I wonder whether I'm the only person here who, let's say, does some of what preppers do? It wouldn't surprise me if I'm not, as I think it can go with seeing what others don't, anxiety, overthinking, depending on your pov. (In practical terms what it means to us is that we don't run out of nonperishable food - I have stocks and a well-established system for using the oldest first - which actually, now that the system is running, is a big enough convenience to justify keeping it going anyway.)
I've only seen one episode of the show about these guys, and I'd say that any sensible family may be doing
some of the things they're doing. For example, I keep a well-stocked pantry all summer, and about ten gallons of drinking water on hand... with an eye to my swimming pool as a backup source of fresh water, in a pinch. But I live in a hurricane zone, so I'm planning for a rational threat. Before that, I lived in an earthquake zone, and a lot of the advice public officials were giving on emergency preparation was the same.
I saw the preppers' show once, and from that limited sample size, I'd say those people are not rational:
One guy was upgrading his bunker in the mountains of Washington to survive a nuclear exchange with Russia. He lives in Nashville. Apart from the odds of a nuclear exchange, what are the odds that, should one occur, he can make it to remote Washington in time?
One guy was preparing his family to escape from a quarantine zone in case of a smallpox epidemic, which he described as a perfect biological weapon for a terrorist, since people haven't been exposed, and there is no vaccine. Good luck getting it in the hands of terrorists, though, because the last reported case was in the 1970s, and the only remaining samples are in high-security storage in the US and Russia. This would explain why people have no exposure, and why there isn't a widely-available vaccine.
Whether or not their preparations are being done well, the thinking that launched them into preparations in the first place is horribly flawed.
