A high school friend of mine once told me about a survival week he completed with air cadets. Equipped with nothing but a pocket knife and two matches, he had to survive in the wilderness for a week with the understanding he could give up at any time.
Although impressive in its own right, what struck me was his reflection on what made the ordeal difficult:
“It wasn’t that you were hungry, or thirsty, or tired. It was boredom.”
He then went on to describe his ordeals, including giving names to sticks and having full fledged conversations with them. It should be noted that “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks hadn’t been released yet, so that movie made perfect sense to me when it came out.
I find this to be a pertinent point often missed in survival groups or post-apocalyptic motifs. Sure, you can engineer a shelter, equipment and find sustenance, but so few people are mentally equipped to deal with isolation for extended periods of time.
This presents a few options:
Learn to be bored, without the aid of any communication, mediums of entertainment or movement through populated areas
or
Strive to build solid communities with an interdependence on each other, recognizing survival isn’t possible without them.
Unless we do more of the latter now, we will be forced to do more of the former.