Endemic, economic collapse, worldwide government overreach, and deep community divides

First, on the title. Are you using "endemic" as a noun? That would be extremely rare. If it's an adjective, you're saying "endemic, economic collapse," in which case I don't understand to what you refer. If you're bemoaning COVID-19 as an endemic illness, I don't think it's going to be too horribly impactful on an ongoing basis, so why mention that it's endemic? I'll grant the last two (government overreach and community divides).

Finance professionals are "bean counters" in a certain sense. It only makes sense to be an investment banker when there are businesses that are for sale (debt or equity). That is, unless you're a restructuring expert, in which case a partial, but not a total collapse of the business system would actually be a good thing for you. Same with private equity and the rest. Yadda yadda...

Learning things outside of one's field is always useful, so no pushback there. Independent thinking is highly valuable, except it often is just the Facebook scare maxim du jour, in which case I would question the independence of the thinking in the first place.

Saying that bad things will happen in the future without knowing when they will happen is not prognostication, it's dread. Dread doesn't make your life better. It doesn't make you more prepared for an actual apocalypse scenario (chronic stress will weaken you like nothing else). Dread dullens your senses, not enhance them.

Let's deconstruct what we mean when we say "doomsday prepping." In the grand scheme of things, I would say that this encompasses any kind of preparation action that one takes for an apocalyptic scenario. You esteem intellectual independence, sociability, and understanding the inner workings of one's house, nutrition, and health. Those are all fine preparations for an apocalyptic scenario, so in this context, I think they can accurately be called "doomsday preparation." And all of these things are fine goals on their own in the absence of preparing for a "doomsday." Who wouldn't want to get along better with people or live healthier lives?

Manufacturing viruses, siccing assault drones on people, and tracking people over the internet are actions that likely only a state-level actor could take. On why this is mostly true, look at terror organizations in the Middle East; they don't generally use drones to attack other people. It's more of a unilateral thing against them. I think bio-hackery types could theoretically do quite a bit of damage on the virus side, so I'll grant that it wouldn't take a state to pull that one off. Tracking people over the internet in a police state is not practical from an individual hacker's perspective, because they lack the force to actually coerce the people they've tracked. This too is state territory. If you think about the United States, it doesn't particularly have an incentive to use assault drones on its own people or manufacture a virus targeted toward the American public, so any threats to Americans must be from abroad. When the US gets an economic cold, other countries get Stage IV pancreatic cancer, so what incentive is there in bringing about that collapse from the abroad side?

The problem: I don't know that these negative outcomes are even cohesively linked. If a state-level actor made a genocidal virus, what people could be governed through grid tracking? What would the purpose of that tactic be? It's important to know how "your car... is successfully maintained," but a genocidal virus would have caused the collapse of the gasoline supply chain already. You may know how to replace the suspension all on your own, but what use is that knowledge unless you have gasoline? Is the answer typical doomsday prepper hoarding? I think yes. Gasoline has a short shelf life, so you buy some stabilizer and call it a day. There, you have two years worth of driving from the time of collapse. You say that bomb huts won't protect you against "assault drones," but that's precisely how most drones currently work anyway. It has an explosive payload and you hide from the explosives if you want to live. Either that or hope someone else who resembles you is an aid worker taking water to kids, right (dark joke, I know)?

I have a very common refrain: "if you've got 25X your annual spend in VTSAX, but can't be bothered to spend some money on extra food supplies or supply chain robustness, then you're an enormous fool."

At the end of the day, this is an internally inconsistent fever dream, not a prognostication or advice. Improve yourself and develop robustness for your lifestyle, but don't let it occupy your thoughts more than necessary. I'm the kind of guy who has a much more robust lifestyle than most people, but I always do it with a smile on my face. :)