Why This Climate Doomer Won’t Learn Survival Skills
It’s not only that I do not plan to survive the Climate Catastrophe…
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’m an old dog, and survival skills would be new tricks for me.
Of course, the aphorism about old dogs is not true. I have learned new tricks lately. In my profession, I’ve learned new programming architectures, frameworks, and libraries. In my spiritual life, I am constantly learning new relationship skills (whether I want to or not!).
Motivation is the differentiator. I am motivated to learn new professional skills because I find my profession, software engineering, endlessly fascinating, and because I get paid good money to do so … and I need money to enjoy the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I am motivated to learn new relationship skills because I want to keep my primary partner relationship healthy and joyful.
I’m just not motivated to learn survival skills. They are not something I enjoy. They smack of exercise and physical exertion, which I loathe. I do the minimum exercise necessary (some yoga and walking) to keep my sciatica from flaring up and my back and neck from aching, and that’s it.
If I thought that the survival skills I could learn would preserve my comfy lifestyle for significantly longer, maybe I would do the work. But I’m not going to do all that work just so I can survive like an animal.
If you enjoy practicing and wielding the skills necessary for survival in a crisis and resource shortage situation, good for you! Learn, practice, enjoy!
If you love life so much that you will endure much to preserve it, then start learning survival skills, even if you don’t enjoy it, because you are going to need them.
If you feel responsible for preserving the lives and happiness (to whatever extent possible) of loved ones, hone your survival skills so you can help them survive. By all means, do!
As for me, I’m looking forward to wrapping up my life and doing the dirt nap. I’ve no desire to resort to heroic measures to prolong it. And I’ve got no kids or close family to take care of. There’s only my partner Misha and she can take care of herself, if she wants to. (No survival skills there, either.)
We learn new things when they are important to us. I learned more calculus grading calculus homework papers as a teacher’s assistant than I ever did when I took the class the year before. I had to. (I quickly found who the smartest kid in the class was, and used their paper as an answer guide. When they got one wrong, things got embarrassing for me!) Survival skills are just not important to me.
I am struck by the ending of the amazing book “Earth Abides” (1949) by George R Stewart, which was strongly recommended by Medium author Richard Crim in response to my article Essential Climate Change Fiction. Slight spoiler ahead: I think Stewart is right when he illustrates how the generation born into the après collapse world will learn the skills they need to survive in that world — and they will not learn the skills we need today in our world such as reading and history and advanced mathematics.
I’m not going to make it in the après collapse world anyway. I’m too thoroughly adapted to the world I grew up in. I’m an old dog and it looks like the time for me and my world is up. The next generation will learn their survival skills in a much different world and it will seem perfectly natural to them.
If you are a young or middle-aged dog right now, you are in a tough spot in a transitioning world. Good luck and god bless.
— Lannie Rose, July 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used heavily for research, but not at all for writing (except as a thesaurus)
