The Tax of Self-Reliance

Every year, more people are paying what could be called the tax of self-reliance. It’s not charged by the government or listed on a bill. It’s paid in the cost of backup systems that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.

It starts small. A spare phone charger. A flashlight that stays in the truck. A few gallons of water or fuel stored away. None of it is unusual, but it represents the same thing: the understanding that what’s supposed to work often doesn’t. Over time that awareness grows, and so does the cost. A generator to keep food from spoiling. A backup heat source to survive a winter storm. Solar panels or battery storage to bridge the next power outage. Each purchase is another payment toward stability that was already promised but never delivered.

People like to frame these things as personal choice. They call it independence or sustainability. In reality, it’s a form of double payment. You already pay for utilities, maintenance, and infrastructure through bills and taxes. But when those systems fail, you pay again to replace the reliability you were already charged for.

That second payment is the quiet part of modern life that no one likes to admit. It’s the cost of living in a system that has turned reliability into a private responsibility. The grid is unreliable, so people buy generators. The water system is aging, so they filter and store their own. Food supply chains collapse, so they learn to grow or preserve what they can. Each act of preparation is also an invoice for the failure of public systems.

The tax of self-reliance isn’t paid all at once. It’s spread out over years in the form of parts, tools, repairs, and labor. It’s every hour spent maintaining what someone else was supposed to maintain. It’s every dollar that could have gone somewhere else but instead goes toward staying functional.

There’s pride in being capable and prepared, but there’s also truth in the fact that people wouldn’t have to be this prepared if the systems around them weren’t breaking down. The tax of self-reliance exists because failure has been normalized. Every storm, every outage, every shortage is treated as something no one could have seen coming, even though everyone already has.

That’s the cost of survival in a society that outsources stability but still collects your payment for it. The more unreliable the systems become, the more this tax grows, and the more it shifts the burden of function from collective infrastructure to individual households.

It’s not a badge of honor. It’s the bill for decay.