Because that was the thing about preppers: they were easily ridiculed, and their politics made it tempting to outright disdain them, but at an instinctual level I felt that I understood where they were coming from. Though I didn’t share their manic insistence on preparing for the collapse of civilization, I knew the distributed matrix of unease from which the certainty of that collapse grew. I, too, with my pessimism, my intimate imagination of the world’s unraveling, had driven my own wife, if not to despair itself, then to somewhere in its vast and crumbling exurbs.
The possibility has from time to time occurred to me that my contempt for preppers is exacerbated by a suspicion that I might not be as different from them as I like to imagine. The politics of the movement—the cringing fear of the poor, the dark-skinned, the feminine, the other—are reprehensible to me, but their sense of the fragility of the systems by which we live is, in the end, hard to dismiss as entirely paranoid, entirely illogical.
In the nontrivial number of conversations I had in that time that centered around anxieties of civilizational collapse, it quickly became clear to me that I was not alone among my friends and acquaintances in the suspicion that a hazily delineated catastrophe was taking shape on the horizon. More than a few friends informed me that they had given some thought to the possibility of stocking up on supplies for some kind of apocalyptic scenario, though for most of them this never went much further than idle consideration. Either they didn’t have the space to build bunkers, or they were too lazy, or—and this was by far the most common reason—they concluded that if civilization were to actually collapse, they would much rather be dead than try to survive whatever cataclysm might be in store, because who in their right mind would really want to survive a nuclear holocaust or asteroid impact event anyway?
I myself find that even reading the words “pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks” is extremely helpful in clarifying my own stance on the question. If the choice on offer is between pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks and being among the first wave of deaths in the apocalypse, I hereby enthusiastically place my order for oblivion.
Because I was spending so much time in those days thinking about the prospect of collapse, and watching prepper YouTube videos, the topic came up frequently enough in conversation. People would ask what I was working on, and I would say I was thinking of writing something about people preparing for the end of the world, and people—friends, acquaintances, people I had just met—would tell me about their own such anxieties, or those of people they knew.
One friend of mine, who rented a room in a large house in London owned by a very wealthy friend of his, told me that this friend’s mother, who was the eccentric heiress of one of the first great American fortunes, would occasionally call around to the house and hold forth on the near certainty of imminent systemic collapse, and insist that my friend start buying large quantities of canned foods, even going so far as to offer to pay for the construction of a small bunker in the back garden, an offer which—for all the ironic temptations of installing an apocalypse shelter paid for by the same fortune that had contributed greatly to the construction of Manhattan in the nineteenth century—was in the end diplomatically rebuffed.
Then one day I had lunch with a friend of mine, Sarah, who worked in publishing. I knew that she shared some of my apocalyptic fixations, but I had not been aware of the depth and seriousness of her obsession with the end of the world. Under her bed, she said, she kept a large backpack, ready to be hauled out at a moment’s notice. Inside it was a tent, and a miniature camping stove, and a selection of knives, and chlorine tablets for water purification purposes. There was a compass in there, too, and actual paper maps, which would remain useful long after the phone networks went down. This backpack of hers—her “go-bag,” as she called it—she had taken out to the wilderness on solo excursions that seemed to be somewhere between camping trips and emergency drills. Sarah, it turned out, was an honest-to-God prepper.
She claimed to find the whole thing vaguely embarrassing, but it seemed clear that there was also some measure of pride. The whole civilizational collapse scenario was appealing, she said, in that you would be tested to the limits of your resourcefulness, resilience, and self-sufficiency. You would, in the absence of any kind of societal structure, quickly learn what you were made of. Wasn’t there something exciting, she asked, about that prospect?
I myself had no interest, I told her, in finding out what I was made of. My suspicion was that it was not first-rate material. Whatever form the apocalypse came in, I would almost certainly be in the first wave of deaths. We both laughed, but I think she knew that I was not entirely joking.
I said it sounded like her thinking was broadly in line with the prepper movement as a whole, but that she was just more honest about the extent to which she was driven as much by fantasy as by fear. There was, she said, undoubtedly an element of wish fulfillment, but in a way that was very different for her as a woman than it was for the majority of preppers who were men. Theirs was a fantasy of return to patriarchal norms, to a prefeminist dispensation that would be reestablished after the breakdown of civilization. But women, said Sarah, were already halfway to a dystopia. If she got raped tomorrow, for instance, she was by no means confident that she would go to the cops about it. I took her point to be that civilization was a relative concept to begin with, and that its collapse could seem to be more or less under way, depending on where you were standing.
And then she said something that I had not previously heard from any prepper. She was aware, she said, of a desire for final knowledge. To think that it might be to us, in our time, that the end of the story would be revealed: Was there not, she said, some comfort in that, some satisfaction?
I didn’t know how to answer the question. In an abstract sense, a cultural sense, I understood this as some part of the psychology of apocalypse. But as an individual, as a parent, I wanted the world to live on after me. This, I said, was at any rate my assumption about myself. But perhaps the reasons for my interest in the end of the world were more complicated than I was prepared to acknowledge. Perhaps my terrors and my desires were more intimately related than I knew.
3
LUXURY SURVIVAL
The week I traveled to the Black Hills of South Dakota to see the place from which humanity would supposedly be reborn after the coming tribulations, there happened to be a lot of talk about nuclear war. The UN had announced sanctions against North Korea, and North Korea had vowed to take physical action against such sanctions, and America, in the person of a president who was at that point vacationing at one of his many eponymous luxury golf resorts, advised that if they so much as lifted a finger they would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” According to The Wall Street Journal, analysts were trying to guess what would happen to the markets in the event of all-out nuclear war between the United States and North Korea. (The answer seemed to be that you would likely see some flattening of yield curves due to lower risk appetites, but that from a financial perspective a nuclear apocalypse wouldn’t exactly be the end of the world.)