Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,13

refugees who suffered the most in these situations. And the moral lesson he drew from this observation, the idea that he took home with him, did not, despite the Christianity he claims as absolutely central to his identity, involve any kind of imperative to alleviate the suffering he’d witnessed, but rather a steadfast personal commitment: “I vowed,” he writes, “never to become a refugee.”

And this void of empathy seemed to me by no means incidental to the prepper movement, but rather a constitutive element of the entire project, the moral void around which it was structured. To be a prepper was to do everything one could do to avoid being one of the sufferers oneself, while contributing nothing to the prevention or alleviation of suffering in others.

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Given their obsession with the prospect of collapsing distribution networks, and with the consequent need for self-sufficiency and self-reliance, the preppers’ relentless fetishization of consumer goods seemed deeply ironic to me, if also basically understandable. The forums were filled with endless discussions on, say, which thermos flask or which flashlight would be the trustiest option in a SHTF scenario, and a small but apparently thriving economy seemed to have grown up around the demand for various gadgets and comestibles catering to the postapocalyptic survival fantasies of American men.

I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks.

In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.”

At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.)

But on further consideration, the comedy gave way to something darker and more poignant: the idea of a man whose obsession with preparing for the end times had been so alienating and painful to his wife that she had left him, thereby bringing about a kind of personal apocalypse whose outcome was this helpless, fearful, obsessive person subsisting off a supply of flavored protein sludge he had amassed for the literal end of the world.

And this was a man with whom I identified. Of course I identified with him: I’d all but invented him. (I was his hypocrite reader, I thought: mon semblable, mon frère!) He was an outlandish avatar of my own anxieties and meta-anxieties—my anxieties about the damage my ongoing state of anxiety might be causing.

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