How to Survive the Apocalypse, Part 8: Mental Health at The End of the World

If the world is ending, you’ve got more problems than just rationing food and dodging whatever new disaster has come knocking.

Because even if you’re physically prepared, you also need to be mentally prepared. Otherwise, you’ll be the person having a full-blown existential crisis while everyone else is figuring out how to filter drinking water.

The good news? You don’t have to wait for civilization to crumble before taking steps to keep your brain from imploding under stress.

Accept That Things Will Get Weird

If you think a major global disaster is going to feel like a fun action movie where you’re the rugged protagonist, think again. The apocalypse will be weird, unpredictable, and exhausting. Routine will go out the window. People will react in unexpected ways. Your favorite snacks might disappear forever.

Take a deep breath and acknowledge now: Things will not be normal. But humans are adaptable. You are adaptable. The more you accept change as inevitable, the easier it is to roll with it.

Build Resilience Now (While the Wi-Fi Still Works)

You don’t have to wait for catastrophe to start strengthening your mental endurance.

• Practice stress management techniques. Mindfulness, breathing exercises, or whatever helps you chill now will help when things get real.

• Embrace boredom. No internet? No problem—if you’ve already learned how to entertain yourself without a screen. Read books. Learn a skill. Get comfortable with silence.

• Toughen up your decision-making skills. Start making small, tough choices daily so that when the big ones hit (stay in the bunker or risk the outside world?), you’re not paralyzed by indecision.

People Matter More Than You Think

Yes, even introverts (like me!) need community. Loneliness is just as dangerous as dehydration—maybe worse. Humans thrive in groups, and mental health in a crisis improves drastically when you have people to rely on.

• Strengthen friendships now—before you need them to help you rebuild society.

• Find your apocalypse support group. You don’t have to call it that, but start identifying the people you trust and who keep you grounded.

• Have a communication plan. If cell service dies, how are you reaching your people? Establish backup methods before everything goes dark.

Laughter is Survival

If you can’t laugh at the absurdity of the end times, you’re going to have a bad time. Dark humor is a coping mechanism, and it works. Keep a sense of humor, because some of this will be ridiculous—whether it’s scavenging for toilet paper (ahem, 2020) or realizing your survival plan depends on a 15-year-old can of Spam.

Hope is a Strategy

The world ending doesn’t mean you have to give up. History proves that people survive, rebuild, and find new ways to move forward. The apocalypse is just another challenge—so keep your mind sharp, your stress low, and your support system strong. You’ve got this.

How to Survive the Apocalypse, Part 7: Making Tough Choices—Who Gets the Last Can of Beans?

The world as you know it is gone. Resources are scarce. You and your small group of survivors are staring at one last can of beans, and the silence is deafening.

Who gets it?

The strongest fighter? The person who found it? The weakest member of the group? The one who will contribute the most in the long run?

This is the moment where morality, survival, and human nature collide. Welcome to Trolley Problem: End-of-the-World Edition.

The Trolley Problem, But Make It the end of the world

In the classic Trolley Problem, a trolley car is barreling down the tracks toward a split. On one side of the tracks, five people are tied up. On the other track, one person is tied up. If the train car continues with no intervention, five people die. If you intervene and switch which track the trolley will go on, only one person dies.

The choice is yours:

• Do nothing and let five people die.

• Pull the lever and kill one person to save the five.

It’s an interesting ethical puzzle—until the apocalypse makes it real. Because in a post-collapse world, there is no “correct” answer. The rules of morality shift when survival is on the line.

And here’s the kicker: the choices we think we’d make in a crisis are often very different from the ones we actually would make.

Right now, sitting in our comfortable, mostly-functional society, we value fairness, kindness, and long-term thinking. We donate to charity. We hold doors open for strangers. We believe in laws and justice.

But when the world breaks? Priorities change.

The question isn’t just who deserves the last can of beans? The question is: how much of your humanity are you willing to trade to survive?

Different Survival Philosophies: What Kind of Leader Would You Be?

Let’s say you’re in charge of this little survival group. How do you decide who gets the last can of beans?

1. The Utilitarian Approach: Greatest good for the greatest number

You give the beans to whoever will keep the most people alive for the longest time. Maybe that’s the healthiest, strongest person. Maybe it’s the person with the most valuable skills (doctor, farmer, builder). Maybe that’s the person with the most knowledge.

• Pros: Maximizes survival chances for the group.

• Cons: If you’re sick or weak, your odds aren’t looking great.

2. The Altruist Approach: The most vulnerable eat first

The sick, the injured, the elderly, the children—they eat first, no matter what. The strongest can survive the most easily, so we should provide additional assistance to those who need more to maintain the bare minimum.

• Pros: Keeps your conscience clear.

• Cons: If resources run out, the people most capable of rebuilding society might not survive.

3. The Capitalist Approach: What can you offer in exchange

Nothing is free. You want the beans? Trade for them. Got extra supplies? Useful skills? A favor to offer? It’s a deal.

• Pros: Encourages contribution and productivity.

• Cons: Ruthless. If you have nothing to trade, you don’t eat.

4. The Strength-Based Approach: Might makes right

The strongest takes the beans, no questions asked. Either through force or by proving they contribute the most.

• Pros: Nobody has to waste time debating.

• Cons: Hope you’re the strong one.

5. The Democratic Approach: We all vote on it

Everyone in the group votes on who gets the beans. Maybe it’s fair. Maybe it turns into a popularity contest. Maybe it ends in a fistfight.

• Pros: Feels more fair than the other options and everyone gets a say.

• Cons: A democracy only works if people follow the results. And desperate people don’t always care about votes. And sometimes the most popular will win rather than the person most likely to help the group survive.

So… Who Gets the Last Can of Beans?

Maybe the real answer isn’t about who gets the beans. Maybe it’s about what kind of world you’re trying to build.

The apocalypse isn’t just about surviving—it’s about deciding what survival even means. If you save the strongest, do you risk creating a society where only power matters? If you prioritize the weakest, do you doom the group long-term? If you make every choice transactional, does trust even exist anymore?

This is how civilizations rise and fall—not with a grand battle or a final, dramatic moment, but with small, difficult choices like this. The way you distribute resources today determines the kind of society you live in tomorrow.

So, do you hand over the beans? Share them? Hoard them? Trade them?

Whatever you decide, just remember: the hardest choices don’t just shape who survives. They shape the future of the human race.

How To Get Your Great Pyrenees Dog To Stop Ignoring You

[This post was written for a job application. They didn’t pay me for it, so here you go!]

Dandelion (L) and Blueberry (R)

In our house, Blueberry is the undisputed King of Selective Hearing. One morning, I asked him to come inside. He stood at the edge of the yard, wind in his mane, looking out across the field like a statue of noble resistance. After a full minute of silence, he glanced back and sighed—as if to say, “Fine. But only because I was going to anyway.”

If you’ve ever asked your Great Pyrenees to “sit,” only to be met with a slow blink and a long pause, you’re not alone. Pyrs are famously independent dogs. They’re incredibly intelligent—but they often seem to operate on their own mysterious internal code.

The good news? They’re not ignoring you out of defiance. It’s just part of who they are.

Great Pyrenees were bred for centuries to guard flocks in the remote Pyrenees Mountains. These dogs had a serious job: protect the sheep at all costs, often without a human nearby. They needed to make decisions alone, without waiting for orders. That independent thinking is deeply embedded in their DNA.

These days, your Pyr might be guarding the yard, the couch, or the kids—but the mindset remains the same. They still believe it’s their job to assess every situation and act accordingly. That’s why traditional training methods that rely on immediate obedience don’t always work.

Your Pyr isn’t ignoring you to be stubborn. They’re evaluating whether your request makes sense.

For example, if you ask them to lie down while they’re on “alert duty” near a window, they may not comply—not because they don’t understand the command, but because they’re busy “working.” In their mind, protecting the house takes priority.

Aside from traditional training techniques, I think the key to getting your Great Pyrenees dog to stop ignoring you is to stop interrupting him when he's working. And to do that, you need to change your perspective on your dog's behavior.

Once you start seeing your Pyr as a partner rather than a subordinate, everything shifts. Respect their instincts, time your commands wisely, and build trust through calm consistency.

Sure, they might still ignore you sometimes—but when they choose to listen, it’ll be on their terms, and that makes it all the more meaningful. Besides, with a dog like Blueberry, half the joy is in watching them think for themselves.

Blueberry

What Survival Stories Tell Us About Being Human

Why do we keep telling stories about survival?

From zombie stories and post-apocalypses, to Mad Max and pandemics, to big freezes, nuclear war, and earthquakes, these stories have consistently resonated with people, despite their often dark subject matter and backdrop of death.

There are a few reasons, in my opinion.

1. They expose our core values.

When you take away everything society has built to make ourselves comfortable—walls, plumbing, agriculture, education, etc.—what’s left?

Just us. Humans.

The stories we tell about survival often don’t just lay bare the landscape, they lay bare our values. They show us how we think we would navigate such harsh, unforgiving landscapes. They show whether we would be kind or whether we would be selfish; whether we would be generous or whether we would be murderous; whether we would be open-hearted, or suspicious.

Of course, there’s no telling how any one of us might actually behave in such stark, sudden crises, but perhaps if we imagine ourselves in these spaces, it might also help us learn a little bit about ourselves.

2. They explore the edges of empathy.

I think most of us like to think of ourselves as a “good” person. If not “good,” then some other generally positive adjective: kind, generous, peaceful, calm, intelligent, focused, motivated, creative, you pick. And if we can’t say we’re always [insert positive adjective], then at least we can say usually.

But post-apocalyptic fiction asks: Are you though? Or are these just stories we tell to make ourselves feel good about ourselves?

How would you react if someone stole your food? In modern society, we get angry or frustrated, but generally, we can go out and get more. What if you couldn’t? What if that was your last loaf of bread? Your last bottle of clean water? How would you react then?

How would you react if someone killed your friend? Now, we’d be enraged, devasted, unforgiving (in many cases). What if your friend was infected with a virulent disease? What if your friend was the one stealing the last food and water because they had nothing?

I think it’s unlikely that we can know with absolute certainty how we might behave, but stories like this can function as thought experiments, to consider various ways of responding. Then, if we ever do come across a similar situation in real life, we will have already thought through various outcomes, and hopefully, are able to make the best choice given the variables.

Reading makes you more empathetic (Source: NIH) because it lets you practice having and managing feelings.

3. They remind us we’re not alone.

It’s the lone wolf who dies—from cold, from heat, from hunger. And in these stories we tell about survival, one theme that carries through is that of community. Those who find others to weather the storms with, are far more likely to survive than those who choose to remain isolated.

I think this is true in any life, not just fictional apocalypses.

Even now, when hyper-individualism is a constant pressure in our society, the truth is that it’s just an illusion. It may feel like someone is a lone wolf, and independent person with a strong sense of self-sufficiency, but that illusion is only possible when you ignore the infrastructure built and maintained by humans.

A person may live alone, spend time alone, figure out ways to get things done without relying on friends and family—but it’s not really self-sufficiency. The reason they can do this is because if their garden dies, they can go to the grocery store; because if they need to move heavy furniture, they can hire movers; because if a winter storm comes, they can heat their house with electricity or oil.

No one exists in isolation, not even if it seems that way.

A hyper-individualist isn’t really self-sufficient; they’re just lonely.

Post-apocalyptic stories often reveal the weakness of aloneness, by showing the impossibility of surviving alone, or highlighting how much luck and good fortune would be required to survive. And the solution to the majority of the challenges faced by characters in these tales, is community.

The story beneath the story.

I think for many genres, whether we’re talking about post-apocalyptic fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, literary fiction, mystery, science fiction, or [input your favorite genre here], there is an element of “practicing” a skill, an emotion, or an internal thought process, that we can’t practice in any other way except through experiencing it in real life. And many of these experiences we don’t want to have in real life, or we can’t access for various reasons.

And as a result, by engaging with the emotions ignited by these stories, we are able to connect with more parts of humanity than ever before. Reading, whether post-apocalyptic stories or otherwise—allows us to more deeply experience what it’s like to be human.

How To Survive The Apocalypse, Part 6: Bartering and Alternative Economies

Congratulations! You’ve made it this far into the apocalypse. The world has crumbled, the banks are long gone, and your credit score is now as meaningless as your old office job. Hope you weren’t planning to Venmo someone for supplies.

The good news? Economies don’t disappear—they just change. The bad news? If you don’t figure out how to trade effectively, you’ll either get ripped off or starve.

Welcome to the world of bartering and alternative economies, where survival is less about what’s in your wallet and more about what you can offer.

Understand What’s Actually Valuable

In a post-collapse world, not everything is worth trading—your collection of rare Funko Pops? Not useful. A working lighter? Now that’s gold.

The most valuable trade items will always be things that people need but can’t easily get anymore. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Fire & Fuel: Matches, lighters, fire starters, propane, alcohol stoves. If it helps people stay warm or cook food, it’s worth something.

• Water Purification: Filters, purification tablets, iodine, and even knowledge of how to find and purify water will make you a sought-after trader.

• Non-Perishable Food: Canned goods, dried meats, rice, beans. If it doesn’t rot and has calories, it’s currency.

• Medical Supplies: Antibiotics, painkillers, bandages, antiseptics. People will trade almost anything to avoid dying from an infected splinter.

• Tools & Repair Materials: Multi-tools, duct tape, sewing kits, nails, rope. The apocalypse is a never-ending DIY project, and supplies will run out fast.

• Vices & Comfort Items: Coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, chocolate—because the end of the world is stressful, and people will pay for a little escape.

• Clothing & Footwear: Warm gear, waterproof jackets, boots. If someone’s feet freeze off, they can’t go scavenging anymore.

• Knowledge & Skills: If you can fix things, grow food, hunt, or provide medical care, you don’t need to hoard supplies—people will trade to keep you around.

Learn the Art of the Trade

Now that you know what’s valuable, it’s time to barter like a pro.

The Rules of Bartering:

✔️ Start High, Settle Lower – If you open with, “I’ll trade you my entire first-aid kit for a single can of beans,” congratulations! You played yourself. Always ask for more than you actually want, then negotiate down.

✔️ Act Like You Don’t Need It – The more desperate you seem, the worse the deal gets. Even if you’re starving, pretend you’re just mildly peckish.

✔️ Trade Small Before You Trade Big – If you need antibiotics, don’t go offering your entire stockpile of food up front. Start with smaller trades first, then work your way to bigger ones when you trust the person.

✔️ Know When to Walk Away – If someone is trying to hustle you, don’t be afraid to leave. There will always be another trader with better terms.

✔️ Be Wary of Too-Good Deals – If someone offers you something way above its value, it probably is too good to be true. Walk away if your gut tells you to.

✔️ Trade Skills, Not Just Goods – If you can sew, fix engines, purify water, or provide medical aid, you are a valuable resource. Trade your expertise wisely.

Alternative Economies—Not Just Bartering

Money may be dead, but systems of value exchange always emerge. Here’s how people will likely trade when traditional cash is gone:

1. Reputation-Based Economies

Ever heard of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”? In many post-collapse communities, trust and goodwill are worth more than gold. If people see you as a valuable, fair, and trustworthy person, they’ll help you without immediate payment—knowing you’ll return the favor.

• How to Thrive in a Reputation-Based Economy:

  • Be useful.

  • Don’t hoard—share when you can.

  • Show up for people in times of need.

  • Don’t betray trust, or you’ll become an outcast.

2. Work-for-Supplies Systems

Some communities will move beyond bartering and instead function on a work-based exchange. This means instead of trading goods, you trade labor:

• You repair someone’s tools in exchange for food.

• You provide security for a settlement in exchange for a place to sleep.

• You help build a shelter in return for medical treatment.

3. Resource-Based Micro-Currencies

If things stabilize a little, people will create their own currencies. These might be:

• Ammo-based economies – Bullets are both a currency and a survival tool.

• Cigarettes, booze, and coffee – Already used as currency in prisons, these will likely become high-value trade goods.

• Metal tokens or barter chips – Some groups may create a system where a certain material (silver, copper, or even bottle caps) acts as a standardized currency.

Trade Smart, Don’t Die

Surviving the post-apocalypse isn’t just about what you have—it’s about how well you trade.

• Learn what’s valuable.

• Negotiate like your life depends on it (because it might).

• Know when to barter, when to give, and when to walk away.

• And most importantly? Be useful. The more people need you, the less likely you are to end up on the wrong side of a bad deal.

Because in a world where money is worthless, being valuable is the real currency.