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 continents, millions are dying because of famine, extremism is on the rise, natural disasters caused by climate change have become the new norm, and 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 species, venture 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 States, says 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........

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