Preparing for the apocalypse
Or just a more dangerous future
Greetings from Boston Logan Airport—
I’m on my way back to Spain after spending three weeks at my home in New Hampshire. I’ve visited with my son, seen friends, and inevitably fixed a bunch of things around the house.
When I arrived, the electricity in the basement was dead, and as it was the middle of a full-on melt from a heavy winter, there were two feet of water standing in the basement. I ran an extension cord, plugged in another pump, and drained the water. Then, happily, my first guess for fixing the electricity worked—replacing the breaker.
I was also able to finish getting a driveway put in on one of the pieces of land I own nearby. I had to marvel at the efficiency of the New Hampshire Department of Transportation: the Thursday after I arrived, I drove to the land, took some measurements, then drove home and applied for the building permit. By Monday the next week, it’d been approved for construction.
Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting FOUR MONTHS for the permit to replace the roof at the Spain property. We have the quote from the builders; everything is ready go; and still no clear answer on what’s taking so long. Last I heard from the architect, the town will be “asking for some clarifications” on the project, which is not encouraging.
In stark contrast, the day after getting the permit for the driveway, I met a contractor at the property; that weekend, his crew was at work clearing land. I’d snuck into his schedule at a slow time, which I expected, considering it’s still mud season in New Hampshire. Within a few days it was all done.
It’s always satisfying to see physical progress like this.
All of which brings me to a topic I’ve been pondering on and off for many years.
I. A kit to prepare for End Times
Of all the news that had made me morbidly roll my eyes the past few months, perhaps the most fun was this: Brussels asks EU citizens to put together a 72-hour emergency kit to face crises.
The kit was to include “photocopies of identification documents, cash, a radio with batteries, a charger and a phone battery, a flashlight, matches and a lighter in case of power failure, a first aid kit, water, food, and board games to pass the time.”
The whole thing reminded me of telling schoolchildren in the 1960s to hide under their desks and cover their heads in case of a nuclear attack. In other words, well-meaning but patronizing bureaucrats attempting to soothe the public with a bandaid against potential armegeddon.
Maybe Brussels was just trying to get folks to take seriously the various potential military, environmental, or perhaps pathonegenic threats of the future. Or perhaps the recommendation to pack a flashlight and board games was made in good faith—don’t worry, EU public, whatever happens, a 72-hour kit should get you through it.
I was rolling my eyes, but as my girlfriend pointed out, Europeans are accustomed to relying on the government to help them through tough times—even save them from tough times. Up to and including how they should prepare for End Times.
One weekend, when we were getting particularly adventursome in the mountains together, she pointed out that in Spain, most climbers and hikers expect that if they get into trouble, a wilderness rescue will be reasonably prompt and paid for, and that most expect this to come at taxpayer expense.
This expectation would be absurd in the U.S., where the swathes of wilderness are so huge, and rescue teams spread so thin (and often all-volunteer besides), that to expect a rescue out of the mountains paid for at public expense would be the height of hubristic folly. Hikers or alpinists might buy private rescue insurance, but no one actually expects a taxpayer-funded mountain rescue for personal, recreational risk-taking. Yet in Europe, that’s exactly what they expect. As a matter of fairness, even.
In any case, we agreed Europeans perhaps need a wake-up call. And the 72-hour survival kits might at least be a small part of that.
II. Imaging the future apocalypse
Preparing for the apocalypse has always fascinated me. Not that I’d qualify as a “prepper”—we stopped storing food in the basement after the first time water flooded it. I don’t own any firearms. Mostly, I just try to figure out more ways to reduce the propane bill (also this trip: we got a heat pump water heater installed).
Still, I’ve been running the apocalypse thought experiment in my head for years.
It’s both scary and—as the appeal of infinite post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows can attest—strangely entertaining. I think it was The Walking Dead that first got me hooked. I remember watching and asking some friends what they would do in case of a Walking Dead-style zombie apocalypse. I volunteered that I’d learn how to build my own house and improve my gardening—maybe brush up on my electrician skills so I could get some electricity going from a solar panel. They had the better answer: get guns and steal whatever they need from people like me.
Of course, the zombies are always just a metaphor. It could be any world-destabilizing event where survival is at stake. A plague. Nuclear armageddon. An astroid.
We’ve already run the plague hypothetical.
III. The capacity for self-delusion
COVID forced everyone into place, and we didn’t have much time to choose where that would be. I was in Mexico with my partner at the time. But, sensing the uncertainty, we changed our plans and flew back to the homestead in New Hampshire. Just in time, as it turned out. Flights were canceled or grounded for weeks afterward.
It was the perfect place to wait out a global pandemic (I wrote about it in 2022: A brief, shining pandemic moment). We had a garden, fruit trees, good neighbors, close friends, plenty of space, plenty of water, a swimming hole across the street, and a climbing area down the road.
Stories of people who found themselves holed up in cities during that time, especially European cities (or worse, Chinese cities), sound absolutely terrible to me. I’m not surprised there is so much trauma associated with that time. Yet, sometimes I wonder if any lessons have been learned.
We humans are naturally optimistic, with a great capacity to bury our traumas and just move on. We are good at collective forgetting. Or, you might call it burying our heads in the sand. Exhibit A: hiding under our desks as a defense against nuclear armegeddon.
Maybe that capacity for self-delusion is a good survival instinct. A way to move on when bad things happen. Yet over and over again, we move on from disaster without changing our behavior. A hurricane or a fire destroys your home, so you rebuild in the exact same spot. A global pandemic kills millions, and we go back to our lives just the same.
As a kid, I was taught the old boyscout saying, even though I was never a boyscout: hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Yet ask what one’s response to potential disaster should be, and you’re as likely to hear about systemic injustices and inequalities as say, making your home more resilient to natural disaster.
In Spain, housing activists pass around flyers calling for a range of actions that would more or less reinforce the status quo (indefinite rental contracts, not allowing investors—ahem, speculators—to purchase units, etc.) In contrast, no one here is marching to make the permitting process less onerous, so, for example, one could replace a roof on a building that’s been abandoned for decades. And almost no one calls for building more homes on empty land. God forbid.
You hear much (both in Europe and the U.S.) about systemic problems: the failures of government, the evils of big business or big tech, the erosion of free speech and civil liberties, and the rise of fascism. In the U.S., we are organizing “national days of action,” but that action doesn’t typically include planting a garden, fixing your home, or learning any new skills.
And waiting for the government to save you has never been a particularly good survival strategy.
V. Where there’s a will
My internal armageddon discourse sometimes reminds me of a particular incident from my past: the Northeast Blackout of 2003. If you were there, you know. Power was out from Ontario to New York City, affecting 55 million people. And, it just so happened that day my dad and I were in the New York suburbs, trying to get into the city to visit my sister.
With electricity out, the trains weren’t working—and the radio said bridges in and out of Manhattan had been closed in response to potential terrorist threats (this was a mere two years after 9/11, mind you).
I was 21 at the time. I had no clue what to do. My dad said we should try to drive into the city. I looked at him like he was crazy—dad, the radio just said all the bridges are closed!
He must have scoffed. Let’s just try.
So we got in the car and started driving, me at the wheel. It did kind of feel like an apocalypse scenario. On the radio, they had ruled out another terrorist attack. The cause of the outage, apparently, was some failure in a power company control room somewhere, causing a problem that had cascaded across the entire Northeast.1
As we got closer to NYC, we made some guesses and headed for one of the inobvious bridges connecting the Bronx to Manhattan. To our surprise (well, maybe not my dad’s), it was open. No one was driving across it. And quite suddenly, we were dumped into upper Manhattan with not a single other car on the road.
I drove a few blocks across town, then hooked south. From 150th, I started driving south along 5th Avenue with not a single stoplight working and not a single other vehicle on the road. Undoubtedly, I still hold the all-time speed record for fastest time driving from Harlem to Midtown.
Around 50th street, we hit a mess of abandoned vehicles blocking any further progress south. Again, something out of an apocalypse movie. But my sister was only about 10 blocks away by then. We walked the rest of the way, where we found her and some friends outside a restaurant that had opened its doors and its fridges—the chefs were were preparing and giving away all the food before it went bad. People were drinking beer, smoking joints, and playing football in the street.
I never forgot the lesson from my dad: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
At worst, we’ve completely forgotten our will. At best, we’ve let it severely atrophy.
VI. How to prepare for a more dangerous world
Our will has either been hijacked by distractions or we’ve been convinced that it’s pointless and ineffectual to use. We’ve become nihilists.
But nihilism is something to be afraid of. Convincing as many people as possible that their actions don’t matter is a sure way to make that society complacent and compliant. The most dangerous meme of my lifetime is lol nothing matters.
Instead of lol nothing matters, do something hard with your time. Something like what Corey Booker did recently on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Holding the floor for 25 hours straight, disrupting the normal business, getting into “good trouble.” No eating, no sitting, no bathroom breaks. And along the way surpassing a record set in 1957 by a man opposing civil rights.
You might take the view that what Booker did ultimately doesn’t matter. But I prefer to take the view that it was an inspiring act of will (read one headline: Corey Booker, Endurance Athlete), one we might all learn from.
No one is powerless. We can direct our will in whatever way we think is right, but we should try to direct it toward doing impressive things. It could be organizing a march if it makes you feel better, but personally, I’d aim for something on par with breaking a record that’s been held since 1957. Even if you don’t get there, you’ll be in a better mental space afterward. And the world might even be better off for your effort.
This is, in essence, how I think we should be preparing for a more dangerous world. By re-asserting our will, our capacity to do hard things, even if it takes focus for hours on end. We should build, explore, nurture, grow, learn, teach.
If you must, it also probably wouldn’t hurt to learn how to safely handle and fire a gun. I learned a long time ago, at Summer camp. So, if it comes to the zombie apocalypse, I’ll be in better shape than most.
As for a more dangerous, unpredictable future, I can guarantee that going to your nearest convenience store to buy a 72-hour prepper kit isn’t a good response—just a late capitalist one. In fact, it strikes me as about as effective as ducking one’s head under a desk or burying it in the sand.
But hey:
According to Wikipedia, a reminder of just how fragile is the civilization we take for granted: “The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of much of the Northeast regional electricity distribution system.”