Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,14
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.