value
Sunday, Nov. 25, 2012 @ 12:34 a.m.

It's a popular hobby now, to construct a post-apocalyptic plan for the end of 2012. Amy and Kyle are meeting at Squirrleys. Cam is going to sit on the roof of the mill with a shotgun and eat canned beans. For the past several years, my plan has hinged on my (somewhat unbalanced) friendship with my survivalist neighbor who once replied, when asked whether he was prepared for the apocalypse, that he had enough guns and ammo to start and win a small war.

That was our first conversation on the subject, but the most recent one is troubling me in a way unrelated to pandemics and solar flares and zombies. Because something he asked made me worry about more than just my physical well-being come apocalypse time.

Me: "You have the exact, perfect skill set to survive the end of the world."
Dave: "What are you going to contribute?"

I'm concerned about my human value.

I write award-winning essays and speak a little French and bake pies. I know the Northern night sky, have lived happily with nothing and don't take up much space. I sing songs, I right wrongs. My imagination is very healthy: I don't believe in modern government, and I do believe in Santa.

But I would need food. Shelter. Clothing, fuel. Basic necessities, which aren't a focus of my general daily activities. So much of my time is spent impractically, I feel like I'm practicing all the wrong things. I'm relying heavily on Rousseau's social contract to acquire what I need to survive: working for money, and using that money to buy stuff. My stockpile of canned goods won't make up for years of neglecting survival as a requirement -- I'm not equipped. If I had to grow or kill my own food, find safe shelter, collect firewood or kerosene or geothermal energy and dress for the elements without Google and eBay to guide me, how could I possibly excel? How could I make myself indispensable?

Maybe it's time to face the fact that I wouldn't last on my own, and that I probably don't deserve to. My current skill set is not compatible with the functional realities of a post-apocalyptic earth. The resourceful, capable, hard-bodied Dave Barretts of this world will survive, and should. We can't begrudge them that. And we definitely can't hope that they take pity on us, and let us tag along.

I'll have to take a page out of Henry David Thoreau's book -- his actual book, Walden, where he went to live alone in a tiny forest cabin. His aim was not to find out whether he was capable of it, but rather to discern the value of doing so and, in finding that, his own:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Less being. Less method acting. Less math and money and HBO.

More less.

"That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest."
- also Thoreau