Crazy Ways People Are Prepping For The End Times

Modern life is pretty sweet at times. Air conditioning, microwaved burritos, and antibiotics are not the type of conveniences that any sane person would want to live without. On the other hand, some crazy people are enthusiastically planning for the end times, the apocalypse, the day when Google leaves us forever and they can unironically scream "I AM THE LAW" at a horde of charging cannibals. Here are the craziest ways people are prepping for the end of the world.

There's a lot of disagreement in the prepping community about what type of disaster will evict mankind from our well-earned spot at the top of the food chain. Some are worried about scenarios like an asteroid strike or a limited nuclear war ending mankind's party, while others are betting on social upheaval or a solar flare. One thing apocalypse enthusiasts can agree on is that life on the surface will unequivocally suck during the end times, and we would do best to be elsewhere.

For some odd reason, around 2008, a lot of people began to think the end of the world was imminent. Real Estate entrepreneur Robert Vicino recognized the opportunity when he saw it and started up the VIVOS Project for the most noblest of reasons. On paper, the VIVOS Project exists to provide shelter for those with the knowledge and skills necessary to restart humanity after a world-ending event. But when we look a little closer at the accommodations provided, something seems just a little off.

Vivos currently has a development under construction in the Black Hills area of South Dakota that will allow 575 families to ride out the apocalypse while enjoying the protection of armed guards who employ a variety of state-of-the-art security measures. Each individual bunker is pretty posh, but the VIVOS really goes the extra mile with the onsite amenities. Vault dwellers will enjoy various dining options, a community theater, movie theater, hot tubs, a gym, and a variety of digital entertainment options. While the rest of us surface dwellers are volunteering to fight in cage matches over the last can of cat food, VIVOS residents will be living in relative comfortable environment and will no doubt enjoy having to listen to every single one of their neighbors drone on about how they were right and saw the apocalypse coming.

On second thought, maybe things will be better on the surface.

One unfortunate side effect of the collapse of industrialized agriculture brought on by the apocalypse, besides billions of people slowly starving to death, would be the unfortunate lack of fine dining options. The silver lining of the apocalypse upending the nutritional pyramid is that we will finally be free from having to listen to people whine about the lack of gluten-free options, unless you're in an apocalypse shelter stocked with food purchased from PrepareWise.

PrepareWise understands that the collapse of civilization is no reason whatsoever for a picky eater to adjust their diet. Gluten-free, vegetarian, organic, and kosher options are available for the discerning apocalyptic palate. Meals from PrepareWise can be either slowly cooked at one's leisure or frantically swallowed straight from the bag while fleeing from a group of raiders. With a 25-year shelf life, products from PrepareWise will ensure that even the most obnoxious of dining trends will survive the end of this world and will be around for the beginning of the next.

The apocalypse has something for everyone to fear. Some people fear the breakdown of law and order, while others don't want to live in a world where they can't use a small handheld device to look at pictures of cats. People who wear glasses have this nagging suspicion that getting a new pair after the apocalypse will be their biggest problem.

The tech crowd in Silicon Valley is always planning for the future, and around the beginning of the year, for some reason, they started to be a tad less optimistic about the future. Recently, Steven Huffman, the CEO of a little website called Reddit, made waves when he revealed that his chief motive for getting laser vision correction surgery was to prepare for the apocalypse. Huffman seems to have started a trend among the overly myopic Silicon Valley crowd, and now, a bunch of tech types are rushing to get the procedure done as quickly as possible. It's almost like the people who control the information we all consume know something the rest of us don't.

Most of the time when people cosplay as their favorite movie character at a convention, it is simply a fun hobby that let them meet likeminded people. When South Carolina lawmakers Josiah Magnuson and Jonathon Hill decided to cosplay, they chose to do it at press conferences, and instead of cosplaying as comic book characters, they went as the New Founding Fathers featured in the Purge Films while advocating for something they call the Virtue Solutions Project. After everyone had a good laugh, they double-downed on the crazy.

The pair believe the federal government is immoral, and its collapse is imminent. Rather than prevent this collapse and save the nation from chaos, the two believe their time would be better spent organizing and preparing small morally upright communities for the incoming apocalypse. The plan is that these small towns act as islands of civilization and life rafts while the rest of the country descends into a hedonistic apocalypse. After the country burns to the ground in what sounds like the most awesome party imaginable, towns that are part of the Virtue Solutions Project will rise up and remake the nation according to the principles of the American Founding Fathers, while emulating the practices of that small town from Footloose.

For the majority of us, the best we can hope for in a nuclear war is to be taken out in the first wave of attacks rather than having to spend our days riding on the back of a motorcycle with a chain around our necks. In some cases, the chosen few who are deemed necessary to the survival of mankind might be able to score a golden ticket in a government-controlled fallout shelter, while the rest of us on the surface learn to live with radiation poisoning. The majority of the population will be out of luck during a nuclear war.

Unless you happen to have Swiss citizenship.

Unlike other countries that might find themselves on the receiving end of nuclear weapons, Switzerland has the capacity to place its entire population in a series of fallout shelters constructed at great expense by the government. The Swiss legalized their nuclear paranoia. Articles 45 and 46 of Swiss Federal Law and Civil Protection requires that every private building constructed has a fallout shelter capable of supporting every resident. Switzerland is in the paradoxical position where it might win a nuclear war without possessing any nuclear weapons. After the fallout fades and the Swiss emerge from their bunkers, the rest of the world will be helpless to stop them.

Central to the plot of Ayn Rand's love letter to capitalism Atlas Shrugged is the fictional town of Galt's Gulch. The business and technological elites of the world separated themselves from society and live in a community that's equal parts EPCOT Center, Pleasantville, and Stepford. The quest to establish a real-life Gault's Gulch to ride out the apocalypse has been the holy grail of Ayn Rand aficionados for generations. American entrepreneur John Cobin organized one recent attempt at establishing his own version Galt's Gulch in Chile, and it went about as well as most other modern utopian experiments.

Not to let something like a lack of understanding about the finer points of land ownership in Chile stop him, Cobin purchased a large tract of land and started parceling out to would-be settlers. But in Chile, land ownership works a little differently. Buying land and the water that runs through it are two completely different transactions.

The investors found out that they'd be settling in the middle of a desert with no legal right to use the water running through it. They started asking pesky questions like "where are the specific plots of land where houses will be built?" or "why  was Cobin  seen playing roulette with a backpack full of cash?" and the development quickly collapsed. Quite ironically, selfishness and government regulations doomed this libertarian experiment to failure.

The two things necessary for any apocalyptic survival plan to work are the presence an actual apocalypse and a safe place to ride out said apocalypse. While building an apocalypse bunker in the side of a mountain or moving into a turn-key ready island compound are appealing options, the unfortunate drawback is those locations are probably under the jurisdiction of a government that would ask all sorts of uncomfortable questions. With nearly every speck of the earth's surface controlled by one government or another, the best option to avoid government oversight while planning for the apocalypse would be to quite literally build a country from the ground up.

The concept of seasteading has taken off over the last couple of years. The basic idea is to use either a derelict oceangoing vessel or an offshore oil rig as a foundation to build an artificial island. The artificial island would be located in international waters and would technically not be under the control of any one government. On these islands, or seasteads, a dedicated individual with more money than sanity could very easily make themselves comfortable during the impending apocalypse.

As crazy as it sounds, a project like this is quite feasible. A lot of money was quite literally sunk into the idea by Silicon Valley investors, and recently China began constructing islands in the South China sea to secure a legal claim to the region. Maybe we were all a little better off when only wannabe-Bond villains took this idea seriously.

You might outfit a survivalist compound with every episode of My Little Pony, an arsenal of weapons that's overcompensating for something, and a metric ton of baked beans with a corresponding metric ton of high-quality toilet paper, but it's all for nothing if you'll spend the apocalypse alone. Unfortunately, planning for the apocalypse really is a solitary endeavor. Preppers don't really get a chance to meet people all that often, and most of the people they do meet are, even by their standards, a little strange. Luckily for the prepping community, very few problems can't be solved with a simple Google search.

Knowing there's some significant overlap between conspiracy theorists and apocalypse preppers, Awake Dating is the go-to source for all of those looking for that special someone who can appreciate a good fallout shelter and have a healthy distrust of chemtrails. All sorts of disproportionately male online communities are out there to help those who are preparing for the apocalypse find true love ... or maybe they are all just part of some government plot to catalog every apocalypse shelter in the country.

If post-apocalyptic movies have taught us anything, it's that bullets are great long-term investments. During a zombie-induced apocalypse, bullets will be worth their weight in whatever arbitrary item we determine has value. Seeing a boom in the niche zombie-survivalists market, arms manufacturer Hornady has stepped forward to manufacture a special line of ammunition specifically designed to deal with the zombie threat.

Rather than go through a long research and development process, the good people of Hornady seemed to have prudently decided the best course of action was to take the ammunition they currently manufacture and put it in a box with a picture of a zombie on it. Their idea is simple and brilliant. In the event that they get called out for selling defective zombie ammunition, there's a pretty good chance that a lawsuit filed against them probably will not go very far. Besides, if society has put as much effort into making canned food as it has bullets, the collapse of civilization shouldn't be as bad as we've been led to believe it will be.