In the popular movie Cast Away, there is a scene where the Tom Hanks character is trying to catch fish with a net. The next scene is a few years later, when a fish is impaled underwater by a spear. Then, finally, the camera pans out to him, standing on a small rock on the ocean shoreline about 50 feet (ca. 15 m) away. Those two back-to-back scenes tell us all we need to know about the will to survive. If we want to live badly enough, we will. The critical thing we have to understand is that this requires a multitude of patience. In a world where survival is now a daily chore, learning how to do it in every way imaginable will take time. Generations, perhaps.
Learning To Live
The first thing we should do to prepare for survival mode is stockpile books from medicinal plants to the art of bartering and civility to soil composition and how it relates to specific crops. The next phase in preparedness would be to live as much as possible off the grid. We don’t want to deal with too much culture shock when we have to go into survival mode. Being close to off the grid while studying basic survival techniques is an excellent way to live one life in two ways: a reduced carbon footprint and educating oneself on how to live without luxuries.
There is also the fact that the longer one lives like this, the more one realizes that modern society with all its trappings is unnecessary. This realization will fade away when the day comes that we have to do more than exist, make money, and play. It will disappear when we have to survive. All the old ways of living and thinking will be a thing of the past. From day one, it will have to be. So, the key to this is to occupy the mind and actions with productivity. Activities that have immediate and needed results are needed.
Learning To Survive
The comic Louis CK once pointed out that everything we need to survive is beneath our feet—namely, the ground and plants. The land can feed us, and certain plants have medicinal qualities – Aloe Vera for burns, Valerian for anxiety, Giant Hysopp for throat ailments, and many more. But just as plants heal, they can also kill, so knowing the difference is helpful twice over. The more we learn about this, our preparedness level increases. Additionally, we will be in the right frame of mind should catastrophe hit.
Without the luxuries of gas and electricity, one must learn the art of cooking over a fire. Now, picture people sitting around a campfire cooking smores, then imagine people cooking a fatted calf on a spit over a pitted fire. Or a family of three cooking rabbit stew. There is a lot to learn here, so Native Americans’ and other indigenous peoples’ feeding methods are a valuable tool. But we can learn from any society that lived or lives without our contemporary conveniences.
Another valuable lesson to learn is the thoughts and practices of those people regarding how much food they can gather or kill in a year versus how many people are in their tribe or community. If a society wants to maintain what they have with no loss or gain of people, implementing some form of population control will have to be implemented before it has to. Being proactive will make this facet of societal life easier to stomach as time passes. The passing of time will show it for what it is: Living in tandem with the earth’s natural cycle.
Maintaining A Balance with Nature
While this way of life matures over the generations, teaching civility is paramount. People can believe what they want to and live how they want to live, but being civil and understanding each other is the master key to survival. It will override any other aspect of society. Without running the risk of getting too preachy, we need this for generations through infinity to survive. Relearning civility may be the biggest obstacle in reforming society. If pushed into that corner, we can kill another animal to eat—the instinct to survive kicks in. There is no human instinct to be civil to one another, That is a learned behavior, and it is a behavior that needs to be understood.
The Importance of Civility
One act of civility is learning the fine art of bartering. We can start by not assigning a value to anything other than its immediate need. How soon would you die without a particular something? If Suzie has a pound of medicinal plants she doesn’t need, and someone else has a month’s worth of foodstuff that she does need, that could be a fair trade. The value of these products is placed on their need rather than their want. How we treat each other, as most of us at the Prepared Bee believe, should remain civil to stay in a productive frame of mind.
Not to make this societal method come across as rigid, unloving, or even ironic, but we should not assign the finer points of life, like art, general entertainment, and love, a higher priority than bare civility. Having lived like this for so long until these priorities are seemingly in our DNA is the only time the former should be prioritized over the latter. If this notion sounds many worlds away, take comfort in knowing that your gut instinct is correct.
That said, there is nothing wrong with homesteading with a worst-case scenario behind the wheel. The key is to avoid driving so far that we get lost and lose sight that we are homesteaders in modern society. Some people have lived off the grid since the 60s, and that’s the only way they can live. They’ve been on that road so long; it’s the only road they know. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Not when you consider that they would be the best prepared of us all should things go south.
