Preparing for the unknown… unknowns: ‘doomsday’ prepping and disaster risk anxiety in the United States

This article examines the collapse-based thinking energising ‘doomsday’ prepping: a growing American phenomenon centred on storing food, water and weapons for the purpose of surviving disasters. Existing understandings of prepping indicate that its practitioners are driven to prepare by peculiar and delusional certainty that apocalyptic collapse will occur in the near future. This view, however, has not yet been tested by empirical research....