Apocalypse Rabbit Hole
What have you done to prepare?
One day, not long after DOGE got access to the Treasury, I went down the apocalypse rabbit hole. I had no trouble at all imagining an attack on the entire banking system. Thank you, Margaret Atwood. Thinking about it made me anxious, really anxious. I’ve had problems with anxiety in the past, especially when I wasn’t stable. I hate anxiety, the physical symptoms are truly unbearable when it’s bad. So I went looking for a little distraction—I opened Substack. The first three Notes made it clear that I wasn’t the only one who thought we were on the brink of anarchy and the collapse of civilization. The collective anxiety that permeated Notes would have been deafening if it had been white noise.
The end of civilization is not a new concern of mine. Even when Obama was president I dreamt about it regularly. This is what happens when you are dependent for your sanity on meds. You dream about not being able to get them and what will happen to you then. For some reason, in my dreams, there are no nice, safe, welcoming psych hospitals or well-stocked pharmacies that haven’t been looted
Normally, when I start feeling anxious, I automatically shift into coping tools mode. I do some deep breathing and mindfulness. I take control of my negative thinking and tell myself positive things to counter those thoughts. I did some of that and felt a little better. But, since I felt like my anxiety was grounded in a real threat to my well-being and the well-being of my family, I decided I probably wasn’t going to feel a lot better unless I also did something to prepare for the apocalypse. That’s when a post written by Anne-christine d’Adesky caught my eye. She writes Resisting Project 2025. You can find her post here. The newsletter covered safeguarding my personal data and money—heavy emphasis on money. Our family doesn’t have money we can afford to lose in a massive banking outage, so protecting our money seems like a good idea.
After an alarming recap of Elon Musk’s insertion of DOGE into the Treasury and the IRS and Social Security, the author segued into the suggestion that you turn to local resources for information and support in an emergency. Anne-christine suggested the public library. This was before the decimation of the federal Library program. Anne-christine suggested seeking emotional support from people you trust before taking steps like moving money or making major investment changes or relocating to, say, another country.
(This of course assumes you have money to move. From here on out, this post reflects my level of privilege. For example, the fact that I have the ability to buy and store extra supplies, that I might have spare money to move or keep on hand, and that it’s even on the table for me to consider buying a spare phone all assume I have the resources to do these things. A whole lot of people aren’t in a position to do those things and I want to acknowledge this fact up front. But you may choose to do some of the things I ended up doing or allying with others in your neighborhood or sphere to do some of them. I’ve been pretty poor at times in the past and I know one car breakdown or medical bill can mean you’re facing homelessness and stocking up on toilet paper and beef jerky will not make it onto your to do list today.)
She followed this excursion into reassuring territory with advice on unplugging from the Cloud, using end-to-end encrypted e-mail, VPN’s, temporary email addresses, and burner phones. I found my palms sweating and my chest tightening the further I got into the very comprehensive recounting of all the bad things that might happen if the current bad actors took things to the limit. What limits? Based on the Supreme Court’s decisions, that would be NONE. My apprehension had increased but I found many of the suggestions ones I knew I could not get my family to do. And the idea of carrying burner phones seemed just too Mission Impossible. So I went back to Notes.
But the algorithm had noticed and the next thing presented to me was Lexi’s post titled "A household guide for cyber defense against DOGE attacks." Anne-christine had convinced me I needed to know more than I did about protecting my family. My anxiety was actually worse than it had been before but I thought I might feel better if I could figure out some concrete steps to address my worries. I felt compelled to do something and many of Anne-christine’s suggestions were ones I didn’t think I could implement because my brain doesn’t work well when I’m anxious. After another round of deep breathing and mindfulness, I opened Lexi’s newsletter. Lexi says they have worked for Apple and Microsoft to build critical infrastructure for global enterprise customers. My BS detector moved a little but not much. I was out of my depth. I had no idea what critical infrastructure was or how to build it, so how could I possibly judge the reliability of their advice?
Lexi promised to tell me about practices that would help me “achieve a robust defense.” Lexi described DOGE as an external entity that had taken over the US Digital Services division to gain access to the Treasury and they used words like “breached,” “outages,” and “Severity 1.” Immediate steps included blocking and securing my sensitive data and freezing my credit. Then I was to build a “moat” around me and my assets to protect them from attack. I had to admit, Lexi had my attention.
They advocated offline banking and communications. Once again, owning a burner phone came up. Having cash on hand was one of Lexi’s suggestions along with ordering extra checks since you wouldn’t be able to do bill pay anymore. I had no problem imagining the nightmare scenario Lexi so effectively painted of a system seized by DOGE or Pallantir as one of many possible futures here in the US.
When I got to the end, I shut down Substack and went for a walk. My nervous system needed recalibration. My heart rate was up and my gut was churning. I had to digest all this stuff and figure out what, if anything, I was going to do with the possibly questionable information I had found. I hoped the walk would reduce my anxiety and help me make some rational decisions that would reduce my anxiety even more.
The walk didn’t really help. I got home feeling just as stressed as when I left. Another coping tool of mine is to put things down on paper. If I’m feeling overwhelmed by too many things to do, I make a list and prioritize things. So I made a list of some things that had been suggested by these authors. It wasn’t a really long list but it was intimidating. If I followed many of the suggestions on my list I was going to have to master stuff I didn’t know how to do and use systems I wasn’t familiar with. Okay, maybe I could do that. Maybe my son would know some of this stuff and could help me. But my wife has trouble using the internet for anything more complicated than watching her wood-turning videos on You Tube. There was no way she was going to do this stuff. As for the burner phones, I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what a burner phone was or where to get one. Maybe if I lived a more exciting life I’d know about burner phones, but so far my world had never included the need for one.
I looked at the list and mentally added survival gear to it and food that I could heat on a BBQ for when the electricity went out. Somewhere in the garage was the footlocker with the camping gear. Should we take it down and inventory it? Add to it? Should we invest in pepper spray since guns were right out?
I decided to sleep on it. I woke up at 2:00 am and tried to shake the remnants of the bad dream I was having about our trying to survive in the midst of civil war. I went to the kitchen and gave the cats some treats. While they munched on Greenies, I settled down in the recliner with my phone and researched dried food on Costco. For several thousand dollars, I could satisfy my urge to get enough shelf-stable food to feed us all for a year. Right.
Get a grip, I told myself. If I couldn’t rely on my smartphone, I was probably already toast. If the apocalypse really happened, I wouldn’t live long. I knew I wouldn’t survive in the wilderness of the local park even with a complete set of camping gear and a year’s worth of freeze-dried food. I abandoned all thought of those kinds of preparations and decided I would focus on what I could do without seriously disrupting our lives and having to try to teach my wife new tricks and went back to bed.
In the morning, I moved some money around so we had some we could draw on easily without going online. I set aside the question of cash on hand for a discussion with my wife. Money in the bank still seemed safer than money in a box of cereal or under a mattress but we could talk about that. I made sure I had backed up my most recent writing to the cloud. And I ordered more meds from my mail-order pharmacy so I would have at least a three-month supply of everything.
Then I ordered some stuff from Costco. Not dried food. Ugh. I ordered some extra canned goods, extra protein bars, four packages of heavy duty beef jerky I’d never seen in the store, bamboo toilet paper (I’d been wanting to try that for a while and they came individually wrapped, handy for grab and go moments), chlorine wipes, and a box of Cup of Noodles and a box of shelf-stable PBJ’s. (Honestly, I shouldn’t have ordered those. We never eat Cup of Noodles but they have them at all the Mental Health Wellness Centers as a staple so my goofy brain associates them with survival; and my wife likes PBJ’s but who knows if she would eat something that was who-knows-how-old and came in a plastic bag?).
I didn’t tell my wife what I was doing. I figured she’d think I was overreacting. Then I ordered some stuff from the local grocery store that I couldn’t get from Costco—a couple dozen cans of soup, two cases of bottled water, flour and salt and whatever we would need to make bread, and extra chocolate chips. My wife runs on chocolate when she’s stressed.
You see, I decided I needed to do something but not everything. I was not going to drift into a manic episode over this, frantically trying to do it all, burying money in the yard, ordering $5,000 worth of food, grilling the T-Mobile guy about burner phones. No, I picked the things that made sense to me and knew I could do without help. I avoided things that made me feel like I had taken up permanent residence in Paranoid City—like the burner phone and a floor-mounted safe.
I didn’t try to make the family switch to Signal for all our communications. I didn’t try to make a CD of all our important documents. I already had the originals on hand and copies stored on my computer and in the cloud. That would have to be good enough. I called my daughter and told her what I had done and suggested she do the same since I knew she didn’t bank locally. She was like, okay, if it will make you feel better. I said it would and we left it at that.
When the boxes started arriving my wife noticed. I told her what I was doing and why and how much, and she was like, well okay, if it makes you feel better. And I did feel better. I had done just enough to quiet my anxiety. I knew we wouldn’t starve for at least a week and we would be able to get some cash if we needed it. Oh, and I did order more checks but that was because we were almost out.
So I still have nightmares about not being able to get my meds and civilization ending. But I can get up and go look at my stash of meds and the canned goods and toilet paper and tell myself it will be okay for at least a few days. And that seems to be enough to let me go back to bed and sleep.
If you’ve gotten this far, share in the comments what, if anything, you’ve done to prepare for the apocalypse or what rabbit hole you’ve gone down recently and how it changed you. Hit the like button on your way out if you enjoyed this excursion into anxiety-land.
I turned into my Grandma. I have dozens of cans of fruits and vegetables, several boxes of rice and bags of beans. A case of chicken ramen. A case of macaroni and cheese, several pounds of powdered milk and 18 powdered eggs (not cheap!) I did buy a 20 pound bag of potatoes but that was in February when I believed the world would end with Trump siccing the military on the first protests (so those went bad a few weeks ago) I call it my prepper closet (seriously, in the walk-in closet in my bedroom!)
OMG we freak out in a very similar manner! I, too, have to restrain myself from going down the rabbit hole on all these worst-case scenarios, and at the same time want to be prepared. One thing we have done is to have is extra food, much of it from the Salvation Army food pantry. I have been going to the food pantry for a year now (since entering a debt reduction and repayment plan) and whatever non-perishables they offer that I know our family will eat, I take those each week until that section of our pantry is full. The food pantry offered boxed milk for several months, then they stopped offering that, so what we had accumulated eventually ran out. It was the same with the pinto beans. We at one point had about 3 dozen, now almost gone. So my tip for the food pantry is take whatever they offer and store as much as you have room for of it and use it! We have been able to cut our food budget in half by utilizing the food pantry. Another thing we have done is at least have a binder with our important documents we can grab in an emergency. We also have tents and sleeping bags for either camping or emergency shelter. That’s about all I can manage without going into an OCD panic.