The point I usually try to make is that prepping shouldn't be about convincing yourself that something bad is about to happen, and letting that consume you or define your life.

To me, it's quite the opposite: it's a tool to give you more confidence to go about your business, knowing that even if something goes a bit sideways - a recession, an extended outage, another pandemic, whatever - you have a solid backup plan. So you don't have to agonize over what's in the news, and don't have to lose sleep over the what-ifs.

But to maintain that mindset, yeah, I think one needs to start with an optimistic take on the history of our species: we always have people predicting the apocalypse, and we always find ways to overcome hardships and make the world better for our children. That's unlikely to change right now, and all the doom-and-gloom about climate change, "late stage capitalism", globalist conspiracies, peak oil, Y2K, Ebola, or whatever is the doomsday scenario du jour... is just not worth obsessing over. The Serenity Prayer has it right: "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference".