Non-fictionIt's easy to laugh at preppers, dismissing their ideas in the process. It’s also easy to adopt the prepper worldview wholesale, and make fun of everyone else – all those sheeple – for not seeing what a mess we’re really in. It’s harder, but ultimately more productive, to see prepping as a complex, contradictory response to the multiple crises the world is facing. Prepping is more than just a freakshow, although it is that. And prepping is more than a useful instructional manual, although it is that, too. Neither wholly reasonable nor wholly ridiculous, prepping culture is a vivid and alarming reflection of a contemporary Anglophone culture that exists in a state of perma-­crisis and can find only simple answers to wicked problems.