If you’re anything like me, following the news makes it feel like the world is on the verge of collapse. There are wars on multiple continentsmillions are dying because of famine, extremism is on the risenatural disasters caused by climate change have become the new normand the economy seems headed for a recession.
And beyond all of those real-life concerns, there are apocalypses happening on just about every streaming service right now: HBO’s The Last of Us deals with a deadly pandemic, a killer alien invasion is happening on Netflix’s The Eternaut, and a volcanic eruption has caused a world-killing tsunami on Hulu’s Paradise.
So it’s no wonder that a doomsday meal bucket is flying off the shelves at Costco or that some affluent Americans are paying out the wazoo for luxury doomsday bunkers. Even the ultra-wealthy are preparing for end times: Tesla founder Elon Musk hopes to colonize Mars to preserve our speciesventure capitalist Peter Thiel secretly purchased loads of land in New Zealand to run away to in case of a disaster, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg built a top-secret compound in Hawaii — equipped with a bunker he calls an “underground storage” or “basement” — where he grows his own food and gathers his own water.
Robert Kirsch, an assistant professor at Arizona State University and the co-author of Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United Statessays prepping is as American as apple pie. “As Emily (Ray, my co-author) and I were digging into this, we eventually concluded that prepping is an American institution. And that from the founding (of the country), Americans have seen themselves as a prepared citizenry,” he said. “We’ve seen this throughout the past couple of hundreds of years, where Americans are invited to see themselves as the self-sufficient frontier people who are able to tame the elements and dominate the wilderness and bring America into new spaces.”
Kirsch shared his insights into prepping and Americans’ desire to look out for themselves in emergency situations with the Today, Explained co-host Noel King. You can read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below, and listen to the full episode of Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotifyor wherever you get podcasts.
How does one get into, at the university level, researching the end of the world?
It started off as this investigation into these doomsday-prepping kits that were coming out of Silicon Valley from this startup called Preppi.
What was the story that Preppi was trying to tell?
The way that they sold it, at least at the time that we were looking at their materials, was that this was a “bug-out bag” that you would be proud to display in your living room. It was a really nice weekend bag, and it had a piece of chocolate in there they say you’re gonna really like. And had these very high-end cosmetics and face lotions.
So this bag, its contents and style, don’t mark you as some sort of weirdo who was sort of secretly stashing away goods, but rather it is sort of an outward display of good taste. And so, these class markers become super important in telling this story. Trying to sort of pull this behavior out of the shadows and sort of trying to locate it at the beating heart of mainstream American culture.
Do you have a bug-out bag?
I don’t. Where I live in the desert, FEMA issues recommendations for geographic regions for what people should have. So my co-author, Emily Ray, does have a bug-out bag because she lives in the Bay Area. I have 15 gallons of potable water ready because I live in the desert.
Good. I have a little kit, a just-in-case kit. And I have always wondered how many other people are engaged in prepping or prepping-adjacent behavior. How many of us are there out there?
It can be hard to track. Because on the one hand, there’s no bright line where a certain behavior turns into prepping, right? But FEMA does give a national household survey, and their 2023 results indicate that about half of Americans indicate that they are engaging in some kind of preparedness for some sort of adverse event.
If you told me to envision a prepper, I have a picture in my head. Is my picture fair? Is there a type of person who preps?
You’re right that there’s a sort of media spectacle version of a prepper, and that gets informed by a lot of things like cable and reality television.
I’m not even just talking about the extreme preppers. There’s an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, where they go into an Atlas bunker and try to imagine what it would be like to ride out the end of the world. And so I think that’s an interesting starting point. But again, as Emily and I were digging into this, what we eventually concluded was that this behavior can be marginalized and seem to be extreme, but it actually is a kind of behavior that is constitutive of being American.
In other words, we argue that prepping is an American institution, and that from the founding, Americans have seen themselves as a prepared citizenry. We’ve seen this throughout the past couple of hundreds of years, where Americans are invited to see themselves as the self-sufficient frontier people who are able to tame the elements and dominate the wilderness and bring America into new spaces.
And that 40 percent of us are preparing in some way — this feels like a very high number to me — would seem to suggest you’re right, this is part of the identity of many of us. When do we see this put to the test?
There are a couple of ways to tackle that. The first is at the apocalyptic register, things like nuclear war, right? Or total societal collapse. Americans really haven’t had to deal with that. And that’s an important part for our analysis, too. Because we argue that one of the reasons what we call a “bunkerization fantasy” is potent is because Americans have never actually had to go to ground. They’ve never actually had to take cover in the way that many Europeans had to during the Second World War.
That’s one part of the story: It’s easy to think about readiness and what to do in the face of total collapse because it’s been deferred. It becomes a site of fantasy. On the other hand, you’re also right that the US has ongoing extreme weather events, hurricanes, wildfires, dust bowls, droughts — the list goes on and on. And the way that we tell that story is the way we diagnosed the neoliberal condition of American political life: These disasters happen. There is an oftentimes inadequate or incomplete state response. And so the reaction to that becomes, I can’t rely on the government to do things, so it’s up to me to take responsibility for my own preparation. And the way that I do that is through consumption choices.
One beautiful part of the American economy is that there is always somebody who will sell you something if you have enough money. And when we think about preppers, when I think about preppers, I do tend to think about ultra-rich people, like Mark Zuckerberg buying a private island, raising their own food, these guys in Silicon Valley buying land in New Zealand.
What is the deal with the ultra-wealthy and their preparation for the end of the world? Do they know something that we don’t or do they just have a lot of money and need to spend it?
I think it’s the latter. I really think this is a sort of conspicuous consumption.
These ultra-rich people, we hear a lot about their preparation plans. You mentioned Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, and those are the two most high-profile examples. And what I think is notable about those is that they get profiled in Forbes or Fortune or these monocle-like publications for upwardly mobile people. And they lavish the reader with all sorts of details about the extravagant things that these folks are doing. And then there’s always this coy, But we’ll never tell you where it is, right?
And so it’s a way to signal conspicuous consumption that more middle-class or upwardly mobile Americans can at least try to emulate. But I do want to suggest, too, though, that this takes on strange dimensions. I’m sure, for instance, you’ve read a lot about Elon Musk’s desire to go to Mars.
Right, and it’s a fantasy. It’s in many ways based on this mentality, There’s nothing we can do here anymore and so we’re gonna have to try again on another orb.
There’s a risk here of upping the ante. So what starts with the rich often trickles down to the less rich, which is why I have a LifeStraw and an L.L. Bean knife. If we talk about people who are not the Elon Musks or the Peter Thiels of the world, is prepping big business among the middle class as well?
Yes, and like many other industries in the US, it ebbs and flows. And we trace that back to the Cold War where there were home fallout shelter kits that you could buy. Those went under in the ’60s and now they’re coming back.
You can look at different kinds of preparedness markets that pop up. Shelf-stable food is becoming an increasingly common thing to see. I know at my local Costcos, there are often aisle endcaps that have pyramids of these food buckets that you can store in your house. We might just be in a period of upswing right now. There are still companies that will come bury a fallout shelter in your backyard and promise not to tell anybody where they put it.
You’re in Arizona. What’s the scenario that most worries you?
Grid failure. And that’s just because, as you can imagine, in the Sonoran Desert, it’s hard to imagine making it through 115-degree days without some kind of chemically induced air conditioning.
My biggest ones are electromagnetic pulse, hurricane, tornado, and civil war. Electromagnetic pulse is akin to grid failure, right? It means the electricity goes out, and you’re trying to figure out what to do. We just saw this happen in Spain and Portugal. It was really a nightmare. It makes me wonder: Should we really want to survive a doomsday scenario?
It sounds like a bleak question, but I think in some ways, that is the politically animating question.
What can we confront alone and what can we confront together, right? And if we limit ourselves to confronting things alone, I think that threshold is pretty low.
And so you can think about, again, the ultimate example of this, thermonuclear conflagration. I would say, No, you don’t wanna go through that. You’d want to just vaporize. But once you start thinking about smaller-scale or more regionally located catastrophes that might emerge, the tolerance for persisting through those things is amplified when they’re done in concert and collectively with other people. When considering risk tolerance, that should be part of that narrative.
For me, what makes me a cheerful apocalyptician is that the response to that is not, There’s more I need to do. But rather, We need to form these sort of solidarity networks of concerted collective action to collectively face the problems that we face together.
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