how I plan to make a living depends on which of those thousands of scenarios actually occurs.
Yeah, it'll vary according to what happens.
I'm planning on surviving in the suburbs because I'm not physically very mobile and the suburbs is where I'm stuck for financial reasons.
I expect my neighborhood will be mostly emptied of people because its a dry environment with no apparent sources of water and no people that I know of who stockpile water. There's a couple of wells within a three miles radius but unless you've looked up their locations on the internet in advance, you'd probably thirst to death before finding them. The closest to me is on the suburb's airport property and they apparently don't actually use the well for anything. I doubt if many of the people even working at the airport know its there.
If the area is mostly empty of people, I know a couple of suburban "farms" nearby that have horses, cows, goats, and probably other smaller farm animals. I'm likely to find one or more of those farms abandoned along with the abandoned animals. There's a kennel next to one particular place where I'm sure there'll be abandoned or dead animals plus animal care products. Its not practical to own farm animals on a small lot at the moment due to city ordinances.
The houses in my neighborhood have adjoining wooden fences. I could in theory pen small animals in one yard and garden in my yard and other nearby yards.
If the area is completely empty of people, as in I'm the last person on earth, there's a new combination courthouse/police station/jail with a large pond which the city has built a distance away. There's plenty of open grounds which they have sodded but might be good for planting. I have no idea why a courthouse would need five acres of grounds but its there, already cleared, and they brought in good topsoil so their grass would look nice. Sometimes governments make no sense to me.
If there's a zombie apocalypse, I'd stay across the street from the courthouse/police station/jail in a newly-built warehouse. It has sturdy, high chainlink fencing around it. I believe they make or store plastic cups. Anyway, they tend to have trailers for 18 wheelers in the parking lot. The building has loading docks and doors for 18 wheelers and no windows on the ground floor. I couldn't think of any improvised facility more ideal for lying low from zombies. When there's a chance I could raid the abandoned police station for weapons.
Which, of the thousands of potential scenarios requiring us to dip into our preparedness, do you expect to happen?
Almost all the scenarios outside of small local disasters will cause an economic collapse and a collapse of the infrastructure needed to make living in a city viable. When living in a city is no longer possible, people are going to panic, riot, and either die or leave the cities and spread like a human plague across the countryside. Then the vast majority of the survivors of the collapse of the cities will die in the countryside.
Five years after the collapse of the cities, I'd be surprised if 7 out of 100 people were still alive even in the more pleasant areas of the country. For relatively dry, arid places like my home, I'd be shocked if the survival rate were a tenth of that (so for a town of 100,000 for example, maybe 700 survivors? Sounds about too high but perhaps possible.)
