It’s not uncommon in California to sit around a table with friends or family, discussing what we’ve stowed away in our emergency go-bags. For me, this often leads to a feeling of inadequacy and panic. I have a whistle, for example, but not antiseptic wipes. And did I ever actually buy that exorbitant solar charger, or did it languish in the oblivion of my online shopping cart? (I did not.) Did you know that even bottled water goes bad and you must change it out every few months? Did you know that iodine tablets expire? What about flares, do you have any of those in your kit? Suddenly, in that room, I will feel that my husband and I are doomed.

California is a place where apocalyptic forces converge – fires and earthquakes, yes, but also protracted droughts, brutal windstorms, floods, landslides, avalanches. Climate change has only made matters worse. Our fires burn five times as much land as they did in the 1970s, and are faster moving and more deadly. In response, an entire survivalist industry has evolved to help us prepare, but also to prey off of our existential anxieties. The go-bag or emergency kit is its most symbolic product.

So ubiquitous are emergency kits that you can pick one up at the local hardware store – such as the Ready America emergency bag, a child-size backpack containing a first aid kit, light sticks and dust masks. The Red Cross offers an array of go-bag options online, from the $27.99 bare-bones personal safety emergency pack – essentially a souped-up first aid kit “designed to support one person during a short-term emergency situation” – to the Deluxe 3-Day Emergency Preparedness Kit, which promises three days of support, in presumably greater style than one’s neighbors.

The go-bag doesn’t just represent the hope of outlasting the next catastrophe, though. It also expresses the Golden State’s Darwinian streak. This is the California where Silicon Valley capitalism meets Donner Party cannibalism – where rugged individualism curdles into “every person for herself”. Everyone needs a survival kit of one’s own, for who, if not me, will come to my aid? The disaster kit promises self-sufficiency, at least for a few days, because are we really able to rely on our government, or another, for help?

What this means is that one’s ability to prepare for disaster is determined, in large part, by how much one is able to pay. For those who still listen to National Public Radio – mostly white people with disposable income who see themselves as champions of sustainability – the regular fundraising campaign feeds off of both climate anxiety and the guilt of abdicated responsibility. Those who pledge $180 can finally stop dragging their feet and secure themselves a thank you gift of a backpack stuffed with survival gear, including hand warmers, drinking water pouches, food rations and an AM emergency radio equipped with an LED flashlight and phone charger (lithium batteries included). It also comes with an “Emergency Communications Planning Card”: basically a piece of paper on which to write important phone numbers.

Those with even more cash to spare can contribute $360 to their local NPR station in exchange for the “Total Survival Bucket” from Emergency Kits.com. This premium kit includes a “Swiss Army-like knife,” a survival whistle that produces five different cries, eight emergency candles, and two planning cards. The bucket itself can be transformed into a toilet, with liner bags and a snap-on seat with lid. We will have light, we will have a toilet, we will have a plan – so long as we can afford it.

Only 52% of Californians own a disaster kit, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Cost is not the only reason, but it’s certainly a barrier. If it helps save your life, a $100 survival kit is a bargain. But it’s a princely sum for a bunch of stuff you hope never to have to use. (Stock up on all the gear the New York Times’ Wirecutter recommends and you’ll be out of pocket more than 10 times that amount.) In a state where 40% of Californians live at or below the poverty line and 17.8% of the population is unable to meet their basic needs, for many, the cost of survival is out of reach.

The go-bag is thus a potent symbol of today’s California not just because of what it says about the climate crisis, but also what it reveals about our crisis of inequality. The instant it strikes, disaster is an equalizer – a tsunami or earthquake will level whatever is in its path. But disaster preparation is not a level playing field. Wealthy tech dons have built luxury survival bunkers the world over so that their private jets can whisk them away at the first sign of the apocalypse. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, along with other stars, hire private firefighters to ensure that, whatever happens to the rest of the state, their houses don’t burn. To add insult to a disaster’s injury, it can feel as though some of the worst of us will survive the end of the world, while the best of us are more likely to perish.

The post-disaster context is also shaped by inequality, and perpetuates it. The people who have insurance can rebuild. Those who have friends or family with spare bedrooms will have a place to stay for a while. Those with a second home can live there instead. Those with steady, salaried jobs are better able to keep them, or take time off, while rebuilding.

In A Paradise Built in Hell, the writer Rebecca Solnit makes a case for the effectiveness and startling beauty of support networks that form in the wake of disaster. In such a world, communities come to their own aid and share their emergency rations. This is the real core of apocalyptic survival, Solnit argues.

We might need go-bags, yes, but I like to imagine that the apocalypse will also demand mutual aid, and that what we can pay for now – our bunker, our bucket toilet – will not entirely determine who survives.