Apocalypse Survival 101: Skill Set
©2016 C. Henry Martens
Apocalypse Survival 101Mental attitudeAssess the situationDefine the level of riskQuestions that need to be askedLocation, location, locationSkill setTimingThe realities in your support systemInventory of resourcesOdds versus priority
Apocalypse Survival 101: Skill Set
What do you bring to the table? Look around you. I’m sure you see how others function in society. You see the tough looking guy changing tires, the girl behind the desk at the doctor’s office, the couple on the street corner with a cardboard sign. What we are really doing when we interact with these people, beyond the ritual of a business transaction, is evaluating them. We might make some kinds of assumptions about how well they would survive in severe circumstances. But we really don’t know them.
We might not know that the tough kid changing tires has diabetes, lives in his mother’s basement, and spends his time away from work playing video games and searching porn sites. The young woman behind the desk has a concealed weapons permit, carries a Glock in her purse, camps as often as possible, and studies herbal medicine as a hobby. The couple with the cardboard sign just lost their home due to his PTSD-related employment issues, and he is a vet with black ops training and she is a midwife experienced with home births.
What do we see when we look in the mirror?
Time to be honest.
Age: Critical in terms of survival capability. The sweet spot is between twenty-five and thirty-five. This is the best place to be because you are most likely to be over your adolescent risk taking behaviors and haven’t yet experienced the ravages of your body falling apart from age. Next best age, thirty-five to fifty. Again because you have the mind to make decisions and still have the possibility of having physical capability. Next best age? A toss-up between fifteen to twenty-five… and the decade or so after fifty.
The younger set has the advantage of physical capability and enthusiasm, but a limited capacity having acquired relevant experience or for making good survival decisions. The elder set has good experience and decision making skills, but the body is starting to fall apart. Now these are evaluations “in general,” and we all know there are mature eighteen year olds and people in their later years that can run circles around the average teenager.
Experience: There are those people who avoid all new experience. Put them on the short list of soon-to-be-dead people.
A reality check, if you have a list of foods you don’t like as long as your arm, you are probably going to have some issues. If you specialize in anti-bacterial warfare, and your battleground is your own home, you will probably not do well once you are out of it. But if you can kill, butcher, and cook an animal in a home-crafted tin foil pot over an open fire that you made without matches, you may have some better odds. If you have built anything complicated with hand tools, planted, harvested and preserved foods from a garden, and can sew, read a map, train a dog, herd, trap, or shoot… then you have some skills. Nowadays, if you can make a solar panel work, understand the cultivation and use of medicinal herbs, or refine hydrogen from water, you may really be in demand.
Attitude: The strong will adapt. That means that you may be the most perfectly trained person in a group, capable and flexible and knowledgeable, but if you deny the worth of your fellow survivors and run out of patience they may ban you or eat you. If you happen to be that person, you better look at those around you and decide who you can train, who you can negotiate with, and who will be the natural leader. If you aren’t the natural leader, and that person is an idiot, you may want to move on.
On the other hand, if you are pale and weak and subject to sudden irrational fears, you better look for the person who is most capable and begin to learn and experiment to find your confidence.
Specific skills: Garden? You should know what plants can be preserved and how to do it. Just as important, how to grow the next generation from seeds or roots that you have collected and preserved. You should know that you can grow green beans, butternut squash, and tomatoes from seed you collect, but zucchini may be a problem because the seed you buy is most likely a hybrid that won’t breed true and the next generation will be inedible. You might want to bone up on growing something other than food. Medical herbs and textile crops are something to consider.
Preserve food? Do you know what keeps without preserving? Canning and bottling is great, but takes special equipment and skills, and if you can’t keep it from freezing your efforts are for nothing. Smoking, drying, and salting are more temperature resistant. Just saying…
Medicine? A good midwife has more value in a world without access to antibiotics than the best brain surgeon. A general practitioner who throws up their hands and gives up has less use than a dentist who can pull a tooth without anesthesia. Someone who knows how to reconstitute and use animal medicines may have value when it is time to let the animals die because all you have to treat humans is the “not for human consumption” antibiotics.
Scrounger? Need something? Where are you going to get it? Some people have a natural ability to find things. They will come up with seed, thread, ammo, and fish antibiotics when no one else can think past the fact that they don’t have what they need.
Weaver? Do you know how to card cotton or wool? Can you hand spin it, and build a loom?
Animal husbandry? Can you take a lightly handled, scared animal and turn it into a useful tool to pull a cart or haul a load? Can you train a dog to obey commands? If you know how to herd and care for animals that like to congregate together, trim a hoof or treat colic, or know when to cut your losses and eat something before it goes down, you may have survival potential.Military knowledge? Hopefully there won’t be human-seeking killer robots, or an invading army, but it never hurts to have someone who can handle security. Just remember that a paranoid, overly aggressive attitude can get you killed just as dead as a wishful thinker who wants to believe everyone has pure intentions.
It is a good thing to have some kind of comfort level with negotiating psychology, battle plans, weapons repair, manufacture, and training, and methods to camouflage what you have from prying eyes.
Outdoorsman? This is a synonym for hunter. Some people might be surprised that I would value this fairly low in most scenarios. One reason is because most people who hunt aren’t really good at it. When the SHTF prey animals will become wary or be dead. That means that a really good hunter who is used to bringing home meat in a population of animals under pressure will be useful, but someone who goes out and spends days “trying” will be a detriment to any group. A good hunter will be able to use a rifle, but they will also have knowledge of other methods to gather high quality protein. Traps, snares, deadfalls, fishing by line and net or electricity, dynamite, or noodling can all come into play. Rerouting a creek to trap fish in low water, burning a few acres to find fire cooked grasshoppers, organizing a rabbit drive are some possibilities.
Well, just some ideas. Remember that look you took in the mirror? How honest were you? If you can’t bring something of use to survival, then you are going to have to feed off of the skills of others. That may mean doing some unpleasant activities that make you the low priority, marginal, least valued person in the group.
Please notice that I see most apocalyptic scenarios as likely to be where you will need to depend on others. If the entire population of the world evaporates into thin air, you the only person left, then your skill set will be less important. You will have years of anything you can possibly want laying about for the effort of looking. But in an apocalypse with numbers of surviving human beings, the most dangerous threat will be those human beings. Competition for resources will make your worth to the community critical.
Learn to do something. Something useful.
Click here to receive the Apocalypse Observer Newsletter in your inbox
www.readmota.com
To comment, scroll down and type in your comment. Under Comment As, you can select Anonymous or Name/URL (you don't need to enter a URL). Then hit Publish.
Apocalypse Survival 101Mental attitudeAssess the situationDefine the level of riskQuestions that need to be askedLocation, location, locationSkill setTimingThe realities in your support systemInventory of resourcesOdds versus priority
Apocalypse Survival 101: Skill Set
What do you bring to the table? Look around you. I’m sure you see how others function in society. You see the tough looking guy changing tires, the girl behind the desk at the doctor’s office, the couple on the street corner with a cardboard sign. What we are really doing when we interact with these people, beyond the ritual of a business transaction, is evaluating them. We might make some kinds of assumptions about how well they would survive in severe circumstances. But we really don’t know them.
We might not know that the tough kid changing tires has diabetes, lives in his mother’s basement, and spends his time away from work playing video games and searching porn sites. The young woman behind the desk has a concealed weapons permit, carries a Glock in her purse, camps as often as possible, and studies herbal medicine as a hobby. The couple with the cardboard sign just lost their home due to his PTSD-related employment issues, and he is a vet with black ops training and she is a midwife experienced with home births.
What do we see when we look in the mirror?
Time to be honest.
Age: Critical in terms of survival capability. The sweet spot is between twenty-five and thirty-five. This is the best place to be because you are most likely to be over your adolescent risk taking behaviors and haven’t yet experienced the ravages of your body falling apart from age. Next best age, thirty-five to fifty. Again because you have the mind to make decisions and still have the possibility of having physical capability. Next best age? A toss-up between fifteen to twenty-five… and the decade or so after fifty.
The younger set has the advantage of physical capability and enthusiasm, but a limited capacity having acquired relevant experience or for making good survival decisions. The elder set has good experience and decision making skills, but the body is starting to fall apart. Now these are evaluations “in general,” and we all know there are mature eighteen year olds and people in their later years that can run circles around the average teenager.
Experience: There are those people who avoid all new experience. Put them on the short list of soon-to-be-dead people.
A reality check, if you have a list of foods you don’t like as long as your arm, you are probably going to have some issues. If you specialize in anti-bacterial warfare, and your battleground is your own home, you will probably not do well once you are out of it. But if you can kill, butcher, and cook an animal in a home-crafted tin foil pot over an open fire that you made without matches, you may have some better odds. If you have built anything complicated with hand tools, planted, harvested and preserved foods from a garden, and can sew, read a map, train a dog, herd, trap, or shoot… then you have some skills. Nowadays, if you can make a solar panel work, understand the cultivation and use of medicinal herbs, or refine hydrogen from water, you may really be in demand.
Attitude: The strong will adapt. That means that you may be the most perfectly trained person in a group, capable and flexible and knowledgeable, but if you deny the worth of your fellow survivors and run out of patience they may ban you or eat you. If you happen to be that person, you better look at those around you and decide who you can train, who you can negotiate with, and who will be the natural leader. If you aren’t the natural leader, and that person is an idiot, you may want to move on.
On the other hand, if you are pale and weak and subject to sudden irrational fears, you better look for the person who is most capable and begin to learn and experiment to find your confidence.
Specific skills: Garden? You should know what plants can be preserved and how to do it. Just as important, how to grow the next generation from seeds or roots that you have collected and preserved. You should know that you can grow green beans, butternut squash, and tomatoes from seed you collect, but zucchini may be a problem because the seed you buy is most likely a hybrid that won’t breed true and the next generation will be inedible. You might want to bone up on growing something other than food. Medical herbs and textile crops are something to consider.
Preserve food? Do you know what keeps without preserving? Canning and bottling is great, but takes special equipment and skills, and if you can’t keep it from freezing your efforts are for nothing. Smoking, drying, and salting are more temperature resistant. Just saying…
Medicine? A good midwife has more value in a world without access to antibiotics than the best brain surgeon. A general practitioner who throws up their hands and gives up has less use than a dentist who can pull a tooth without anesthesia. Someone who knows how to reconstitute and use animal medicines may have value when it is time to let the animals die because all you have to treat humans is the “not for human consumption” antibiotics.
Scrounger? Need something? Where are you going to get it? Some people have a natural ability to find things. They will come up with seed, thread, ammo, and fish antibiotics when no one else can think past the fact that they don’t have what they need.
Weaver? Do you know how to card cotton or wool? Can you hand spin it, and build a loom?
Animal husbandry? Can you take a lightly handled, scared animal and turn it into a useful tool to pull a cart or haul a load? Can you train a dog to obey commands? If you know how to herd and care for animals that like to congregate together, trim a hoof or treat colic, or know when to cut your losses and eat something before it goes down, you may have survival potential.Military knowledge? Hopefully there won’t be human-seeking killer robots, or an invading army, but it never hurts to have someone who can handle security. Just remember that a paranoid, overly aggressive attitude can get you killed just as dead as a wishful thinker who wants to believe everyone has pure intentions.
It is a good thing to have some kind of comfort level with negotiating psychology, battle plans, weapons repair, manufacture, and training, and methods to camouflage what you have from prying eyes.
Outdoorsman? This is a synonym for hunter. Some people might be surprised that I would value this fairly low in most scenarios. One reason is because most people who hunt aren’t really good at it. When the SHTF prey animals will become wary or be dead. That means that a really good hunter who is used to bringing home meat in a population of animals under pressure will be useful, but someone who goes out and spends days “trying” will be a detriment to any group. A good hunter will be able to use a rifle, but they will also have knowledge of other methods to gather high quality protein. Traps, snares, deadfalls, fishing by line and net or electricity, dynamite, or noodling can all come into play. Rerouting a creek to trap fish in low water, burning a few acres to find fire cooked grasshoppers, organizing a rabbit drive are some possibilities.
Well, just some ideas. Remember that look you took in the mirror? How honest were you? If you can’t bring something of use to survival, then you are going to have to feed off of the skills of others. That may mean doing some unpleasant activities that make you the low priority, marginal, least valued person in the group.
Please notice that I see most apocalyptic scenarios as likely to be where you will need to depend on others. If the entire population of the world evaporates into thin air, you the only person left, then your skill set will be less important. You will have years of anything you can possibly want laying about for the effort of looking. But in an apocalypse with numbers of surviving human beings, the most dangerous threat will be those human beings. Competition for resources will make your worth to the community critical.
Learn to do something. Something useful.
Click here to receive the Apocalypse Observer Newsletter in your inbox
www.readmota.com
To comment, scroll down and type in your comment. Under Comment As, you can select Anonymous or Name/URL (you don't need to enter a URL). Then hit Publish.
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