I learned a new term, recently: "Prepper."
A prepper is someone who essentially makes a hobby of preparing for doomsday or the apocalypse. They like to worry about TEOTWAWKI ("The end of the world as we know it"). We used to call the severe cases of this mode of social (or anti-social) behavior "survivalists" (and in wikipedia, for example, the article "prepper" redirects to "survivalism"), but this new term seems to be more inclusive of people who have survivalist tendencies but may not be as extreme in their efforts or interpretation. The concept of prepper takes a thread traditional American frontier survivalism and knits it together with the kind of clubby, fuzzy-warm, after-work enthusiast style of hobbies like scrapbooking or homebrewing. Take a look at this prepper website, which not only tells how to start a fire using three distinct, non-technology-dependent methods and how to survive the inevitable currency collapse, but also has apple pie recipes.
The thing is, if you look at the movement broadly (and not just at that crazy website, which is just an example), there are clearly a lot of preppers in the US, and even in the world. There are people I know in my current workplace who have the mentality of American preppers – they think the end of the world is nigh, and this influences their lifestyle and behavior.
Is it perhaps derivative or connected to all the millenarianism circulating in Christian evangelical circles, which the US and Korea share culturally, these days? Yet even in my own very non-Christian evangelical family, I can point to a half dozen family members which strong "prepper" tendencies – in some cases very strong. Even I have inclinations that way, though in my case I don't really act on them – instead, in my own case, the "prepper" tendencies are expressed in my "minimalist" lifestyle, perhaps, and what's missing is any interest or obsession with TEOTWAWKI, as the preppers like to call it.
But there's something more going on.