To galvanize the nation, Labour’s posable action figure Al Carns has made a video urging us all to “be ready for an emergency”, but he, too, is eerily silent on what exactly that means. The bathetic chasm between jumpy headlines and strangely repressed instructions — buy in a bit of bottled water and tinned food, write down a few phone numbers, order medication in good time — is also jarring. Should the National Grid fail, then so will every refrigeration unit, food production line, and water treatment plant in the country. The difference between dying of thirst immediately and doing so three days later seems somewhat academic; and the same goes for eking out small amounts of food and meds. Are we really supposed to be facing down the apocalypse with half a big shop each?

Some might prefer to take a leaf out of the grizzled North American handbook and get serious about survival. The internet is full of information for disaster preppers, as they are known, and bits of it already seem pertinent to British life. Start small by assembling what is known as a Get Home Bag, designed to help you bypass paralyzed transport systems during blackouts, and also for when you are stuck on Avanti. Next, graduate to a Bug Out Bag, useful for fleeing your house for 72 hours at short notice in order to go to a music festival. After that, though, it all gets complicated and expensive. The basic kit for civilizational collapse includes a renewable-powered generator, water filtration system, and waste disposal system; none of which is really practicable when you live in a small terraced house or flat. It is all slightly easier when you live on the prairie or in the desert, able to whip up a solar gravity shower or compostable toilet without needing planning permission first. 

Browsing websites for useful tips, it appears there are psychological pitfalls to avoid here as well as practical ones. A big one is not letting the whole prepping project take over your life; hard to do when the main motivator is cold sweat in the middle of night, and there is no upper limit to what counts as being adequately prepared. A different problem is when your partner is not quite as fixated on doomsday scenarios as you are. Some men online seem to long for global breakdown, just so they can justify all the money they have spent on methane-harvesting septic systems to their wives. 

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Resentment arrives from another direction in discussions about what the best attitude is to take to blindsided normies. Some imagine themselves as generously sharing their knowledge and resources during future disasters, but these tend to be in the minority. Having invested so much time and money in securing their own family’s future, most preppers insist no mercy will be shown to clueless panickers begging for shelter and spare tins of spam. They had so many chances to ready themselves for Armageddon, yet chose to go to Disneyland instead.

Take this line of thought only a little further, and you start picturing aggressive attempts by others to steal whatever it is you own. Indeed, the presumed covetousness of others puts a prepper of average sociability in a strange position: tempted to brag about the sheer scale of his root cellar on Facebook, while also being aware he might just as well be making an advert saying “free food here!”. The truly sagacious doomer would surely not bother to build or buy much himself, but simply keep a map of the most productive and least ferocious-looking local preppers handy for a rainy day.

For this sort of reason, most of what is loosely called “the prepper community” seems to spend a lot of time and money securing their set-ups from the predatory designs of fellow members. Alongside husbandry tips, their websites are also full of information about the best motion sensors and automatic weaponry to buy. The track from hobbyist to Hobbesian looks fairly short. One minute you are buying zucchini seeds, the next you are contemplating the ferocity of human nature and investing in camo and a crossbow.

When imported into Britain, such visions of rugged self-sufficiency look immediately comic: less John Rambo and more The Good Life. Faced with the prospect of intense competition for resources, plus the collapse of established order, there is not enough land here to avoid encountering hostile others altogether; and nor (thankfully) are we allowed to stockpile weaponry in preparation. If there had been a supply emergency in Surbiton, Margot and Jerry would presumably have cheerfully waltzed straight off with Tom and Barbara’s marrows.

Whatever the Government pretends, transplanted into our relatively small-scale, close-knit setting, the notion that a household could be “emergency ready” on its own is obviously fantastical. When it comes to national disasters, there can be no substitute for a shock-proofed state to manage the response. Slowly, the authorities do seem to be realizing this. Under Keir Starmer, Labour instigated a lot of programs in the name of increasing national “resilience”, though whether they work in practice remains to be seen. My own impression of key organizations such as the UK Resilience Academy and the Centre for Long-term Resilience suggests that far too many bureaucrats and effective altruists are leading the conversation, and not enough ex-military.

As the 2025 UK Government Resilience Action Plan correctly puts it, “building a truly resilient society requires a fundamental cultural shift”. The point applies as much to professional organizations as it does to individuals: lanyards and nice-sounding platitudes are not going to cut it in a genuinely dramatic crisis. But equally, we will need citizens with a strong sense of agency, who possess the skills and aptitudes helpful for negotiating energy- and screen-free zones. 

It is a shame, then, that so many of us are avoidant about leaving the house now, and horribly dependent on technology for things that we used to do ourselves; and that successive authorities have cheered this trend on. To take just one example: a society that prefers to deal with the obesity crisis by introducing highly complex international supply chains, rather than simply telling people to run about a bit, does not exactly inspire confidence that it will cope WTSHTF. 

There are accelerationist figures, both on Right and Left, who desire a world where our heads are always in clouds and vice versa. Goodbye, physical objects; hello, total tech dependence. The more we blindly go along with their superficially appealing program, the worse the shock of systemic failure is likely to be. As Thomas Hobbes once wrote, with his pen, human beings are “made fit for Society not by Nature, but by Education”. But do we want to educate people for the society where they have hoverboards and Meta glasses, or for the one where they contemplate eating their pets?

Until our politicians decide to prioritize a modicum of self-reliance, talk of emergency prep will continue to ring hollow. Even tinned goods are no use when nobody remembers how a can opener works. And if there really is limited time left before some amorphous entity attacks civilisation as we know it, we should probably use our remaining internet hours wisely, skip the Al Carns videos, and learn a few basic knots and self-defense moves instead.

This was not the view of “Guy Alaska”, who earlier this month posted a photo on Twitter of his wife doing just this. “She has been doing our laundry like this for TWO YEARS,” he wrote. “She can’t even feel her feet and she’s shivering in front of the woodstove. A true heroine. Comment ‘’ to show your appreciation for this monument of a woman.”

Quite unsurprisingly, Guy’s post provoked a backlash. Why had his family chosen the harsh pioneer path — living off-grid and without running water — happily and intentionally. What could possibly make this couple choose to live, to put it bluntly, like poor people? The answer, as I found out, is both straightforward and illuminating.

Guy Alaska is originally from Michigan, but his wife, Shay, is an Alaska Native. With several young children, they were living on an acreage in Michigan when their house burned down two years ago. The insurance money didn’t cover a rebuild, so they decided to start afresh in Shay’s homeland, something they had long been dreaming of.

Guy tells me that, for them, Alaska represented “one of the last free places” in America. “There’s still plenty of places in Alaska where you can buy land,” he says. “You own it — you don’t have to pay anybody so-called ‘property taxes’, which means you’re free to not have to earn money, which means you’re free to not participate in a system that you don’t want to participate in.” For him and Shay, the goal was to opt out of what sociologist Michael Bell calls “the treadmill of consumption”, which describes the way in which people in highly developed countries try to “keep up with the Joneses” through more and more material consumption, without any real gains in overall happiness or satisfaction.

After their house in Michigan burned down, the Alaskas started out by camping in a Mongolian yurt in different locations in her home village, but soon grew tired of getting evicted and decided to broaden their search. They soon found the perfect spot: three acres on an island that cost just under the $30,000 they had in savings. The couple bought the land sight unseen and set off. “We just showed up here with all that stuff, and basically blazed a trail into the woods with a pair of loppers until we found a spot that we could build on,” Guy says.

In the past two years, Guy has built a 75-square-metre cabin and a woodworking shop that doubles as a barn. He has also cleared a half-acre of forest for hay, installed paddock fencing around a quarter acre and a small solar panel system for electricity, as well as building a two-hole outhouse and a smoker for smoking fish and game. All the while, the Alaska family has subsisted off the land: on one occasion, Guy hunted down a bear which Shay then prepared by hand with her youngest in a baby carrier on her back.

While the family has accomplished a lot, they don’t yet have a rainwater harvesting system to collect enough water for indoor plumbing. This means they have to haul water to use in their home, which makes washing in the river an attractive option. Guy takes odd jobs in carpentry and milling to pay for things the family can’t produce themselves, and he is saving up to eventually buy a washing machine. (Even hardcore off-gridders see a benefit in that.)

The Alaskas aren’t the first American family to vanish into the wilderness. The early pioneer stage of the United States is central to its ethos and self-image. Americans think of themselves as valuing self-reliance, and central to that belief is having the courage to resist the push of conformity. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s key text on the topic implores: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But with industrialisation, mass wealth and the expansion of the welfare state, there has been an upending of this value in lieu of a new worship of consumerism, ever-increasing material standards of living, and vague notions of “progress”.

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Even as writers such as Steven Pinker insist that this ever-increasing mass affluence is always a net good, we are reaching material, environmental and even spiritual limits that are causing breaks in the normal functioning of society. The way they see it, the Alaska family isn’t recreating the pioneer lifestyle for merely philosophical or spiritual reasons. First and foremost, they see their path as logical: “You have these huge systems that everybody’s really relying on, and to be free for us out here, we can’t rely on those systems.”

For Guy and Shay, the path of freedom necessarily aligns with a rational desire to be both self-reliant and prepared for the potential breaks in those systems. They are not alone in their thinking. Before the Covid pandemic, about 10 million people in the United States would fit the definition of a “prepper” or “resilient citizen”, with the ability and resources to survive any kind of disaster for at least one month. Following Covid, that number has jumped to about about 20 million. There is an increasing sense of unease at the prospect of a world of escalating disasters — chlorine gas spills, zoonotic diseases, typhoons, solar flares, civil unrest, terrorism, and full-scale war — but also a loss of faith in the state’s ability to help its citizens in times of emergency.

The recent wildfires in Hawaii are a clear example. Citizen accounts assert that people were waiting over a week for any help from the government, after a catastrophic failure of state warning systems: the only assistance came from fellow citizens sharing resources and generator power. While officials report only 114 confirmed deaths, journalists attempting to cover the story suggest the death toll could be far greater. The lack of reliable reporting on disasters such as this further undermines people’s trust in institutions, strengthening their desire to pursue resilience on a household or community level.

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But fear is not the only motive behind self-reliance. Though Guy and Shay want to be prepared for a potential disaster, they are also interested in connecting with a deep cultural lineage. “We kind of settled on staying in southeast Alaska, just because Shay’s heritage is here. Her people have been here for 4,000 years, and that’s our children’s heritage too. They have rights to hunt marine mammals like seals and sea otters, and we wanted to be close to their culture, so they can stay involved with it. As far as our philosophy goes, we’re interested in authenticity.”

To that end, the Alaska family has an ongoing fundraising campaign to buy their family a yak for use on their homestead. They’d like to move away from reliance on cars to something more sustainable, and plan to use the yak to get them to town, to move fish and game, and to log their land. Functionally, a yak can do most of what a tractor can do, but, as Guy says, “the only difference is you can’t go quite as fast”. In many ways, despite being rural conservatives, the Alaska family is living a progressive “degrowth” lifestyle, with lower consumption, low energy use, and sustainable livelihoods.

But the online backlash to their lifestyle suggests a growing bifurcation between those Americans who want to exercise individual liberty and those who are shackled by the ideology of mass affluence or the drive for status. Not that it bothers Guy and Shay to be called “really poor”. They think they’re the lucky ones. As Guy says, “We’re free to be poor.”

“It was the end of the world,” begins Notes From An Apocalypse with a knowingly stylish flourish, “and I was watching cartoons with my son.” He’s quite the worry-wart, is Mark O’Connell — at least by the account of himself he gives in his new book. He leads a relatively comfortable life as a writer in Dublin, never too far from a flat white or a craft beer. His last book, To Be A Machine, was widely feted and occasioned a good deal of guiltily undertaken air travel on the promotional tour. He has a wife and two young children, whom he clearly adores.

Yet he can’t stop panicking about the end of the world. He is terrified of (ahem) pandemics, nuclear holocaust, cascading ecological catastrophe, asteroid impact, societal breakdown and moths. And he — I don’t quite want to say cheerfully, but nearly cheerfully — indulges this terror in himself.

“For close to a year my online homepage was set to r/collapse, a subreddit entirely devoted to news links and discussions pertaining to civilisational collapse and adjacent concerns. I would open my browser and would immediately be greeted by a crowd-curated selection of signs and portents, apocalyptic apocrypha. Black snow falling on Siberia. An iceberg twice the size of New York City that was breaking off from Antarctica. Business Insider’s top ten major cities that could be unlivable within eighty years. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

Most of us — even the pessimists — tend for convenience alone to set our homepages to, say, our Gmail inboxes. But O’Connell is made of sterner, or less stern, stuff. Oh, and the moths! He mentions, just in passing, that of all his “quite intense nature-based phobias”, “I was, most pressingly, terrified of moths.” Having one brush his face is “a prospect beyond the realm of the thinkable”.

He explores this terror with his therapist, mentioning that he links it to his increasingly fragile sleep. The therapist notices that he uses the word “fragile” a lot, and asks him: “What comes to mind for you when you say this word?”

I said nothing for what seemed a very long time, attended to a couple of seagulls screeching at each-other, the desolate staccato of a can being punted along the street by a gust of wind.
“Do you really want to know?” I said, straightening myself up on the couch.
“Of course I really want to know,” she said, smiling.
“Death,” I said. I was smiling back, but I was surprised to hear myself say it, and strangely chastened.

The fine, well-written, and fiercely entertaining book in which he explores his interest in all things apocalyptic is in some ways, as that little exchange suggests, a nonfiction novel in which O’Connell appears as an essentially comic protagonist.

But it’s also a serious, or semi-serious, piece of reportage — in which O’Connell variously meets the vendors of mid-range apocalypse real-estate (a guy selling decommissioned concrete weapons bunkers in a vast ranch in South Dakota); investigates the tech billionaires planning, when the Big One arrives, to do a bunk to New Zealand to set up an Ayn-Rand-style post-democratic society; meets the Elon Musk fanboys (they are usually boys) who think the human race’s best chance of survival is colonising Mars; spends 24 hours communing with nature among pessimistic ecologists in the Scottish highlands; and takes a package tour of Chernobyl.

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And it’s an essay, in which he investigates his own phobias and Left-liberal anxieties, and his sense of complicity and hypocrisy. He brings the findings of his reporting and reading — everyone from Hannah Arendt and Schopenhauer to Dr Seuss (there’s a fine and feeling mini-essay on The Lorax) — to interrogate the meaning of the apocalypse.

As he argues early on — contemplating the culture of “preppers” who fantasise about taking to the woods with a “bug-out bag” when SHTF (shit hits the fan) — the expectation of catastrophe is as much fantasy as fear. And it is ideological: fantasies of self-reliance after the breakdown of society play as much into myths of the American past as visions of its future. Preppers fetishise a notion of frontier masculinity in which the white prepper, a Mad Max Davy Crockett, is freed from the reciprocal obligations of “civilisation” to fend for himself.

O’Connell finds equally problematic the rhetoric around “colonising” Mars, and the more or less naked way in which private property secured by main force, and the idea of every man for himself, underpins all these dark visions of the future.

And the apocalypse is not just ideological: it’s an aesthetic and a commercial commodity. It’s MarsCoin entrepreneurs, sales pitches for post-Apocalyptic gated communities, and versions of the same proleptic Ruinenlust that drove the Grand Tour.

As O’Connell tours Pripiyat, enduring the wearisome banter of his tour guide, he finds himself reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl, and comes on her quotation of an ad for a version of just the tour he’s on: “Life gets boring, and people want a frisson of something eternal… Visit the atomic Mecca. Affordable prices.”

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O’Connell is, as I say, a good writer, though he does like to let you know it. And he does have a way — though he’s wanly aware of it, which is part of the joke — of turning anything he sees into a symbol of something else. Signs and portents. Donald Trump isn’t just a silly-haired pillock. He’s “only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood — a rapidly metastasising tumour of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.”

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley tycoon who has bought a New Zealand bolt-hole, is described as “pure symbol: less an actual person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future, a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market”. Later the real Thiel is glimpsed: “an actual human, goofily got up in polo shirt and shorts, sweating in the heat”.

Then there’s O’Connell himself, who declares early on: “My days are a procession of last things, seals opened. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak. That is the prophecy of this book”. Later on, we meet him failing to put up a tent. A nice woman in the next-door tent offers to help.

“I will not pretend that accepting her offer did not involve a certain measure of masculinity-related discomfort, but it seemed to me that the embarrassment of politely declining, only to then continue foundering in tent-purgatory, would be exponentially more severe than the comparatively benign embarrassment of accepting.”

He tells us this before musing on the “paradoxical poeticism” of her second name.

O’Connell’s book, in this way, deftly walks the line between pomposity and self-satire. You read on for the laughs, and stay for the serious thinking that it smuggles in. He recognises that in thinking about last things we are thinking, inescapably, of ourselves: it’s a canvas on which we paint our fears and our fantasies.

So his conclusion, such as it is, is that he needs to get over himself — which is to say, get over the apocalypse. He ends back in Dublin, blowing a raspberry at his newborn daughter. And — who knows? — perhaps he now has his home page set to Gmail.

Notes From An Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, by Mark O’Connell is published by Granta this week.