It Feels Like the End of the World

The New York Times recently had an article about a woman who teaches people how to live civilization-free. It’s survival skills for a world in which there is no end to the survival period. As in, she’s not teaching you how to get through an experience. She’s teaching you how to adapt and continue on as the experience becomes the new normal. Or the old normal because she’s returning people to how we lived before cities and cars and books and hospitals.

The reporter spoke to people who live this way all year round after going through a six month Stone Age Immersion:

“People say, ‘Oh when the apocalypse comes. …’ What are you talking about? It’s here. I’m a collapsist,” she said. “I’m not invested in maintaining the comforts we have.”

A collapsist. It certainly feels like something is collapsing. It has felt this way for a long time; before COVID-19. There’s a fin-de-siècle, pessimistic odor in the air, except that we’re not actually in a fin-de-siècle. We shouldn’t feel like there’s a proverbial cliff in front of us.

I don’t think I could live like the people in the article. Not just the idea of living close to nature… I mean, I’m not really a nature person, especially when there are crickets outside. But because I associate thinking about the future with hope. Nature is lovely, but I think the thing I love about cities is the innovation. And that is what I would miss. I don’t know if I could feel hope if living backwards was my existence.

I would hopefully survive the collapse of civilization because that’s what humans do; we continue on. But there was something that made me so sad as I read the article.