doomsday preppers
Subculture Research & Short Documentary
“YOU’RE NOT ONE OF THOSE
DOOMSDAY PREPPERS, ARE YOU?”
The stigma around doomsday preppers is everyone’s problem. Americans are unprepared for disasters because they don’t want to be part of a group that’s seen as heavily invested in tinfoil hats.
Extremist YouTubers and over-the-top portrayals on NatGeo’s Doomsday Preppers undermined a subculture that’s wholesome, community-minded, less anxious, more diverse, and better prepared for a changing climate.
We did a deep dive on prepper subculture to uncover the myths about prepping and attempt to set the record straight.
Methods
We interviewed six self-identified preppers. Three of the preppers we found through the r/preppers and r/twoxpreppers subreddits. Two we found through our extended networks (preppers are everywhere if you ask around). And one interview was with Adam Nemett, an author who has written for Rolling Stone on prepper culture and what it’s like to be a progressive prepper. Ask me about the email I sent him to beg him to participate.
We also did a bunch of secondary research and fed thousands of Reddit posts into ChatGPT to validate our interviews. More on that at the end (if you’re into that kind of thing).
Myth/Reality #1: prepping for The End of the World as we know it (And they feel fine)
MYTH: PREPPERS ARE ANXIOUSLY OVER-PREPARING FOR HIGHLY UNLIKELY EVENTS
To outsiders, prepping seems like a futile cosplay of world-ending disaster movies like Armageddon or Don’t Look Up.
Preppers do talk about TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It) but that doesn’t mean a meteor exploding the earth. “As we know it” means that the world we know fundamentally changes — something that doesn’t seem so crazy after 2020.
REALITY: PREPPERS ARE RESPONSIBLY PREPARING FOR THE UNPREDICTABLE
If your community is your world, then worlds end all the time: the Johnstown Flood, the Chernobyl disaster, the Maui fires. In COVID lockdown, we all felt the world as we knew it coming to an end. Every prepper we talked to had once felt unprepared for a disaster and didn’t want to be caught slipping again.
Both our interviewees and prepper scholars like Bradley Garrett say that prepping is a surprisingly effective form of anxiety relief.
Myth/Reality #2: The conspiracy theorist v. the well-read Disaster Survivor
MYTH: PREPPERS ARE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS
As part of Rupert Murdoch’s shift towards politicized, sensationalist content, NatGeo’s Doomsday Preppers focused on conspiracy theorists who happened to be preppers, not average preppers.
And algorithms reward extremism, so preppers peddling conspiracy theories can bubble to the top of YouTube, eclipsing “the wholesome core” of preppers teaching canning techniques.
REALITY: PREPPERS ARE WARY-BUT-AVID CONSUMERS OF INFO
Preppers are not alone in society’s growing distrust of institutions. And they all know what it’s like to fend for themselves post-disaster. Many had stories about FEMA’s failings in their community, so their distrust isn’t conspiratorial; it’s grounded in experience.
But they still trust the gov’t enough to consult resources put out by FEMA and DHS. And all had wide-ranging media diets. Two told us they were checking their (physical) stocks in late 2019 at the first reports of COVID in China.
Myth/Reality #3: The rapidly changing demographics of preppers
MYTH: PREPPERS ARE ALL CONSERVATIVE WHITE MEN
This myth persists because conservative white men are taking up the most space on social platforms, and algorithms are trained to push the controversy they’re peddling.
Demographics have shifted significantly, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.
REALITY: THE FUTURE OF PREPPING IS FEMALE AND SOCIO-POLITICALLY DIVERSE
The most growth in the prepping community has come from urban, affluent, educated women aged 25-35 (theprepared.com).
And the rise of preparedness outfitters with designer aesthetics (e.g., Preppi and Judy) says that the market notices the shifting demographics in the prepping community, too.
Myth/Reality #4: The bunker Builder VS. the skilled-up hobby prepper
MYTH: PREPPERS ARE BUILDING BUNKERS & FALLOUT SHELTERS
Bunkers are rare. Rich preppers who spend money on them are mocked as “loot drops” by the rest of the r/preppers community.
In 1961, JFK urged Americans to build bunkers in their yards to prepare for nuclear fallout. Some distrust of authority in the prepping community stems from the very real fact that the US government has been known to build secret bunkers for a select few, while leaving average citizens to fend for themselves.
REALITY: PREPPERS ARE FOCUSED ON “STOCKING UP” AND “SKILLING UP”
Preppers are focused on having the stuff and the skills they’d need in the event of power grid/supply chain failures. Every prepper we talked to had skills they were working on acquiring which doubled as hobbies.
Many are reluctant to call themselves preppers in public, but they’ll talk openly about the hobbies they pursue as part of prepping. Those hobbies are probably part of why prepping works as anxiety relief: the mental health benefits of hobbies are well-known.
Myth/Reality #5: The Lone Wolf VS. The Community organizer
MYTH: PREPPERS SEE THEMSELVES AS LONE WOLVES AGAINST THE WORLD
It’s a well-worn trope in culture to valorize the last man standing who can fight off the bad guys, or who has to make tough choices to keep his family safe in a bunker with limited space.
There’s a very small minority that the prepping community refers to as “doomers.” Doomers are conspiratorial and misanthropic: humanity is evil and they will have to fend off the hoards when things falls apart. They’re often shouted down or policed out of online prepper spaces.
REALITY: PREPPERS SEE COMMUNITY AS ESSENTIAL TO SURVIVAL
Many choose prepping because they want to be able to help in a time of need. They want to play a part in keeping their community together, not be the last one standing.
One prepper spoke about the joy it brought her to send coffee to a friend during lockdown. Another talked about organizing a neighborhood list so they knew how people could contribute in a time of crisis. It’s common wisdom that the best prep you could ever do is to get to know your neighbors.
prepping creates personal safety and resilient communities. So how do we fix the branding?
LET’S MAKE PREPPING AS
NORMAL AS GROCERY SHOPPING
Many think prepping needs a full rebrand—that they should abandon ‘prepper’ as a term. Homesteading has much better branding, but requires land ownership (and 80% of the US lives in cities). ThePrepared.com is trying to get “the prepared” to stick. And some talk about “preparedness,” but we can all agree that’s way too many syllables.
It’s worth exploring whatever branding will help create more resilient communities, but the boom of young women in online prepper spaces suggests that the prepper brand isn’t completely toxic. (What a compliment.)
The fact that Alt-Right mad boys go grocery shopping doesn’t make grocery stores Alt-Right spaces. Going to the grocery store is just something that every household needs to do to survive, regardless of your beliefs or background: just like prepping.
HOW DO WE MAKE PREPPING SEEM NORMAL, SAFE AND BROADLY APPEALING? ONE IDEA: HGTV GETS PREPPED.
A month of prepper- and homesteader-infused programming in collaboration with sponsors like Preppi and solar panel installers would give HGTV an interesting edge while normalizing prepping, because there’s nothing that says pleasant and broadly appealing like HGTV.
The hosts of Home Town, Good Bones, etc. could take a prepper’s eye to the properties they renovate for a month — maybe every May before hurricane season or September before fire season. Working prepping across multiple shows could provide insight on effective urban v. suburban v. rural prepping, because how you prep depends on your neighborhood. And preppers are so much more, and such better neighbors, than the extremists who represent them now.
Validating research
The danger with interviewing six people is that it’s just, like, the opinions of six people, man.
Which is why we took thousands of comments from from the subreddits r/preppers and r/twoxpreppers and plugged them into ChatGPT to draw out themes, test theories, and make sure the preppers we spoke to represented the whole. They did.
secondary Sources
Books, articles, news: Bunker (book about prepper subculture) and Doomsday Preppers and the Architecture of Dread (research paper) by Bradley Garrett. Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich by Evan Osnos. Diary of a Progressive Prepper by Adam Nemett. Preppers in 2022 (Sixty Minutes) by Jon Wertheim.
Websites: www.theprepared.com, www.fema.gov, www.dhs.gov.
SPECIAL THANKS
…to Adam Nemett and all the preppers who talked to us for this research.
The homesteading photography in Doomsday Preppers is care of Adam’s blog, thunderbirddisco.com, a great resource about prepping and an incredible name for a homestead.
More Work
