Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

by Laurence Gonzales

When I wrote Deep Survival, it was my hope that I could get such a concept across: All accidents are the same. All hazards—physical, economic, or otherwise—share common features. All of our mistakes are from a family of mistakes, and we can learn from them all. And our ultimate survival—in life, in love, in business—evolves by common rules on a shared landscape.

PSYCHOLOGISTS WHO study survival say that people who are rule followers don’t do as well as those who are of independent mind and spirit. When a patient is told that he has six months to live, he has two choices: to accept the news and die, or to rebel and live. People who survive cancer in the face of such a diagnosis are notorious. The medical staff observes that they are “bad patients,” unruly, troublesome. They don’t follow directions. They question everything. They’re annoying. They’re survivors. The Tao Te Ching says: The rigid person is a disciple of death; The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life.

Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is.

The practice of Zen teaches that it is impossible to add anything more to a cup that is already full. If you pour in more tea, it simply spills over and is wasted. The same is true of the mind. A closed attitude, an attitude that says, “I already know,” may cause you to miss important information. Zen teaches openness. Survival instructors refer to that quality of openness as “humility.” In my experience, elite performers, such as high-angle rescue professionals, who risk their lives to save others, have an exceptional balance of boldness and humility. So do astronauts.

The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.

A true survivor would be attuned to those subtle cues, the whisper of intuition, which might have been saying, I don’t feel quite safe here. Why is that so? But since most of us are not conscious of those processes, we have nothing to draw our attention to what’s happening to us. We don’t have what psychologists call meta-knowledge: the ability to assess the quality of our own knowledge. It’s easy to assume that perception and reason faithfully render reality. But as Plato suggested and modern neuroscience has proved, we live in a sort of dreamworld, which only imperfectly matches reality.

get lost. It’s simple. All you have to do is fail to update your mental map and then persist in following it even when the landscape (or your compass) tries to tell you it’s wrong.

(Psychologists have observed that one of the most basic human needs, beginning at birth, is to be gazed upon by another. Mothers throughout the world have been observed spending long periods staring into the eyes of their babies with a characteristic tilt of the head. To be seen is to be real, and without another to gaze upon us, we are nothing. Part of the terror of being lost stems from the idea of never being seen again.)

Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life.

He’d worked out his own salvation. He had discovered the first Rule of Life: Be here now. That final stage in the process of being lost can prove to be either a beginning or an end. Some give up and die. Others stop denying and begin surviving.

One of the toughest steps a survivor has to take is to discard the hope of rescue, just as he discards the old world he left behind and accepts the new one. There is no other way for his brain to settle down. Although that idea seems paradoxical, it is essential. I know that’s what my father did in the Nazi prison camp: He made it his world. Dougal Robertson, who was cast away at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.”

A survival situation is a ticking clock: You have only so much stored energy (and water), and every time you exert yourself, you’re using it up. The trick is to become extremely stingy with your scarce resources, balancing risk and reward, investing only in efforts that offer the biggest return.

Turning fear into focus is the first act of a survivor.

To survive, you must at some point allow cool to become cold. Stockdale wrote, “In difficult situations, the leader with the heart, not the soft heart, not the bleeding heart, but the Old Testament heart, the hard heart, comes into his own.” Survival means accepting reality, and accepting reality takes a hard heart. But it is a strange kind of coldness, for it has empathy at its center.

Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we’re going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don’t defeat death, they come to terms with it.

“I resisted the urge to look up or down. I knew that I was making desperately slow progress and I didn’t want to be reminded of it by seeing the sunbeam still far above me.” Interesting. For how can you know something and still keep from reminding yourself of it? It would seem to be a paradox…unless you had two brains. Indeed, when Simpson says he “knew,” he means that his hippocampus contained a short-term memory pattern about his situation. But the visual perception of how far he had to go would be sent straight down through the thalamus to the amygdala to be screened, and that was what he wished to avoid, because it might trigger a whole new set of emotions that he didn’t need right now. He could bump what was in working memory out by concentrating on something else: his pattern. It was a wise choice. Keep the perceptual input to a minimum right now. Don’t feed that amygdala any scary raw data.

To laugh at our own misfortune, we must be willing to play the fool. It keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. It keeps us humble.