Why you will be useless in a genuine disaster
1. You cannot live without the Internet
Most of you reading this cannot yet conceive of how big a deal this is. It’s one thing to know that you are going to be away from it for a few hours or a few days, or even, possibly, weeks. The idea of a future where it does not exist for you at all is unthinkable. Technology has become a substitute for having big things in your life, a diversion that fools you into thinking that it has everything you need. The Internet is no longer a mere a tool, it’s a lifestyle, and when cut off from it people will be forced to faced reality, only without the callouses they would have built up had they been spending their time outside and around people instead of surfing.
In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession
Internet Addiction Disorder: Causes, Symptoms,and Consequences
2. Too sedentary
If you are used to a life of sitting on your ass all day and moving at your own pace, you will have a hard time adjusting to a life where movement is absolutely necessary. Hardship usually involves having to do stuff, run, hide, forage, find or build shelter. Note also that there will be no place comfortable to sit and while away the hours anymore. No ergonomic chairs, no memory-foam mattress. Your whole world will be turned into an uncomfortable and unfamiliar place.
Lazy cat
3. Destitution is boring
Basically, when you are not moving you get to sit around and think about how fucked you are and how the future can only be worse. When you are moving you are doing mundane, repetitive tasks that you have no choice but to do. Try to start are fire, pick some more maggots out of your wounds, try to find an effective toilet-paper substitute etc.. This is why homeless people start smoking crack. There comes a point where life feels like a failed enterprise so why not? Why not just admit that there is no way out of this and do the only thing you can to make yourself happy? But what if things are so bad that there isn’t even crack to be had or you are too broke to afford it? Then there is sex, which is why poor people have more AIDS and babies and also why you get raped in prison.
“Patterns of drug use after becoming homeless varied considerably. Changes in the company kept, increased availability or boredom were offered as reasons for increased use.”
4. Too much competition
You presently have no idea what competition is. You have not competed till you have fought for food with a bunch of other starving refugees. Picture being in a battle with people for the most important thing in their lives at that very moment. In a large-scale tragedy you will face a lot of this. When you are down on the ground amongst the other desperate people you will know what “cutthroat” means. This kind of thing calls for ruthlessness and selfishness of the highest order. Like it or not there are situations in life where the only choices are to be the lowest kind asshole, or die.
Displaced
5. Not ready to do what it takes
You are probably not ready to surrender and suck one guy’s dick, or fight and get fucked by twenty. You are not ready to eat out of a garbage can or steal food. You are unprepared for the occasions that call for you to throw out all your values and previously held ideas of things you would not resort to. Bad situations destroy your ego and all ideas of self-righteousness. The people who survive things are not nice people. They are snitches and thieves and murderers.
Hiker Recovering After Amputating Own Arm
6. Your skill-set is useless
Ok, so you are an excellent web-designer. Awesome. Now imagine you and your children starving starving. Are you going to eat your knowledge of PHP? Imagine yourself in a refugee camp in a destitute nation at war, no Internet in a hundred square miles. Imagine yourself living on the street, an educated homeless person among thousands of educated homeless people.
You have the skills to survive within a certain framework, one with roads and local government and order. Should that framework be destroyed an illiterate Mexican field-worker or a deranged veteran who has been homeless for years are more functional than you.
Wilderness Survival Skills
7. You expect reasonable behavior
You expect people to abide by certain rules, to be governed by basic logic, except when people are bitter and violent that does not happen. You know those abusive husbands who beat the crap out of their wives for some little irrational thing? It’s not that it makes sense to them, but they feel they have the right to do it even when it doesn’t make sense, just because they feel like beating somebody up, causing some pain. Well the world is full of them, and when things get desperate and and ugly for everybody, they multiply. Some people are governed simply by whim, by the need to vent some malice, and if you are the most convenient thing on which to vent then you get hit. You, on the other hand, who expect people a warning when people are going to do something bad. You who are ready to believe that most people are good, you get sucker punched, you get your ass kicked and are left bleeding in the street wondering what you did to provoke that.
Restaurateur stabbed to death in random attack
8. You take luxuries for granted
The people with shit to sell have succeeded in convincing much of humanity that a cell-phone is a necessity. It is not. It is a convenience, and a minor one at that. A car is a big, significant convenience, but still not a necessity. There is a difference really awesome shit and the essentials for survival. You can live quite well without a cellphone or a car. Without antibiotics, or shelter in a cold climate, not so much. Thanks to big business the lines between necessity and luxury have been blurred. Few people these days know what they absolutely need, so they go broke buying all kinds of shit that is less important.
Deluxe Emergency Kit-2 Person, Emergency Zone, Disaster Survival Kit, Emergency Preparedness
9. You have not suffered enough
You are pampered, soft, genteel, used to a life where the worst possible thing is your car breaking down, or gaining a few pounds. When the really ugly shit starts happening suddenly you are out of your depth with no tools for handling a real, drastic change in circumstances. Weekends camping in a park do not train you for a life of homelessness where there is no reasonable hope of ever having permanent shelter again. A few quick fights in high school do not prepare you for having to defend your life with your own hands at 30. Like everything in life, being able handle sudden hardship is a skill. You don’t learn it by playing with your little toys, entertaining yourself or getting fat. You get it by not being complacent. By being ready and having experience.
When suffering is new to you, real, horrible deprivation, you need an adjustment-period to get over the shock, but real life, especially when it gets to be real and unpleasant, does not give you one. It moves at it’s own pace and usually you do not get to prepare yourself for the next awful thing, they just keep coming and coming. It always gets worse.
They’re often clean-shaven, well dressed and utterly desperate
10. Depression/panic
You do not deal well with change, especially of the calamitous sort. That’s because your life is relatively stable. You may worry about it coming, try to visualize it, but you still can’t see the reality because you have never faced anything truly disastrous before. Those people that you see on the 9/11 videos running from the collapsing WTC towers know what I mean. To a certain extent the ability to build and maintain a stable nation is a good thing, except when that stability is damaged or destroyed. The people in war-torn African nations would have been able to handle 9/11 better. They know that life involves, sudden horrible episodes, they know that no period of peace ever lasts for long. The soft people who take peace for granted, who go long stretches without losing anybody they know, they are the ones who get hysterical, who kill themselves when the bad shit happens.
Suicide Spreads as One Solution to the Debt Crisis
