Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,7
could be unlivable within eighty years. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Even when I didn’t click the links—which often enough I did not, for fear that what I gained in knowledge I would lose in sanity—my online existence was saturated in a sense of end-time urgency.
It would have been healthier, of course, not to mention more useful, to attempt to effect some small good in the world, or to challenge my energies toward some positive goal, but this did not seem to be how I was wired. Avoiding these more sensible options, I set out toward the darkness itself.
“Set out” is maybe not quite the right language here, as it connotes a certain degree of resolve, as though I were some kind of Kerouac-type figure, packing up his bag and striking out for adventure, which could not be further from reality. It would be more accurate, in fact, to speak of wandering or drifting toward the darkness, or even of loitering with intent at its margins. Although again, “intent” is potentially misleading in its own right, in that it inevitably gives the impression of my having literal intentions, which was hardly more true than my having resolve; and so perhaps it might be best to abandon these ambulatory metaphors altogether and proceed directly to the banal truth of the matter, which is that I was spending a lot of time on the Internet reading stuff about the apocalypse.
My obsession tended at first toward the sensationalistic, even within the general context of the end of the world. For a time, I pursued a leisurely and more or less abstract interest in the pursuit known as “prepping,” a subculture made up, as far as I could see, pretty well exclusively of white American men who were convinced that the entire world was on the verge of a vast systemic rupture and were obsessively invested in making sufficient preparations (“preps”) for such scenarios. It was all there in strange microcosm: the frontier mythos of freedom and self-sufficiency, the overwrought performance of masculinity that utterly failed to conceal the cringing terror from which it proceeded, the sad and fetishistic relationship to consumer goods, the hatred and mistrust of outsiders. Lurking on the forums and blogs and Facebook groups of these preppers—reading their literature and even listening to the occasional podcast—I came to see their movement as a hysterical symptom of America itself.
I punched in a great many hours on YouTube, hours that will never be returned to me, watching videos in which guys named Brandon or Kyle or Brent talked their viewers through the contents of their “bug-out bags,” knapsacks containing the items they personally considered essential in any scenario whereby they needed to head out into the wilderness and fend for themselves.
It was generally projected that the worst effects of such collapse scenarios—nuclear attacks, mass civil unrest, viral pandemics, meteor impacts, so forth—would be focused on urban environments, and so the thinking among preppers seemed to be that the thing to do in a SHTF (“shit hits the fan”) situation where you had to leave your home was to “bug out”—to head out into the relative safety of the wilderness, away from people. (“Bugging in,” by contrast, was the preferred, albeit less exciting, option whereby you battened down the hatches and secured your current location: essentially a highly militarized version of not going out of the house, a form of apocalyptic preparedness that seemed more commensurate to my own skills and temperament.)
It struck me that these bug-out bag videos bore a strong family resemblance to the more mainstream YouTube phenomenon of “haul videos,” in which a person, usually a young woman, laid out for her viewers the results of a recent shopping trip. The bug-out bag video was a kind of apocalyptic variation of this display of consumerist achievement. The revealed items were typically such things as hunting knives, first aid kits, head-mounted flashlights, extra batteries, multi-tools, crowbars, face masks, compasses, whistles, Kevlar socks, space blankets, military-grade cordage, mini water filtration systems, long-shelf-life emergency food ration bars, wet wipes, thermos flasks, camouflage-patterned duct tape, tea lights, cotton balls, Vaseline, and high-quality sunglasses.
In fact a minor tributary obsession of mine, flowing inexorably downward into the larger obsession with preppers and their consumer habits, was an interest in the specific style of sunglasses worn by these men: they seemed to overwhelmingly favor wraparound shades, a preference that was, as far as I could gather, more or less universal among right-wingers as a