The stress of being forever on high alert, making fast choice after fast choice, takes its toll. Decisions must be made with a cool mind but the action is high intensity, and that needs tunnel vision. Despite what Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson may have you believe, it is impossible to keep up. It is a punishing and brutal exercise which will break you.

Remember the dude who had to chop off his own arm to save himself because he got it stuck between a literal rock and a hard place? In the apocalypse, situations like that are your whole life. Your daily schedule will be something like:

1) Wake up.

2) Kill someone's beloved pet for breakfast.

3) Fight over the carcass with an emaciated kid.

4) Cry.

5) Cry with gun in mouth until exhausted.

6) Sleep.

7) Repeat.

GrashAlex/iStock
"Hm. I'm in the mood for gun metal for breakfast."

The assumption is that this will become routine, but the post-apocalyptic world is unpredictable. The brain can adapt to almost anything but only if that thing happens regularly. Almost every day, a survivor would have to make a choice that would have brought them to the point of tears and vomit in their pre-apocalyptic life. Right now, in our modern world of ultimate comfort and convenience, do you have a hard time deciding what to watch on Netflix? Then good luck making a decision when you're starving and one of your fellow survivors starts to look like a giant roasted turkey.

The Lone Wanderer type is a favorite of the post-apocalypse genre. It's what the Fallout series is all about. Max Rockatansky of the Mad Max series has a better relationship with his car than he does with other people. The sole survivor trudges through the [insert your preferred wasteland], finding it in them to somehow trudge on. But what post-apocalyptic fiction is saying about Lone Wanderers is that they basically have a superpower. They've somehow been able to remain relatively sane without humanity's regular social structures. No amount of survival training can prepare you for a potential lifetime of loneliness and sorrow. Tom Hanks in Cast Away is so desperate for anything resembling human companionship that he inadvertently builds a friend out of a volleyball and his own blood, and gets into an argument with it. It feels so human to argue with someone again.

20th Century Fox
"What you looking at, bro? You wanna fight, bro?"

Extreme isolation fractures our reality and makes it impossible to make sane, rational decisions. What I'm saying is, if the shit goes down and the life of everyone you know and have ever met is extinguished in the blink of an eye, the first thing you should do is find an object with a face, like a teddy bear or an action figure, and formally introduce yourself. You two are going to become lifelong friends eventually, might as well get a jump on it now. You're going to need each other.

In a post-apocalyptic universe the dirty work isn't just hard physical labor. It's giving someone an order to do something morally repugnant so that you don't have to do it yourself. You never have to be nice to anyone ever again. Sounds like a dream, until you realize that no one ever has to be nice to you either. What's important to remember is that this is familiar. The last remnants of humanity in you may be the glorious history of remorselessness in the relentless search for power.

PTSD will plague survivors. The relentless onslaught of destruction and loss will devastate the human mind. It is over, everywhere, and there will be no recovery. The moment they watched their world die will never leave them; it'll replay in their heads, day and night. Even if things get better, which they probably won't, that unimaginable moment will trap them in their own mind. Take note of how bad you felt when you lost a friend or relative. Now extend that to everyone you ever knew, and extend that further to the rest of the world.

There will be hunks of time where the trivialities of survival will take center stage, but sleep will suck and sometimes separating the living nightmare from the horrors of past ones will be impossible. The severity will be on a scale never before seen. Hope you like living in a prison of your own sadness!

This is how the apocalypse manufactures War Boys. Martyrdom is the only way to live in a barren wasteland populated by the beaten and broken. The cult of death will promise better; it'll make you feel like you're a part of something larger than your sad, lonely existence. At the very least it will give you peace. This way you can let go of your struggle to survive a little and spread it among your new larger family of psychos. Sure, in your past life you never would have pillaged settlements and stolen food from the mouths of children, but these people are your new family. Without them you are nothing but a dusty face streaked with tears. You'll do whatever it takes to fit in with the cool kids.

Warner Bros.
Every family has its own quirks.

So when the big one finally hits you want to be the conspiracy theorist standing in Yellowstone, arms wide open, embracing the volcanic ash. Do not run, do not huddle and make a plan. Just close your eyes and picture the gates of Valhalla, because even if you're not sure if there's such a thing as an afterlife there's no better time than now to find out for yourself.

For more check out 5 Popular Zombie Survival Tactics (That Will Get You Killed) and 6 Sensible Things You Should Never Do in a Zombie Outbreak.

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