The internet's latest obsession: The end of the world

What they're saying: Michael Mills, a researcher at the University of Kent who has studied doomsday prepping for more than a decade, told Axios that modern doomsday fears aren't necessarily about a specific apocalyptic scenario.

• "It's an overall reaction to uncertainty in most cases," Mills said.
• He noted that whereas Cold War-era survivalists were often focused on nuclear conflict, modern preppers worry about terrorism, climate disasters, geopolitical threats and emerging technologies.
• He described the modern mindset as a "multifaceted concern with uncertainty."

State of play: Viral posts have repeatedly urged people around the world to stock up on food and water, following similar recommendations from various governments and warnings from former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

• The situation has gotten so buzzy that President Trump was asked about it in an interview Monday. He said Americans don't need to stock up because the U.S. is "in good shape. We're strong. We have a great military and we will not have those kind of problems."
• Separately, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson — a man with 17.9 million followers on X alone — published a lengthy post Sunday evening alleging that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pressuring Trump to launch renewed attacks on Iran after the midterms, potentially with a nuclear weapon. For what it's worth, Carlson has been predicting similar doomsday scenarios for a while, and he's been wrong before.
• And the Pentagon's newly reported plan calls for U.S. military bases to prepare to operate without outside support for at least 90 days, terrifying some people into asking, "What's the government know that they're not telling us?"

The big picture: Worries about financial insecurity, skyrocketing health care costs, a lack of rainy-day savings and younger generations' perceived inability to buy a house all contribute to the feeling that life is not okay.

• Then you've got AI, which could cut thousands of jobs, enable a cyberattack or help engineer a dangerous, and potentially deadly, biological disease.
• And then there's the geopolitical situation: wars, genocide and the possibility of global warfare as China continues to threaten Taiwan and rumors abound that the U.S. and Israel will reignite the Iran war with a fresh round of attacks.

Zoom in: Political uncertainty can also fuel doomsday prediction culture, particularly around major elections.

• Mills described the prepper movement as historically right-leaning, with fears increasing during the Obama and Biden administrations and subsiding among some preppers after Trump's 2016 victory.
• During elections, "where it can often seem that everything is at stake... we don't know which way those contests are going to go and so naturally that uncertainty kind of flares up," Mills said.

Reality check: Preparing for a catastrophe doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist. Governments commonly warn people about potential disasters, like advising them to evacuate before a hurricane.

• Mills distinguishes ordinary emergency readiness from prepping, which typically involves preparing for disasters lasting weeks or months, sometimes longer.

The bottom line: Nobody knows what catastrophe, if any, might come next.

• But feeling prepared and stocking up for a couple of days without power can make sitting in the dark a little less scary.

Go deeper: Here's how AI could kill us all (if the worst fears come true)