How Doomsday Prepping Got Normalized
A CPP's first-person journey from buried shipping containers to ballistic backpacks — and what it reveals about how prudence and prepping have become the same word.
By Samson Williams, CPP
The backstory to this piece is simple, and slightly disturbing: it occurred to me that I am a doomsday prepper.
Not in the caricatured sense. No bunkers-for-the-apocalypse fantasy. No obsession with collapse. Just… behavior. Rational. Calm. Well-reasoned. Normal.
Last winter, during a snowstorm, I bought a solar generator for Maureen's house. The stated reason was mundane — if we lost power, the kids wouldn't be too inconvenienced. But the unspoken reason was continuity. Reducing fragility. Making sure the lights stayed on no matter what.
At my farm in South Carolina, I recently buried two shipping containers underground. Officially, they're for “storage” of pest-control equipment. That phrasing, I realized later, is doing a lot of work. It's a polite, legal way to describe something older and more honest: hard security, disguised as practicality.
Then there's real estate. I've noticed that when I look at houses now, I think “resiliency” first. Power redundancy. Infrastructure failure tolerance. That mindset explains why I've purchased three generators in the last five years — without ever framing the decision as fear-based.
Only in reflection did it strike me how strange that all is.
The real moment of clarity came when I noticed my shopping cart. Ballistic armor panels. Color options for a ballistic backpack for Emory. Not because of a specific threat. Not because of paranoia. Because it felt… reasonable. Sensible. Like choosing smoke detectors or car seats.
That's when I said it out loud — and heard how broken that sounded. How broken we had become without noticing.
This is a piece about security that never explicitly says “security.” About prepping without ever using the word. About how a society arrives at private contingency so quietly that no one notices it crossing the line from fringe to default.
This is the first of two pieces examining that shift — and what it means for security professionals.
A $300,000 armored car in a stable society is a luxury item. A status signal. Even a joke.
A $300,000 armored car in an anxious society is something else entirely. It's prudence. It's foresight. It's the logical endpoint of a culture that no longer trusts continuity.
Understanding that distinction is where the money is. It's also where the truth is.
The question I keep coming back to — the one I can't answer with a generator or a buried shipping container or a backpack — is what kind of world my daughter will inherit when prudence and prepping become the same word. And whether she'll recognize the difference, or whether she was raised so deep inside it that the answer never occurs to her.
Samson Williams, CPP, is a certified protection professional and senior partner at MilkyWayEconomy, a federal innovation advisory firm. This is the first of two articles examining the normalization of private security.