried to approach it from the perspective of threat modeling / risk management for real life; and by that metric, incidents such as losing a job are far more likely than a zombie apocalypse. I have seen far too many people in the Silicon Valley discover that the hard way :-(