4

When The Pack Is Gone

There are seven billion people on the planet. The virus/holocaust wipes out nearly all of them. A few hundred thousand stragglers are left on the planet and they're dropping off, too. We're not built to be alone, and as appealing as the thought of every annoying douchebag you hated in the Before Times being wiped off the face of the earth is, being this isolated would suck. Humans have built an unspeakably complex society, with every aspect of our lives directly linked to the efforts of others.

How much of your day is made tolerable by the efforts of other people? Coffee brewers, podcasters, plumbers, and pot dealers -- All. Gone. Humans feed off each other, and when the stream of information is cut, the "human" in us starts to fade out. Will Smith's character in I Am Legend would be delusional and have no impulse control. You kind of see it in his tableau of mannequins in the video store that he's assembled to achieve some semblance of normalcy. In reality, his madness would be much more like that of a man in long-term solitary confinement, but the cell is the entire city of New York. Loneliness would soon start to chip away at your sanity.

Claire Greenway/Getty
Would have lost his mind and eaten his dog within a month.

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?"

3

When The Rule Book Has Been Pulverized

Think of Negan from The Walking Dead -- a total sociopath who has without a doubt reached his full potential in the post-apocalypse. In times like these, fairness becomes a luxury. Not everyone has access to resources. The survivor will have no one to answer to but himself/herself. With scarce resources and death perched on your shoulder, morality might have to take a backseat to staying alive.

AMC
The very model of mental health.

When some semblance of community is created, you want to be at the top of the hierarchy. It's like the cliche advice people in movies always receive before they go off to prison: Pick a fight with whoever looks like they're in charge to establish your spot at the top of the pecking order. And there's good reason to be at the top.

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.

2

When The Brain Is Trapped

Max, specifically in Fury Road, is a brooding anti-hero with explosive fits of violence and rage because the scary little voices in his head won't leave him alone. These are the voices of those he failed and whom he lost. For survivors who lived a healthy happy life, who travelled and fell in love, who were part of a community and liked it, the apocalypse will fill their heads with a thousand terrible voices.

Warner Bros.
You can tell he's crazy because he's wearing a black leather jacket in the Australian desert wasteland.

1

When You Are Out Of Reasons

In a post-apocalyptic world there will always be one bullet in your gun reserved for yourself. A survivor would feel an itchy trigger finger within weeks, once the hopelessness really set in. Hopelessness will be the natural response to an apocalypse. A survivor may (justifiably) not see the point of trudging through and living for ... what? The abyss staring back at you? You're not, even by the broadest definition of the term, keeping your shit together. Reality is warped and your brain has never experienced anything like this before.

Givaga/iStock
"Oh, pointless, hopeless abyss! Promise you'll never leave me!"

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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