Simply put, if you live in a huge metro area near downtown, you are toast if anything really goes bad. Look up golden horde. In the city it will be a meat grinder. Outside in the burbs you are not able to do anything real except shoot. In the outer bands you have a small chance.
EMP it will be a walking horde.
Read “One Second After”
Read more books
You are on your own or in a small group or town may pull together. But otherwise, you will die, painfully, and brutally. Odds are not in your favor. Your bugout is not good enough. Sorry, but misery will only be the result. And I’m prepared, chickens, horses, donkey, water, small farm/ranch and I’m still screwed. If you don’t have anything, you are really done in the first day. I expect I’ll last hours, maybe a few days before being overrun.
You are forgetting one thing in your “I’m screwed” philosophy. That is human nature.
You are correct that people near downtown are screwed and the burbs will be almost as bad.
But the truth of the matter is that if we experience a lights out situation or other terrible event the average Joe will sit tight in their house waiting for the govt to come rescue them. By the time they get desperate enough to set off for unfamiliar rural territory they will be too weak from hunger to hoof it 75 miles to your little farm.
Another truthbomb is that within a few weeks of lights out or whatever the build up of uncollected waste and non working sewers and no clean water will result in dysentery that will kill more people than lack of food.
As far as roving gangs of bikers and gangbangers go they will be rapidly picked off by all the desperate people with guns that are trying to defend their last five cans of chili. Not to mention that every exit off the interstate into small rural towns will be barricaded and manned by armed residents.
So actually you likely won’t be screwed.