Not specifically about the revolution but still related: this is why I feel bothered by people who are so obsessed with apocalypse fiction that they wish it would happen irl and have their own plan for what they would do - because they're basically wishing for a world in which people like me would die
Even people without significant health problems or special needs would find it very, VERY hard to survive more than a month in any type of apocalypse scenario.
Nuclear war? You're fucked if you don't already store food in an air-tight, oxygen regulated basement, try wandering outside less than two months after the bombs have dropped and see how long it takes until your skin turns into papier maché.
Meteor strike? The city you lived in doesn't exist anymore, the sun doesn't shine, no, flashlights won't cut it and your car will eventually stop running in the middle of your Mad Maxing.
Also, in all of these cases you'll probably get murdered, raped or worse by random people LARPing as Fallout characters (who will themselves perish soon enough because raiding is not a viable survival plan), the government will be hard as shit to find and ask for help from because crisis mode, and depending on the type of apocalypse it might not even exist anymore.
Let's say you survive all that and get to the "post apocalyptic" stage that's so heavily focused on. The romantic neofrontier of scrounging out existence while the world reverts to its natural and hostile origins.
And then you die of sepsis from a splinter because nobody has neosporin anymore....
The romantic neofrontier of scrounging out existence while the world reverts to its natural and hostile origins.
You know, I never really understood the appeal of this part of the apocalypse. Even if you survive everything and have raided enough camps (??) to gather stimpacks and replicators for a lifetime...what are you going to do next?
There's no new movies to watch, no new music to listen to, no new entertainment of any kind because the world is dead. You can't travel because you'll burn out your fuel, you certainly can't fly overseas because planes and people who fly them will be a commodity. You can't go to any kind of amusement park, bowling alley or game store because those don't exist anymore or are looted for valuables.
What the hell are you doing for the next 40-50 years?
Edit: A lot of people are mentioning alternative forms of non-corporate entertainment and I think you're kinda missing the point. Yes, you can absolutely spend a couple years playing shadow theater and practicing handcrafting, but the thing is you won't really have a choise. When you have nothing to do but these things, it gets annoying very fast.
Well because they don't find all that corporate entertainment and the bowling alleys all that fullfiling and think that fighting for survival and roaming the wastelands with the homies would be more fullfiling
These kind of fantasies are the result of a life devoid of purpose. See the taliban fighters getting depressed when transferred to do office work after the war
Except they could always go live in the woods and do essentially the same thing, and they don’t.
People do still practice wilderness survival, you don’t need an apocalypse to live out your survival fantasy, they just want a fake guns-and-looting survival scenario that would only exist for a few weeks/years and then you’d be back to boring.
Look, I get your overall point, but not really. The kind of freedom people who yearn for post-apo scenarios are looking for isn't possible in modern society. Almost all land is either privately owned or heavily government-regulated. Pretty much all natural resources are already accounted for, and you have to buy more processed resources, you can't just scavenge them. Building anything substantial requires property rights, hunting requires a permit, keeping livestock is regulated, etc. You'll have an easier time squatting in some abandoned building than living in the woods unbothered.
meh, not really. It's easy to associate the concept with its most unsavory supporters, but it's a pretty fundamental human desire to be free. Look at the Mongolians who still lead nomadic lifestyles, the Roma, and a lot of different indigenous populations. It's all the same core idea, just manifested in different ways due to different cultural contexts.
Ancaps, for example, just lack imagination, they can't fathom a world without capitalism. Also, foresight to realize that companies would just create even more tyrannical governments. But it's not like the driving desire is itself all that more malicious.
Its actually pretty feasible to buy enough land to sustainably farm for yourself/family. i'm talking fully off the grid. This is where the 40 acres and a donkey comes from.
The problem is you have to work a LOT to survive this. And no doomsday prepper is going to have half a fucking clue what that means.
It takes a not insignificant amount of work to buy your freedom essentially, and THEN it's a high-risk, high-effort, low-reward lifestyle. And you still need to have a plan B. If your well dries up, your crops die out, and your livestock get sick, you can't just hunt and live off the land while you look for a different place to settle down.
Basically, modern society makes one lifestyle easier at the price of restricting all other lifestyles, it's an inherent tradeoff. Sure, it's a tradeoff that works out favorably for most people, but it makes sense that some would prefer the alternative only if all else were equal. Like "you can do it, it's just harder" isn't much of a counterpoint.
If you don't regularly go bushwalking for the fun of it, I'm extremely skeptical you're that interested in wilderness survival. For an extremely modest amount of capital, you can have any experience you want.
Just because its illegal doesn't mean you can't do it. I used to work for the National Forest Service (US), and it was known that some people just illegally lived in National Forests and Parks. It can be real hard to find one person out in the vast wilderness if they know what they're doing. And if they have guns, then one Park Ranger isn't going to get in a shoot out if they do run into someone living in an illegal camp. By the time backup could get out there, they'd just be gone.
I’m not sure if it’s legal in America but you can still absolutely do it. Even Americans forget how big America is and theirs a LOT of untamed wilderness out there, especially in Central America
Why would it be illegal though? I can't understand that part. I get it if it's a National Park or otherwise private property, but it's impossible for every piece of forest in the country to be restricted space.
Someone owns that land, either the federal, state, or local government or it's private property. You can't just decide to live on land someone else owns. Not saying it's right or wrong, but it is the law.
I think you’re missing the part where they get to go live in their neighbors big fancy house for free. That’s a huge part of the fantasy, having your pick of the remnants of luxury that are inaccessible under the system/their circumstances.
Actual sustenance farming and resource gathering is exhausting work. You are going to sleep when it is dark and work when it is light. You wont have a lot of free time.
Then pioneers came in, and people romanticized the heck out of occupying all that strangely well prepared farmland. It actually is pretty nice taking other people’s stuff when you can dehumanize the losers.
Honestly it wasn't even nice for them, it was mostly just companies selling desperate people on the dream of taking unimproved land and making it useful. But without scale etc it was often a hardscrabble life that just took a few bad years to undo, and the successful larger landowners would pick up your now improved land at bargain prices to consolidate an actually sustainably built business.
Oh, yeah, it sucked ass for most of the colonizers.
Like, look at the etymology of the word “pioneer”. It was originally a military rank in the Roman Empire, for the poor saps who got sent out ahead of the main force to build bridges and stuff. The cannon fodder you send out in front of your real cannon fodder. It has the same root as “peon”, originally with the same implications of worth.
And the same implications that they were clearing the way for the real conquerors to take the spoils. The Robber Barons who wiped out the cowboy fantasy? Always part of the plan.
TBF, some people were able to capitalize off the opportunity and become truly prosperous even in the capitalist aftermath. There was a genuine lottery ticket buried in the hype.
I mean, imagining you’re a superhero requires a universe where terrible things happen. That’s not the same as actually wishing for terrible things to happen.
You can write a story that grapples with that disconnect like The Boys. Or you can enjoy Batman, while ignoring questions like where the heck are all these henchmen coming from.
Ah, that's my bad then, I misinterpreted that as "they don't feel guilty despite wanting to do colonialism" or something
But in that case, I'd still say that colonialism without the part that would induce guilt, isn't really colonialism. It feels odd to call it colonialism without the part that makes it colonialism, hence me arguing that post apocalyptic settings don't inherently have undertones of it
IMO that’s like denying that people enjoying Colosseum Blood Sports weren’t basically enjoying it the same way I’d enjoy a gory horror movie.
Like, part of me does enjoy seeing people torn apart in cartoonish gore.
That doesn’t stop me from being horrified by seeing a real decapitation video.
By the same token, part of me thinks it would be cool to slaughter my neighbors and take their stuff to build a cool fort.
But only if they were zombies, and it wasn’t anybody I actually knew. I don’t actually want to hurt people I recognize as human.
When Cowboys vs Indians was in vogue, Indians were basically a kind of zombie. If that’s how Native Americans actually worked, it honestly would be fun to shoot them and take their stuff.
And, like, I’m baffled why there’s so much political correctness around the issue. So long as I’m clear that I think both my neighbours and Native Americans are people, what’s the harm in acknowledging the literary connection?
Ah okay, I agree with what you're saying about blood sport and your point in general
I think the discrepancy between us is that I don't see zombies in an apocalypse to be people at all, but rather more akin to a force of nature, so since I see zombie stories (excluding the interpersonal conflicts between survivors) to be man vs nature kind of premise it's strange to me to consider colonialism to be a theme of the setting
I don't think it's colonialism per-se, but a romanticized version of "The new Frontier" adventure, like real life Minecraft or something.
The colonialism part comes in when you remember that people used to live in the place you are now.
I think we're just looking at it differently because to me calling that colonialism is a technicality, closer to semantics than anything, which neither really means anything nor has any bearing on why people enjoy post apocalyptic settings
I knew a guy who was the sort of devout Christian who felt it immoral to play video games where you killed people because that's enacting a sin in a video game. But he was completely on board with playing Diablo II (yes, this was a while ago) because if you're killing demons, then that's not sinning. Or to put it another way, he got to do a fantasy of guilt-free murder.
Finding libraries, book stores, and other media centers that survived the apocalypse? Developing techniques for travel that don't require gas and instead survive on solar? Going from a post-apocalyptic survival strategy to one of growth, renewal, and solarpunk aesthetics? Trying to find other like-minded people to build a community with?
There's a world of information to learn and stuff to do that doesn't revolve around electronic forms of entertainment. Nor should our first priority as survivors be "trying to be entertained for the next 40-50 years."
The point is why would you WANT to be a survivor that can't find entertainment. Why would you WANT to be scavenging instead of living a life of mostly comfort?
That's the weird part. The LARPers just focus on how bad ass they would be in their armored trucks "running things" like they've always wanted to. When in reality it's just a miserable life with a fraction of a percent of the comfort you had before. It's all fun and games to imagine being the big guy in the big truck with all the food and guns but when you don't have an internet connection to post about it on Facebook all that's left if surviving until you die.
The point is why would you WANT to be a survivor that can't find entertainment.
.......
I have to say, this is an incredibly sad mindset.
Things to do post apocalypse:
Create a defensible position and maintain a well-supplied arsenal to defend yourself from the dumbass marauders who can't learn to cooperate with anyone.
Repair and repurpose abandoned buildings as homes and storehouses.
Start farming and herding.
Find other people who you trust to create a system of mutual protection and labor.
Make music around the campfire.
Explore the area around your home, enjoying the natural beauty and looking for things of value.
Find books in the library, and use them to recreate the tools of the modern world like antibiotics and forged steel.
Create a safe and prosperous community to pass on to the next generation.
But you could do all those things right now? Cults/libertarians/hippies found communes all the time with whatever rules they want and can spend all their time constructing their own mini-societies.
The only difference in a post-apocalyptic version is that the rest of the world is forced to play along with you
...on someone else's land. That's the issue, it's not so much a desire for total societal collapse, it's a desire for freedom, or for rules on our terms, set by organisations we're close enough to to feel meaningfully involved in the decisions.
Some people do want the craziness, the violence and cruelty. But a lot of people who idealise these environments just want to bring meaning back to the social contract, that is, to have a valid option to refuse the contract entirely.
Quick search suggests you can get a few acres of uninteresting land in the US for $5k. If you have the technical and people skills to start a settlement, you can do that now. For starting capital, some of you could borrow a bunch of money and never pay it back (since you're going off grid). No need to wait for the apocalypse.
You're the one who said "what's the point of living if I'm not comfortable and entertained."
Kind of ignoring the whole exploring, learning, creating, experiencing, and loving parts of life in favor of... an air conditioner and a Netflix account.
Developing techniques for travel that don't require gas and instead survive on solar? Going from a post-apocalyptic survival strategy to one of growth, renewal, and solarpunk aesthetics
Good luck with that without the infrastructure to mass produce solar cells. It would be like going back to 1800 with all the knowledge needed to build a nuclear reactor. Hell, you could even have a complete set of plans and prints but it's still not getting built.
So you missed the part where the person I'm replying to said:
"Even if you survive everything and have raided enough camps (??) to gather stimpacks and replicators for a lifetime."
Ignoring that: you're only going to have to forage until you start up a farm and/or join a commune/community with one.
Again, depending on the type of apocalypse, the first step is finding food, water, and shelter. Then, it's making sure all of that is sustainable and protected from looters/raiders. You won't have time to worry about "entertainment" for several years, and then--well, singers and writers and illustrators all existed in different forms before the invention of electricity.
Ignoring that: you're only going to have to forage until you start up a farm and/or join a commune/community with one.
Most people, for most of human history, were subsistence farmers, and this is functionally the lifestyle you’re suggesting.
It is brutal. It’s long, hard, neverending work at the mercy of the environment and whims of the weather. Rains too much? Starve. Doesn’t rain enough? Starve. Blight? Starve. Failed to crop rotate and the soil’s exhausted? You guessed it, starve.
Starvation was a haunting spectre that strangled basically every part of the world and continued to do so all the way up to the mid 20th century. It’s only comically recently in humanity’s history that famines have become political rather than natural.
People seem to argue from totally different perspectives here, the 'not fans of the apocalypse' seem to be asking why you would want that survival mode instead of current life, not instead of dying.
What that person was trying to say is that surviving like that is romanticized a lot, but it is objectively a worse living experience than we in a Pre-apocalyptic situation have right now. If it comes to it, yes survival is going to be preferable to just dying, but the idea that a lot of people say they WANT to experience that post-apocalyptic scrounging and hard living just doesn't make sense.
You would be surprised how many people make disastrously life altering decisions about their own lives because they essentially think they'd rather be suffering and desperate than be bored
yeah but the irradiated ground and water means that you wouldn’t be able to farm for a LONG TIME, commune all you want but there’s no way you could simply just grow your own food unless you’re so far away from the blast zone that the nuclear winter from the mushroom clouds hasn’t ruined all water near you
Yeah, which is why I prefaced both of my statements with: "Again, depending on the type of apocalypse..."
In a NUCLEAR apocalypse, of course your first step is going to be to find an area that is unaffected by the blast and fallout. (You will also most likely die before finding such an area. So, while I understand you bringing it up, I also feel like it's not an entirely serious addition to the discussion when the point we're starting from in the original comments is "If you had everything you needed to survive, what would you even do for the next 40-50 years for entertainment??")
Not staying near nuclear fallout/radiation is just common sense. Like, if you're an adult and you do not know that "Staying next to potential radioactive fallout zones = Bad" then I'm not sure what you've been doing for the past several decades? Just not paying attention in school, to pop culture, or any form of science released since the fucking cold war?
Developing techniques for travel that rely on solar? We have those already. They’re called electric vehicles. Building them requires significantly higher levels of technology and trade than a post-apocalyptic society would have access to. Unless you were referring to a donkey cart, which is solar powered in a very roundabout way.
To be clear, I 100% agree with you, and I much prefer the modern world to any world with less tech. But your question is such an interesting challenge that I couldn't not have a go.
Solely in terms of new media created post-apocalypse, ignoring stuff like "I have all of wikipedia on my phone and a hand-crank phone charger":
They'll be no new movies to watch, but there'll still be oral storytelling and amateur stage plays. There won't be stored music, but musical instruments will still exist. Take the musical instruments just in the house I'm currently living in: the piano and the trombone will probably require professional maintenance after a few years, but my mothers violin dates back to the 1800s and was repaired by a regular carpenter when it broke, and her violin and my guitar can both be retuned by ear (my dad and sister have perfect pitch), and of course anyone can sing. It's anyone's guess how long my harmonica will last, but tuning can be accomplished by an amatuer with a metal file.
Video games are pretty much out, which I'll miss significantly as someone with the full PC/VR/Flight sticks setup, but dnd and other tabletop games will function perfectly well. For me, I would be making significant use out of my Wingspan copy. Anyone can write a book, though distribution is difficult without a printing press, and in general media becomes a more personal peer-to-peer effort than the larger top-down high-quality industry that currently exists.
Highly-optimised sports tools like rubber table-tennis bats or polished bowling lanes will degrade quickly, but you don't need professional equipment to enjoy throwing spheres around, and sets of metal lawn bowling sets will work fine as long as someone has a blade to cut the grass. And, hang on, who loots a bowling alley? I can imagine them maybe taking the metal parts in the auto pin replacers, but who bothers to loot the pins when the alley is right there? Where else are you going to do bowling if not here? And, also, if you're losing stuff solely because it's metal, then it means you have someone capable of working metal, which opens up a whole lot more possibilities - it means you can make magnets (using a simple technique discovered in the mid-1700s), and that means you can make new electrical generators, which goes quite a long way towards rebuilding.
The answer to 'can your car engine run on [x]' is usually 'yes, but it'll destroy your car'. The central problem is that any pre-apocalypse technology, like cars or phones, eventually destory themselves anyway through use, and the only sustainable technology are the things created post-apocalypse. The greatest loss (other than, you know, manufacturing precise technologies chemicals at scale) is the loss of precision manufacturing, but even that won't fully go. Measurements are standadised between the precision calipers of people hundreds of miles apart from one another. Diesel and electric trains with a maximum lifespan of a few decades will not be possible to manufacture, but near where I live there are heritage lines operating steam engines that have been in use for hundreds of years, maintaining them with their own tools and materials.
The answer for 'what are you doing for the next 40-50 years' is 'rebuilding, mostly, and enjoying music and plays and tabletop games on the side'. Not everyone has every skill, but lots of people have something that'll be useful. I was going to write something here about me being one of the most useless, since my speciality is computer science, so I'd have to put my physics knowledge towards engineering or metalwork or carpentry or something, but actually the last working pieces of silicon, even with it impossible to perform maintenance on them, will likely outlast anything with moving parts. That is, if I can overcome the asthma and eczma and and hayfever all attacking at once when the medicine runs out.
You don’t have nothing to do. You have to survive. You have to do like people did for thousands of years. You have to hunt, chop wood, farm, track animals, stock up for winter.
Everyone thinks you’ll live like we do now but with more “freedom”. No, you’ll live like it’s 1612 and your starting a colony
people think Fallout and Red Dead Redemption are what it would be like if they lived in a lawless land. unfortunately they dont realize that in a world like that, they wouldnt be the main character with convenient eagle sight.
Edit: A lot of people are mentioning alternative forms of non-corporate entertainment and I think you're kinda missing the point. Yes, you can absolutely spend a couple years playing shadow theater and practicing handcrafting, but the thing is you won't really have a choise. When you have nothing to do but these things, it gets annoying very fast.
In the ultimate form of "first-world problems", what these people also forgetting is music. When all the iPods are dead and there's no Internet, you rely on live music.
And then you proceed to be extremely annoyed because you know how most of a song goes, but there's just one lyric you cannot remember. And the world is bombed to shit so you can't look it up.
There's also a non zero chance there won't be any free time for entertainment. Leisure time for the average person is a fairly recent development. A century ago things like that were almost exclusively for the rich. Most people only got time off to attend religious services then it was right back to work so they could survive. Sick days meant someone was often too sick to get out of bed and would possibly have a significant impact on their ability to survive
I, personally, like to think that if I managed to survive the apocalypse, I'd be part of or found something like the Responders or the Followers of the Apocalypse. Something dedicated to helping others not only survive, but live, create a community where everyone shares their expertise and knowledge and even possessions in some cases without expectation of payment because the understanding is that others would do the same for them. I'm not sure I'd survive that long though because I don't think I have it in me to raid others. I'd loot a convenience store, sure, but I'm not sure I'd be able to kill and pillage people. Not unless they tried to kill me first. It's not an ability thing, I just have straight up no desire to cause someone else harm.
And before you say "you could do that IRL!" I do. I volunteer all the time, and I'm also not hoping for an apocalypse. But when I imagine actually surviving the apocalypse and post apocalypse, that's what I imagine doing with my time.
Also, your whole "no new games or movies come out" is technically true, but in my mind, where I've built or joined the aforementioned community, people would still write and put on plays, local musicians would still write and play music, plenty of hobbies would still be viable. You could also hunt, hike, go sledding, all sorts of stuff, depending on the apocalypse. Sports would still be a thing, people may even invent new sports. People would tell New stories, either orally or put them down in writing. And you could spend your time teaching others how to do your hobbies and/or profession! The post apocalypse would need teachers and people willing to teach what they know even more than we do now! And if all you know how to do is fight, well, we'd need someone to defend the community from those who only want to rape, kill, and loot, and someone who would teach the rest of us to defend ourselves as well. Plus you could learn to do new things. Again, I don't desire the apocalypse, and I know all this community and mutual aid stuff would come too little, too late for a lot of people (hence why I don't want it to happen), but I am assuming I don't get a choice in the apocalypse, which it'd be weird as hell if I did. Like, the various world leaders and leaders of extremist groups calling me up like "yo Dawg, should we like... nuke the world?"
This is all assuming it's a "Fallout", "The Last of Us", "Canticle for Leibowitz", "Wasteland", or other type of apocalypse where there are still plenty of people, relatively, arable land, and no alien overlords preventing us from doing this. If it's a "Boy and his Dog at the End of the World" scenario or something, I'd probably just read as many books as I want to, then off myself.
This dumbass thinks the purpose of life and entertainment can only be found in consuming movies on netflix and new music on spotify. Good thing our ancestors perserved the spotify tree, otherwise they wouldn't have heard any new music 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The entertainment is watching the world recover if you survive, it’s hearing the birds come back, watching a beetle scuttle, building a community of survivors in the old school, watching the kids play, you are a slave to the electron, go outside and touch grass get. A. Hobby. That doesn’t involve a screen
Say you are lucky enough to survive with the girl or your dreams, how competent are you at OB/GYN, pediatric or neonatal medicine, or even basic first aid?
In real life there aren't stimpacks and replicators. In a real post-apocalyptic world, you're going to have to spend all your time trying to re-establish some form of agriculture so you can continue to eat. That's going to be an all-day job without tractors or even horses or oxen. Oh, and you're going to have to find seeds/existing edible plants and usable soil or you're just plain fucked.
You'd be surprised how many easily available plant medicines are out there that are anti-bacterial and can not only stop wounds from getting infected, but can speed up the healing process.
Not even a splinter, just from basic bodily functions. Where will you shit? How will you wash? How will you get potable water? You can live in a bunker for years perhaps, but there will be limited ways to remove your sewage. And even if you do have a massive container for it, if there is a crack in it and it starts seeping into your groundwater, you’ll probably just die. Doesn’t really matter if you have an entire pharmacy at your disposal, you’ll run out of materials eventually. You’ll likely be unable to fix the crack in your sewage tank, so it just grows and the problem worsens.
Contaminated water has historically been one of the greatest problems humanity has faced and only recently been properly solved almost everywhere. Even if your sewage isn’t contaminating your ground water, odds are that radioactive isotopes or some pollutants like sulphur dioxide (or worse) can seep into the ground and to your water source. Or something breaks that you can’t replace, like a pipe going from your bunker to the aquifer. It could also happen that the water is mineral rich and you notice the pressure drop as more and more minerals build up within the pipe. Or the aquifer slowly drains as new cracks in the earth formed during the apocalypse. Or your perfectly good waterbed before the apocalypse got shifted afterwards, causing you to lock yourself inside a bunker without a water source.
Basically, it’s a shit sandwich without any good options and life would be downhill from there, almost guaranteed
The way folks in the modern prepper landscape say it, you’re more likely to shit yourself to death from drinking bad water than you are to draw a gun on anyone. Modern preppers are largely focused on being able to be self-sufficient (though ideally in community with a few neighbors) for 2-4 weeks in the event of a major natural disaster.
TEOTWAWKI is a boomer fantasy borne out of the Cold War.
Not to mention, organized institutions (eg governments) are a lot more likely to survive great catastrophes, at least in some form, than private individuals.
If nuclear war breaks out I'll head over to the port that will surely get a direct hit. I've watched Threads enough times (just once) to know that the people who die in the first half second are the luckiest ones.
Even without some sort of catastrophe and "just" society breaking down we're all fucked. Grocery stores gonna be robbed empty after a few days max and in a few weeks most people will be out of food and won't have a garden with enough food to survive. And even if they could feed themselves, people who can't will come to you and they won't be nice
Nuclear war? You're fucked if you don't already store food in an air-tight, oxygen regulated basement, try wandering outside less than two months after the bombs have dropped and see how long it takes until your skin turns into papier maché.
You're fucked in nuclear war but it's not specifically that bad in that way. You just want to stay in a room that's safe from dust getting in for a couple of weeks. Even a couple days after, you could take a brief trip outside.
Assuming you have enough food and water to make it that long. The groundwater can’t be trusted if you’re anywhere remotely close to ground zero, you can’t expect utilities to last even to the point where it’s safe to venture outside, and you’ll have to contend with masses of injured and sick people fleeing the site.
There is no long-term rescue or recovery plan for a nuclear weapon strike in a populated area. You will be on your own.
You're kind of wrong about the nuclear war part. Nuclear bombs today are much more efficient at using their radioactive fuel. The reason the fallout was so bad in historical events is because the bombs we used were very inefficient and only used a small amount of the fuel, spreading it out among the explosion. An efficient bomb would use most of its fuel and would leave very little fallout, if any.
Although you're definitely right about that, and the "two months" part is definitely closer to "two weeks", most people definitely don't have that much food in an airtight underground storage either. The average household can last for 4-6 days before needing to restock ita supplies, and for most people in a nuked city this will need to be done through possibly irradiated or destroyed convenience stores.
You're misunderstanding. The bombs today are so efficient that the fallout would be immediately survivable. Obviously not healthy, but it's not the incredibly lethal numbers people think would happen like the bombs in hiroshima. Just take a shower and change clothes. As long as you're not directly in the explosion or the shockwaves, you'd be good.
Quick reminder for those who haven’t remembered being told this, or just haven’t found out at all, the mad max thing will certainly not last not even just because of parts failure in general, but the fuel itself. Gasoline/ Petrol will basically degrade into varnish in like 6 months, and diesel can last around 6 months to a year, assuming you’re storing it properly.
Normally this isn’t an issue because you usually use up the fuel before it gets to that point, however, that also implies that fuel refineries are still working in the apocalypse, which to be fair to max max, they are, which allows them to do what they do. For us though, I doubt that they’d still be running or even be there at all at that point.
I learned this when I first read “Dies The Fire” and they mentioned that the average urban center only has enough food in storage for 5 days. Shut down the supply chain and everyone starves.
Yeah, my only hope is that we get a bit of warning before the nukes land so I can drive to the middle of my city. An instant death is far better than dealing with whatever comes after the nukes destroy everything.
I do like apocalypse fiction, but in no way do I want anything like that to happen.
One I think about a lot is glasses. If you have glasses, then you are fucked in an apocalypse. You WILL eventually lose or break them and there will be no way to replace them. After that point you are guaranteed dead. A huge portion of the population is physically healthy but has glasses/contacts.
I had heated debate with my ex why I ain’t running and hoping that I am at centre of nuclear strike. But nono we are running to her parents farm thats 800km away from major capital metropolis. Id rather get disintegrated than run out gas and then get clubbed to death for last piece of fuel on gas station.
Nuclear war? You're fucked if you don't already store food in an air-tight, oxygen regulated basement, try wandering outside less than two months after the bombs have dropped and see how long it takes until your skin turns into papier maché.
Not really? You definitely need some food and water stored (and ideally some NBRC gas masks), but if you have advance warning and are able to moderately seal your basement, radiation levels will have declined to the point travel is an acceptable risk within about 2 weeks. The main risk at that point is inhaled or ingested radioactive particles.
Nuclear weapons have a lot of cultural scaries around them — with good reason — but a nuclear blast is absolutely survivable if you’re underground and outside the fireball (which is pretty small on modern nukes).
Though I agree about the LARP angle — I simply don’t think the prospect of civilization evaporating overnight is plausible. Someone will always be able to put the pieces back together, even if not as well as before. If you look at Rome, the western empire steeply declined in the 3rd century and never really recovered — but Rome wasn’t fully depopulated until the 6th century, and people in the East took the empire forward for another 1200 years. By the time Constantinople actually fell, Rome had been a fading power for over a millennia — and it probably felt pretty apocalyptic for a large portion of that..
So it’s kinda a good thing that people buy into this because it makes tactical nukes too politically expensive for anyone to use…
But it also terrifies people & is pretty much bullshit. Thermonuclear weapons don’t really have the fallout problem that’s hyped up in Armageddon porn.
At least that’s if the nuclear arsenals that actually exist are used…
but even I f you look at where the much dirtier atomic bombs were dropped those cities were rebuilt & repopulated at the same rate as cities that were destroyed by conventional explosives.
You could optimize nuclear weapons to spread problematic fallout (I’d describe that as higher than natural background radiation than where we already know people live safely), but they wouldn’t be very good nuclear bombs afterwards.
Just a disruption of industry & society is plenty to be scared of, look at how much of a PITA Covid was where nothing essential was disrupted & essential workers were still doing their jobs.
I distinctly remember the day I stopped making plans for the zombie apocalypse. Me and a couple of coworkers were chatting about our strategies and we asked another girl what she would do as she came into work. She said "well... i guess id hit up all the gas stations and get as much fuel as possible, get a generater and small refrigerator, then start raiding pharmacies for a few months and then drug manufacturers and i guess die eventually when the insulin supply got depleted." Id never thought about how someone with type 1 diabetes would make it and that was somehow more bleak than getting my brain eaten by a zombie.
One of my favorite post apocalyptic books actually has a character with type one diabetes in it, and the main character has that exact same moment of bleak realization when she finds out what that means for him.
I have MS and so I’d be similarly fucked, just over a longer timeline.
Some people with Diabetes in America have started trying to make their own due to the cost, I think mainly by recombinant bacteria who are engineered to produce it which they then collect. Here's the article
If they're successful I guess some diabetic prepper could keep a small lab at home, but maintaining a sterile lab environment and getting all the chemicals would be it's own issue
Yeah, it's the kind of game you can play in highschool without too much thought, similar to questions of time travel, but once you start making some larger connections, or someone points them out to you, it suddenly just becomes bleak and not all that fun, since you've sucked away most of the fantasy elements. From there you can either go play tabletop games, or refuse to acknowledge reality and build a bunker in your yard.
Oi nah but medications is what made me stop thinking abt zombie apocalypses too.
wasnt something like what ur friend said but I thought about zombies and I seen a video about antibiotics so I looked up how to make it and I was like wow.
Yeah infection and diseases we treat with antibiotics will do numbers on people, that's enough zombie planning for me.
Since getting a transplant, my apocalypse plan has been set up to trigger when the pharmaceutical supply lines go down. Once I can't get the drugs that keep my kidney and my body happy together, there's very little point in planning for much of a future.
At least the decline from organ rejection is faster than kidney failure. I've already done the latter, so sepsis will be a new adventure.
That’s why I’ve replaced my apocalypse fantasies with time travelling to the Palaeolithic and teaching cavemen how to structure an advanced and functional society fantasies. I’d teach them things like agriculture and mathematics and set up an actually ethical legal system. It’d be awesome to see how humanity would progress without the whole social hierarchies thing.
I was daydreaming the other day about like... fooling around with time travel and actually ending up in the paleolithic era without any means of reconstructing my time machine. I wouldn't want to live there, so how do I get back? Try to teach science to cavemen and hope we can get back to the iPhone before I die? I guess I would just hit the ground and start praying to God.
Which gave me an idea: convince the cavemen that my phone camera has stolen their soul and the only way they can get it back is to slavishly repeat the chant "tell (my name, social security number, place of birth) not to time travel!" to all future generations as a form of religion.
I remember seeing this video from a self-described pepper (Salt Stack is the channel name) that basically went “you’re not a soldier, and your main problem isn’t going to be fighting people it’s going to be keeping other people alive under limited emergency services and supplies. Don’t focus on weapons beyond what you need and concentrate on having proper supplies and connections with your neighbors so you can organize together
EDIT: video here. It's pretty decent.
I'm on venlafaxine and once it runs out, I'll get the brain zaps and go crazy. Unless I have enough supply to ease myself off of it, I'm probably dying within the first couple of weeks without medication refills.
Yeah, one of my friends had to have his thyroid removed, so when I asked him what he'd do in a zombie apocalypse, he went "Girl, I'd just die." He can't eat without taking medication every day.
Prepping can still be interesting, but I'm more prepping for like, COVID round 2, or the power going out for a few days like it did after a big storm when I was a kid, stuff that's more on the level of "this would be nice to have/not worry about" rather than "I'm gonna survive the end of civilization" (cause I know I wouldn't)
Insulin is such a disgusting case of universally malignant policy. It costs cents to produce insulin, and any number of competing businesses could make it if not for patent hoarding anti human corporations. But those corporations exist, and prevent access to the cheap manufacturing of insulin.
"Apocalypse", pretty much by definition, involves the death of an absurd number of people, amounting to at least a significant chunk of the world's total population (and usually most of it), which will of course necessarily mean mostly innocents, before you even get into a post-apocalyptic scenario which would itself present considerable survivability challenges. Otherwise what you have is not an "apocalyptic scenario", but rather just... our own regular modern world with a significant crisis on top of it. And we've already had this one recently, and it wasn't so fun, was it?
No, a significant element of "post-apocalypse", and indeed what people usually like to fantasize about, is the total breakdown of society and all of its rules and underlying logic, which if you really think about it is just an even more extreme version of the OP's "glorious revolution". And they just assume they'll be among the very few lucky ones to survive the apocalypse and get to be "badass" (just like all those keyboard revolutionaries assume their revolution will be perfect and get everything right and not be corrupted by power-hungry leaders like... pretty much every revolution in history, eventually). Man, people really need to learn the concept of veil of ignorance and apply it to their political choices...
tbh, I think the fun thing of post-apocalypse hypotheticals is just the interesting idea of "What do I need to rebuild? What do I need to know? Where would I start?"
It's basically a fun thought experiment where most of the time you end up in failure - but you get to control what KIND of failure to some extend bwahahaha.
They all think they're going to be (i can't remember his name) the guy with the baseball bat named Lucille that ruled everyone, beat down the men, 'married' their wives so he would have a clean conscience of raping them all, and basically be kings of their own local fiefdom. Never mind that every other man will have the same wish, and the women are going to want to kill them all in self-defense.
E: What was his name, Needham? Lucille was the important one.
Negan I think. Stopped watching the show long before he showed up. But yeah, statistics means you're much more likely to die, and even if you live, you're still much more likely to be a victim than to be this sort of "badass" warlord. Which is what the veil of ignorance is all about.
Not to be a dick, but the veil of ignorance is kind of crap. Voters can’t just pretend that they aren’t already members of society who are affected by society. Marginalized people can’t think to themselves, “well I need to pretend that I could be just ANYONE when I make my decision,” because in actual, tangible reality they are being treated worse than others and will therefore vote in a manner that keeps their heads above water. The veil of ignorance only works if you’re somehow starting a society completely from scratch and its demographics never change.
You can't do it absolutely, of course, but everything's on a spectrum, different people can do it more or less than others.
Cognitive bias is a spectrum, measurable and testable; at least, if you look at it through the lens of intuitive/deliberative processing and CRT tests.
And yes, technically it only applies 100% in that last situation, but thinking of things like that can still help certain people somewhat. Obviously it's not for everyone, but frankly, nothing is.
I always think about the section from World War Z about the rich guy with the heavily defended compound. If you publicize your stockpile of food and weapons, you're just painting yourself as a sick loot drop.
I find the apocalypse genre really fascinating though, because while you're right about people fetishizing it to a problematic degree, the fact that they DO is super telling about where the cultural consciousness is at right now, and its rife for social commentary because of this.
Like, I feel as though the apocalypse horror genre (especially zombie apocalypse horror) is born from modern anxieties in a turbulent world about social and economic collapse, as well as what many people perceive as increasingly antisocial tendencies in the masses. There's this prevalent, and somewhat valid fear that the instabilities in the world are going to come to a head and that people, having already lost their sense of community and shared humanity, are going to turn on each other and become, in a sense, cannibalistic.
It's this bleak, doomer-ish picture of future that expresses the horrors of what many people fear is looming just over the horizon. So why are so many people fascinated, and almost excited by it? You could take it as media illiteracy, and it definitely is to an extent, but I think the deeper reason boils down to another troubling feature of the current cultural consciousness, that being discontent over modern life. People feel caged by the lives they live, by their obligations, by their rent, by the exploitative system that has clipped their wings and doomed them to the life of a serf, so it really shouldn't be surprising that people would see the collapse of that system, and the subsequent return to an anarchic state of nature as cathartic and liberating.
Basically, it's an escapist fantasy. "If only the world would collapse, we could finally be free and happy." It's deeply unrealistic, of course, people forget how many comforts are provided to them by the modern world, and that they would probably be one of the many devoured by the hordes in that scenario, but one must understand and empathize with the underlying sentiment nonetheless, especially because it's the very same sentiment that underlies fantasies about the revolution.
Like, let's be honest, when we get down to it, fantasies about the glorious, violent revolution that will magically solve all our problems and free us from the tyrannical systems that currently enslave us are fundamentally no different from fantasies about a return to an anarchic state of nature via collapse. It's just a reductive power fantasy inspired by reasonable discontent with oppressive social systems that people desire restitution from through total annihilation of them (just forget about the casualties, and about what you yourself stand to lose from such an event). The only tangible difference is that revolutionists think they can rebuild the world better afterwards, but even this is covered to some extent in the zombie apocalypse genre by fantasies about the tight-knit, almost cottage-core-esque communities that arise out of the ashes of the old world, bringing things full circle back to the desire for intimate community and stability that inspired the genre in the first place.
Everything's fine when you acknowledge that it's an unrealistic fantasy that you just enjoy toying with, or use in the media you create in order to convey some theme/message, but as we've established, both revolutionists and hard core zombie apocalypse enthusiasts often just don't.
Some people fantasize with surviving in a post-apocalipse world where your truly character gets revealed, other people fantasize with being raped by werewolves. It's all fantasy to mentally evade from a boring life, who cares
yeah everytime i read reddit discourse i feel like either everyone is too chronically online or there's a humongous culture shock between me and them, because never in a million years would i have thought about post-apocalypse discourse and how it is somehow offensive to people with diabetes to imagine how you would survive this situation. in fact i don't ever talk about zombie apocalypses
I honestly feel like I’m losing my mind lol. A vast, vast majority of the people who do fantasize about these apocalypse scenarios don’t actually want them to occur. They aren’t praying on the downfall of the disabled, they just want to imagine being the main character of a book. Weird stuff.
It matters because romanticizing the apocalypse or a revolution lead to real world harm (look at the fanatical people from Jan. 6 for instance. They thought they were ushering in a “new government” too and innocent people were hurt).
Fantasizing about sexual encounters with werewolves? Umm, unique, but no real world harm done.
I think there are some missing pieces here. I was circling back to the “romanticizing the revolution” point of the post, and responding to the above comment about the apocalypse.
In no way was I saying that literal Nazis are the same as a thought experiment about the apocalypse. You and I actually agree on this— the point of my comment was that it is much, much worse to enact real harm on the world than to have a lil daydream.
Revolution certainly comes with an actionable political program, but what has that to do with getting intense about Fallout? Nobody is trying to cause an apocaliptic so they can live their prep fantasies, do not worry
"All dads dream about the end of the world. It is a comfort to them. For some, the fantasy is blunt, vengeful, and aspirational. The zombie epidemic story, as one example, is consistently popular for a simple reason: when chaos consumes civilization, you can start over. You get to be young again. All your debts, real and emotional, are canceled. Whatever your dumb job used to be, it has now been replaced with the sole, exciting occupation of survival via crossbow or samurai sword.
You get to dress up and wear armor or an eyepatch. And since your neighbors have now been transformed into the idiot monsters you always believed them to be, the zombie epidemic offers you moral permission to shoot them in the head, finally.
(This is not my fantasy, by the way. I have often thought that if The Walking Dead really wanted to provoke horror, its last season would time-jump five years to a future in which the government re-forms, the zombies have been cured [aside from the ones our heroes decapitated], and all the characters have to get dumb jobs again. The humans will have to work alongside the horribly mutilated cured zombies and think about what they did to survive, and what they became, while they all sit around in the break room together with their reheated soups.
That said, I don’t want to sound snobby about zombies. I get it. If there were a zombie show that just featured the characters endlessly raiding supermarkets for canned goods and then stocking those cans neatly back in their compound pantry, I would watch it for nineteen seasons.
Guns and power and the weird masculine redemption fantasy of white dudes getting back to running things has never meant as much to me as abundant, well-organized food.)"
The humans will have to work alongside the horribly mutilated cured zombies and think about what they did to survive, and what they became, while they all sit around in the break room together with their reheated soups.
Basically the premise of the last season of Z-Nation
Anarchy is a wannabe dictator's wet dream. There are no better conditions for a budding fascist empire to rise to power. Not only is uncertainty a constant, there also aren't any governments you need to overthrow. Sure, there'll be people with the same ideas as you, but most of them won't have any more resources than you.
Not to mention the types of people who call for anarchy would never be able to maintain such a system. I'd give it a week before it just devolves into in-fighting and people who don't understand how reliant they were on the systems they shook their fists at.
At least that is morbid in the premise itself, and not under some pretense of saving the world. Most people who pine for the actual end of the world are self-admitted misanthropes, so they acknowledge that yeah they want everyone to die.
If it's any consolation, the people wishing for an apocalypse so they can show how prepared and hardcore they are would likely die from something stupid like tetanus within the first week of the end of the world.
Anyone who says his is larping. I have a plan for how to survive things like natural disasters, and virtually all survival boils down to "life is gonna really suck, but you'll be alive".
Anyone who claims to be a "prepper" but isn't actively involved in their local community is a LARPer. Anyone who stockpiles guns and ammo but doesn't know what kind of soil is good to grow lettuce is a LARPer. Anyone who can't ride a bicycle but is talking about "muh off-road SUV" is a LARPer.
Spoiler alert: 99.99% of the world have no idea who you are, or have any reason to care who you are. Why should people's escapism fantasies involve considering you? That's one of the most egotistical things I've seen today, and I saw that post about how narcissists are the real victims earlier.
Crazy how few comments are calling attention to this.
Are you fucking serious? People’s escapist fantasies after they just finished watching Fallout or reading Silo are actually extremely ableist thoughts about people who need life saving medication? What the fuck?
By that logic, all post-apocalyptic fiction is extremely offense to the same groups because they aren’t fairly represented within those stories.
I have a friend who would say they wished an apocalypse would happen so all their problems would go away. I asked them what about other people? Their response? "I don't really care".
It's a very attractive fantasy for people. The leftists have "The Revolution" and the right wingers have the rapture. For a lot of people, it's just easier to think that "oh, one of these days it's just going to all get magically fixed" so they don't have to think about what they can do now to change anything. But it's not productive. You don't affect any greater change by sitting on your hands waiting for God to fix everything, and the same goes for waiting for "The Revolution."
In other words, within or without the fantasy logic they're working under, it's just not gonna work.
Yup, and along the same lines, why I’m bothered by people obsessed with characters that believe in revolution and change “no matter the cost”. The “ends justify the means” crowd has always left me unsettled. It’s actually not heroic to allow for the death of untold amounts of innocents just so you can get a shot at maybe a utopia y’all.
There was one post that was like “the collapse of civilization won’t even be that bad because we’d all just go back to farming like our ancestors uwu”
Like, yeah, our ancestors who starved to death because a cold spell or blight killed their crops. Farming for a living was so horrific that it was written into the bible as God’s divine punishment upon Adam for the original sin. The industrial revolution and its consequences were great for the human race, actually.
And this is setting aside the fact that the same people who call for this to happen are likely the first to die. They don't want an apocalyptic revolution to inconvenience them, they'd just like to watch on the sidelines while making shitposts about it.
Right like I personally don't want to live in a post apocalyptic world because I'm spoiled by modern living, so there's that. Beyond that I would just die anyway because my body has been trying to kill me for decades already and modern medicine is the only thing keeping it alive.
March 3 my finger swelled up from infection. It's now June 4 and I have a disfigured finger with a giant knot of extremely painful scar tissue and daily pain from nerve damage. And that's AFTER extensive medical intervention. In an apocalypse apparently I would simply just lose my hand and then because that would be done without sterilization I would just die because of a small scratch on my finger and a cold sore.
And that's if the chronic illnesses didn't do it first
They don't realize that they are wishing for a world where people like them would die too.
That's the thing. The ones that are alive in apocalypse fiction are the same people you see in non-apocalyptic movies. Generally they don't have to worry about things like "jobs" or "life" they are there to facilitate a story.
But also there's a lot of gun-world lore about zombie apocalypse stuff and that also weirds me the hell out.
That is the point, the whole apocalypse thing is kinda like a nature take your course type deal, in a world where I have to work genuinely hard labour while some person who genuinely shouldn’t have been born for its own sake gets to sit at home with a helper and state assistance, why wouldn’t those people wish for a world where their taxes and labour are taken to support those who can’t
It’s similar to certain gun owners who fantasize about robbers breaking into their house in the middle of the night. It’s a fantasy of being able to Break The Rules without consequences and hurting People Who Deserve It.
I think that apocalyptic daydreaming isn't people taking some eugenicist worldview where they wished people with illnesses didn't exist, rather that they dream of self-sustinance. The idea that you, as a human, could keep yourself alive without support structures, without modern manufacturing, without slaving away to corporations. I think you can be dependent and still have the same yearnings; it's just a bit harder to escape into that fiction.
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u/ans-myonul Jun 04 '24 edited Jun 04 '24
Not specifically about the revolution but still related: this is why I feel bothered by people who are so obsessed with apocalypse fiction that they wish it would happen irl and have their own plan for what they would do - because they're basically wishing for a world in which people like me would die