I think a lot of people would be dead regardless if they panic. They would just die more quietly.
I guess the question is would you actually want to survive?
Like that movie The Road where Charlize Theron’s character is like “fuck this” and just walks off into the woods to die. Because what’s the alternative? Walk the Earth trying to avoid even worse forms of death? And to what end? Two dudes ain’t gonna rebuild civilization.
I suppose it depends on the situation and whether it’s reasonable to lay low and survive until most of the losers die off or kill each other. Once things stabilize maybe you can join some group of survivors in a farming community or something.
But I don’t really see the point of wandering some blasted landscape trying to eke out a living scrounging through garbage.
Just so we’re drawing a fair comparison here, the apocalypse scenario in ‘The Road’, while never specified in the novel, involved some catastrophic event that caused a seemingly permanent ‘nuclear winter’ style lack of sunlight that 10 years on, had killed all vegetation and pretty much all life forms on Earth except for a handful of people and the occasional skeletal feral dog. The most likely speculation I’ve read for what it might have been was an asteroid strike. Yeah, in that scenario I’d probably say ‘fuck this’ as well.
The apocalypse scenario I stated for the purpose of this thread is the power grid going down. Yes, it would collapse the global supply chain and cause great hardship and pain. Many would die, especially those who are dependent on modern medicine for day to day living. But it’s an eminently more survivable and rebuildable scenario than that of ‘The Road’.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I started the book. Skipped ahead a few chapters… yup, more of the same. A few more chapters…. nothing new. Then to the end.. still the same.
At which point I metaphorically threw the book against the wall (not literally since it was a library book). No interest in wasting my time reading a whole book in which for practical purposes, nothing happens…
It didn’t get better. I hated that book so much that when it got to the part with the roasted baby, I laughed. There’s dark, and then there’s stupid dark.
I was a pretty big fan of Cormac McCarthy since 1990-something when I found All the Pretty Horses on a stack of novels an ex-employee left on her desk. Probably still my favorite of his. Along with Suttree and The Orchard Keeper - the least McCarthy-ish of his books. I read them all - up to a point. By the time No Country and The Road came out, I was tired of his “style,” and thought The Road particularly tedious. Was pretty shocked that both books received such acclaim.
I was a solider once. I’m accustomed to embracing the suck. Cold, heat, hunger, all just an adventure to persevere through. So it’s not a mentality issue, just a skills issue. I can garden but I can’t farm, though I’m not sure there’s a big difference when your life is on the line. A 24/7/365 devotion to learning how to farm has got to be enough to at least live.
The real question for me in all these scenarios is the ratio of the dead to the living. If it’s a plague and pretty much everyone died, but survivors are still out there and the virus burned itself out, then there’s no problem. 50 years is only 18,250 days. I can raid a new house every single day for the rest of my life, never returning to the same house, and never leave my community.
Let’s say you find a pallet of baked beans in the back of a grocery store, fully shrink wrapped like it just got unloaded. You eat a can of beans every single day. By the time you’re down to the bottom row and you start needing to find a second pallet….20 years have passed!
So the question is, as always, not where am I going to find resources, but rather how many survivors do I need to share with.