This 7-yo girl is living large in England. Family has a nice villa, couple of slaves and servants, throws lavish parties, all that. OK, they’re getting a little broke. The bathhouse burned and they can’t afford to fix it, can’t even find artisans to do the work, stuff like that. Her father is a tax collector and suddenly farmers are refusing to pay up. “Why are we paying for Rome’s protection? When was the last time we even saw a soldier? Meanwhile, the Saxons are fucking shit up not far from here.” And it goes downhill from there, fast.
The girl ends up at Hadrian’s Wall after a few years, and it’s a mess. Slovenly soldiers getting drunk on duty, no one cares about anything, Saxons and Picts raiding everywhere. And it goes downhill again, fast. Next thing you know, no amount of money will buy a clay pot. Metal, of any kind? Forget it, no one will give up any. Roman coin means nothing, because you can’t eat it or wear it.
When she’s 17, her and a few others get a pathetic little farm going. They’re surviving, barely. Hell, they can’t even figure out how to repair a thatch roof. A local strongman snatches them up to add to his tiny little hilltop, which is pathetic in itself compared to what the Romans had going on 30-years previously. At least they start making iron, but that’s only because the warlord lucked out and grabbed the one guy who knows the process. But hey! It’s got an OK-ish wall!
At one point the young woman finds a nice perfume bottle in the ruins. All I could think was, damn, there’s no way anyone, anywhere around her could produce even the crudest glass item.
Guess you get the idea. I know the world is more resilient now, but COVID showed how thin the sauce really is. Supply chains are 2-weeks away from near total collapse. Almost every one of us makes a living, and has an education, that’s totally irrelevant to survival.
I’m in far better shape than most as I’ve got 2.5 acres of swamp, not far from a river. I’m no stranger to the local ecosystems, but I’ve thought about trying to live out there, and it’s not doable without modern tech, not for me anyway. Example, I have plenty of guns for defense and hunting, but ammo isn’t infinite. I can make my own black powder, and have black powder guns. I make my own charcoal and I guess I could get potassium nitrate from urine, but where do I get pure sulpher? I can reload shotgun shells, but I can’t imagine how to make a primer. I can pour my own lead bullets and maybe shot, but how am I to power the smelter? Not with my two solar cells I’m not. (Get me the Fresnel lens from an old-school projection TV and I can melt rock!)
Even the simplest items are out of reach. Clay pots seem easy enough, but I have no idea where to find clay locally. I certainly can’t tell good from bad clay, don’t know the temps and times required to fire it, none of the basics. The pressing need for food and hauling fresh water wouldn’t allow time to experiment.
I make my own soap, but I don’t know how to get lye from wood ash. Even given that, it would take tons of trial and error with animal fats.
Aside from food, shelter and water, cloth is easily the most essential item. “Always carry a towel.”, is excellent advice. The one thing I often wish I had more of camping in the cold or wet is more cloth, of any kind. Even in the heat, we need cloth. Guess if I had a few sheep that would be nice, but I don’t have a clue as to building a loom or how exactly one works. Warp and weft or something? Hell, I don’t even know what it means to “card” wool. For that matter, I’d have no clue how to cure the animals hides I would hunt. Something involving urine again, that’s all I know.
Speaking of hunting, as rednecks think we could do well enough on that count. Don’t know who else has noticed, but our fauna is falling apart, starting with insects. I get into some wild places and it’s shocking how little wildlife there is. Just saw my first two copperheads, less than a week apart! That’s after 5-years of tromping the woods, rivers and swamps. If I wiped out every squirrel on the block, that would feed my wife and I for 2-3 weeks, tops. And everyone else would be doing the same thing. We would literally be down to eating stray dogs and cats, fast.
And back to defense, if you have anything and anyone knows it, you’re going to have to fight. I can’t stay awake 24/7 and neither can my wife. Scary to think, as in our fictional character’s case, no matter what you obtain, someone stronger will eventually come take it. Ally with neighbors? Of course! But there’s always a bigger fish, and being a big fish in a small pond is going to attract attention. “Their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see-I’ll show you. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They’ll eat each other.”
If I break my glasses and the contacts run out, I’m straight handicapped. I’ve never found used eye wear that was remotely “close enough”, better off without.
The Roman Empire had it good for a thousand years, never imagined it could end. And they were cavemen relative to our modern tech. Almost everything we know would become obsolete, overnight. But, not joking, we could live off our own trash pretty well. At least we’d have plastic containers and pull-tab fish hooks. (Seriously, I repurpose loads of crap I find in the woods and on the roadsides. You should see my tackle box! And I don’t even fish.)
What if the US dollar collapses? Global warming? (<- probably the most realistic threat) Nuclear war? A “better” version of COVID or the Spanish Flu? Diseases wiping out our factory farms? Guess what I’m getting at is that despite living in the richest era of human history, we’re all the more fragile. I’m not seriously worried about my few remaining years, but I’m seeing that the preppers might have the right idea.
Whew! Had to get some thoughts out! What are yours?
The novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent Damned good so far! And it’s a trilogy!
You’ve done a mental work-through of the American fallacy of “rugged individualism” and reached the correct conclusion that it’s not doable, or best case makes for a very doubtful life.
Millions of people mistakenly base their identity on the romantic notion of the rugged man crafting and running his life with nothing but his own hands either in the current world or a post-apocalyptic one.
But the reality is that humans need by design a supportive community to exist in, similar to how fish need schools to swim in. Throughout most of our evolution we have existed in a tribal setting. Mothers would nurse any child in the tribe, grandparents would mentor everyone, meat caught by the hunters would be shared by all. It was understood that the survival of the tribe was predicated on a “democratic socialism” whereby everyone looked after each other. You can see this in play in the animal kingdom when elephants form a defensive wall around a young calf, or wildebeests encircle a newborn when lions approach. They are saying “our tribe will only succeed if we give the least among us a fighting chance, and we are only as successful as the least among us.”
In the modern world many have internally redefined the tribal concept to mean a “tribe of one.” But this attitude wont work. Four million years of evolution can’t be waved away. You will not manufacture your own contact lenses. If you want to survive the apocalypse listen to what your intuition is telling you: you can’t do it alone. Yes, stockpile canned food if you wish. But more importantly, make connections, plan it to be a group effort.
You’re seriously trying to school me on evolution?! Yeah. I get it. Take your American hate elsewhere, I’m just kicking around ideas. And BTW, bet you can’t start a fire to save your very own life.
Wow what a rugged response 😂
The Rand corporation made a paper on what they call the “neomedieval era”. They get paid to research and write a bunch of analytical stuff for the US Govt and other big picture people.
The idea is that the last 200 years has been an anomaly. Big central governments, industry, media etc. They make the case that a shift has started since about 2000. We are gradually sliding back to how things have worked for most of human history, decentralized societies, greater divides between rich and poor and governments trying their best to get by. Less chance of massive conventional world wars and more chance of messy regional ones (Syria, Lebanon etc). It’s an interesting read. So no it’s not just you!
Anyway what we should all try to do is focus on what you can locally. Make friends, build skills and do stuff with them. Be involved and help each other. Yes there are always bigger fish to take things but building up is better than being helpless in difficult situations. It can be fun AND fufill a bigger purpose. No need for constant doom and gloom to do better.
If I can get to a level my grandparents were with gardening, canning, sewing, diy repairs etc I’d be pretty well set. Back then it was a norm, but we offloaded those skills on companies and governments. Now it could be seen as homesteading or prepping but in their time it was common sense for a society that made it through world wars and the depression.
Now we’re talking the same language! I’ll have a read on that.
I’m shocked at the comments deriding individualism and building skills, like those are vices. And then there’s the, “I’d rather die.” comments. OK. Die then.
The collapse of the Empire wasn’t that fast.
No! But the book details a single person’s life and experiences. For her, it was fast. Interesting to see how civilization frayed at the edges and contracted back towards Rome.
[off topic?]
Precipice by Robert Harris. Similar idea of sudden swift change. Prime Minister Asquith is toddling along, happily oblivious to Europe when out of the blue Austro-Hungary decides to invade Serbia.
I wouldn’t worry quite so much… This whole last stand holding out through to the end of time kind of mentality isn’t generally true of most circumstances in the modern age. Governments, though not nessisarily legitimized on the world stage ones, tend to be pretty quick to reform so as long as you can wait out maybe a year on victory gardens, old clothes and dried and canned food you should be fine on most difficult to create items. That and since mass production has made sure there is a considerable surplus of regular everyday items like dishware learning how to source your own clay isn’t going to be much of an issue.
Governments have collapsed in the past and the militarized nature of the American citizenry is probably going to make it a unique problem. But like other places chances are any purge like times are going to be fairly short as it is generally been demonstrated that those antisocial behaviours tend to mean a lot of international compassionate humanitarian aid is witheld to those people and once order reasserts itself the bill tends to come due.
Chances are if the worst happens and you don’t treat your resources as worth making a grand last stand over you have a pretty good chance of making it out and once there’s a reconstruction effort then the requests made of you to do your bit will not be a lone wolf kind of senario.
