Håkan Geijer on Nostr: If you want to break all your illusions about what it means to live and survive ...

If you want to break all your illusions about what it means to live and survive outdoors be it post-apocalyptic, part of a guerilla insurgency in the hills, seeking refuge after a disaster, or as part of a migratory journey, then please do a single three-day/two-night journey where you cross no civilized amenities between start and finish. Online and off, I see people speak about it with an air of casualness as if one can so simply walk away from society on a whim with little prep or practice. It is much more challenging than you think, especially the logistics of getting enough daily calories if you plan to be out for longer than a week.

I'm a hiker, not a survivalist, so I'm not even claiming to have this skillset, but having spent time living outside for weeks and months on end in a variety of conditions, I am acutely aware where my knowledge ends and how absolutely reliant I am on existing supply chains.

I suspect most people would have a rough time if power and water were cut off to their flats for a single week and they had to live off only what was presently in their flat. And with climate disasters, weak infrastructure from capitalist/neolib efficiency, "hybrid" war, and even ransomware hacker groups running amok, this too is more likely than most think.

I think about this a lot, and how media makes survival during hardship seem so easy (or when it's hard, it's just vague hardship symbolized by dirtiness and tiredness). In TLOU S2, I have booed and hissed at the comically insufficient amount of gear carried by the protagonists and antagonists for their journeys outdoors, and I wonder if the inadequacy (or the degree of it) registers for most. The only media I can think of (that wasn't explicitly about hiking, e.g., Wild) that seems to somewhat accurately capture the difficulty of traveling by foot and living outdoors was The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (and maybe the two sequels too?).

This is an insomniac ramble, maybe better suited for a longer form essay somewhere where I can go into detail, but having been up for the last 3 hours, well, shit. This is what we got for now.