From the OP:
My range of post-apocalyptic skills range from 0 (hunting, combat, navigation, general survival skills) to 3 (fairly handy with tools/electrical/carpentry/plumbing) to 5 (medical support, quick with a pun).
Therefore…I dunno.
mmm
Yes, that is the question. Am I surviving on my own or are the rest of the people in the community still there too? If all of the people are still there too, the deer, elk, salmon in the streams will be gone in short order, a couple of weeks. There is no one more motivated than a parent with hungry children. Weapons or none, you are going to help.
So the real question is not “are you going to survive?” but is your community going to. Which leads the scenario right back into war time.
I picked 5, but not because I’m a “prepper” or “survivalist”. Most of those folks are solid 1s, and the assets they hoard are irrelevant to actual survival ability.
For me, yes, I do have some skillz of my own… but more importantly, I have a very large extended family, most of whom would converge on the same place in the event of an apocalyptic disaster. Specifically, the home of one particular relative, who personally has most of the skills needed. And between all of us, we very well cover all of the skills.
Yeah, location isn’t literally everything, but the mouth of the Columbia is pretty near the optimal location for human survival. Well, depending on the nature of the disaster: If, say, it’s a nuclear war, then most populated places in the Northern Hemisphere, or anywhere too close to one, will be in the dead-instantly category.
I’m pretty much with LSL. I fear my fellow survivors would be more dangerous than the initial apocalypse.
I’m confident that I could EVENTUALLY obtain the supplies I’d need to survive, but I sure don’t have them on hand. Notably, I have no guns. So, not only would I not be able to hunt for protein, but I would not be able to defend myself and my stuff.
Even though I COULD garden pretty well over time, that sure can’t be ramped up immediately - especially in a midwestern winter. So, at the very least, there would be a rush on canned goods in local stores/warehouses.
Lack of potable water would likely be a challenge. As well as access to firewood, propane, or other fuel. And pretty soon, transportation would be drastically curtailed as gas on hand goes bad.
The lack of electricity for mass communication would drastically curtail any chances of cooperation.
In short, I’d expect to fare far better as a sole survivor against hordes of zombies, than against my fellow man.
I voted 3, assuming a Lucifer’s Hammer type scenario where large swaths of civilization are wiped out and the survivors cluster for mutual survival. In anything above the most basic hunter-gatherer society I have enough engineering/handyman/MacGiver-ish skills to be worth more to a group than the resources I consume.
I voted 1. Based on my reading of the poll, there is a massive chasm between 1 and 2. Rating 2-4 are nigh on indistinguishable. Most people who would put themselves in 5 are wrong.
Based on my skills, I might almost be a 2 or perhaps a 3. I know we are supposed to disregard health but I don’t have that luxury. I’d be dead in weeks at best.
Real world - this is the answer. The people who will survive the best will be the people who can work together the best. The “survivalist/preppers” are going to fail far harder than they expect. Sure, they have a plan to smoke some meat to survive the winter but every time they catch a deer, they need to fire up the smoker to preserve it and they miss the next deer. The community that survives the best will be the village with a great hunter who can catch a deer every few days to share with the community and no needless effort lost in preserving it. The community needs a great farmer who can rely on neighbors to till, sow, weed, and harvest when that needs to be done. And some craftspeople to make tools and repair structures. And other craftspeople to make rope. And a teacher to pass on skills. A doctor. An explorer who can travel to trade for salt and anything else that isn’t available locally. Unskilled labor to collect or pump water. Watchmen to provide security. And entertainers to make like worth living. And people who are willing to do all the other things that helps a society thrive. I don’t think there are many people on Earth who could survive in a unit less than a small village. The bigger the village, the better we could thrive.
If I could disregard health and if I had four or five hours of advance notice, I could get to a friend, bringing enough supplies and abilities that together, we could accomplish a lot. He’d want me around, and I’d want him around. And with those few hours, I know the other people we’d invite to join our community. And we’d have a real chance because we all know we can work together under pressure, come to agreement on common goals, and bust our asses to make it happen. That’s what survival takes. And yeah, between us, we have plenty of guns, ammo, and shooting skill, so we’d be a threat to the roving bands of our fevered imaginations.
Yea, sadly, people who need regular medication or medical procedures would not do well in a post-apocalypse.
The show ‘The Last Man on Earth’ had an episode in which a multi-episode arc character who had shown up among the small group of virus survivors needed an emergency appendectomy. They tried to operate on him using hospital equipment and going by a medical journal, but he died. And that was a comedy, albeit a very dark comedy given the premise.
Funny you mention that. In the post-apocalyptic literary novel Station Eleven, the main protagonist is a member of a traveling theater troupe. They even have a band. Their situation is still very dangerous but I liked that this vision of the future, even a bleak future, included the arts, and people who had found community within their passion.
Excellent novel and the HBO Max series is also fantastic.
Yes, thank you! I’m glad somebody shares my somewhat optimistic view of the post-apocalypse. This is why I think many of us older Dopers (myself included) may fare better than we think— we may not be as strong or as limber as we used to be, but we have a wealth of skills and life experience. My father didn’t get around so well in the last 10 or so years of his life, but he had a vast, encyclopedic knowledge of all things electrical, carpentry and plumbing-related. He wouldn’t have been hunting down deer or cutting down trees for log cabins if he made it to the post apocalypse, but his knowledge would have been invaluable.
Yes, we’ll definitely need humorists in the post-apocalypse.
…which is why you will be banished to the outer wastelands, you horrible punster!
Haha, jk, I love a good bad pun, and I always enjoy your contributions to “More Jokes” 
I’m fairly resourceful; live on a farm; have hand tools and some seed; have a fair amount of food in the house; have a wood stove and a woodlot; have a hand pump on the old well; have lots of potentially useful books in the house; and am surrounded mostly by Old Order Mennonites.
I’m also 74 with diabetes and a heart condition. Didn’t vote.
I didn’t read the novel, but I watched the HBO Max series. Yes, I liked how the show not only depicted basic survival, with the troupe traveling through areas that could get you robbed or killed, but also preservation of culture through the presentation of Shakespeare’s plays.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
– The Tempest - Act 4, Scene 1
I’d be dead in a few weeks at most. So would almost everyone else, in urbanized countries at least.
I suspect that most people have no realistic idea of what a total apocalypse would be like, and/or have been reading too much optimistic science fiction.
Even for those few of us who’re sufficiently rural and agricultural (two different, but sorta-correlated things), the typical age of Dopers sure lowers our score.
If we were all magically 30 again, with the (lack of) health issues most of us had then, our collective score might well be 1+ notches higher.
I’m old, very alone in the world and TBH kind of losing it, but I never needed much in life . I can make a meal out of nothing. I can shop like a ‘MissThrifty of the Depression’ for anything. Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. But I am certain I’d perish in the first wave, hopefully quickly and painlessly.
As long as I’m near the ocean, I won’t starve. I’m not squeamish about eating anything. I probably won’t freeze to death either. But I have no combat skills and fixing things without YouTube and a hardware store is mostly beyond me.
I think we all need to order this book:
Interesting though it might be, I can’t see it being much practical use in a total breakdown situation.
Knowing about something is not the same thing as being able to do it. I have a good broad knowledge of science and technology, but I have no illusions that I would be able to start or rekindle an industrial civilzation single-handedly. It needs a certain minimum spread of multiple skills and experience to keep an industrial society running.
Survivalists and preppers just don’t seem to get this.
And of course all of that ignores the question of living through the first months. Supply chains in modern cities are built on just-in-time models. Food would run out in days. The scenario involving roving, looting, (and possibly cannibal) gangs is depressingly plausible.
As someone who has dabbled in camping and survival skills, I can guarantee that if you’ve never actually done something before, you only think you know how. Starting a fire with a bow drill for example.
Jeez, the rampant pessimism of many of you! Let me clarify again that, despite the fact that I mentioned the possibility of WWIII and zombies in the OP, which I probably shouldn’t have, the OP was based on the other thread about the internet going down long-term. The apocalyptic scenario I specified was more of a ‘soft apocalypse’; in which our internet / power grid goes down indefinitely, but we are otherwise healthy, sheltered and unharmed afterward-- not a ‘radioactive, rubble-strewn hellscape’ type apocalypse.
In that scenario I think there would be more cooperation to rebuild society than competition for our very survival. And I think that, despite many of us being older and not as physically fit as we used to be, we would have valuable skills and life experience to offer. It’s true that, for those of us who rely on modern medical procedures and / or medications, say insulin for example, things would get dire pretty quickly.
First of all, Bic lighters wouldn’t all magically disappear. I must have half a dozen around the house I use for lighting the grill. Second, there’s lots of ways other than the bow drill method to start a fire if you don’t have a match or lighter. Is the Sun shining? Use the old magnifying glass trick (also, I hear if you polish the concave bottom of a can of soda pop with a piece of foil it works the same way to focus the Sun’s rays, though I’ve never tried that). Got a 9 volt battery and a bit of steel wool? Press battery terminals to steel wool-- instant fire. Be sure to have plenty of dry kindling on hand. If it was raining and you are outside, pull off a piece of tree bark and use the dry fibers underneath for kindling.