Community and the Apocalypse
Why prep for the wilderness when your neighbours could loan you some loo roll?
You don’t really learn to prepare until after an emergency.
The day after the Tohoku earthquake in 2011 — after I had walked for three hours from my office in the outskirts to my home in Shinjuku, upstream against waves of people moving the opposite direction to their homes in the suburbs — I walked into my local supermarket to find the shelves empty. The triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown had also resulted in the double-whammy of broken supply chains and panic-buying.
Our house was intact, as most were in Tokyo. However, we had very little food in the cupboards because we would normally walk to the supermarket five minutes away to shop for each meal. A few restaurants were open, and there were still a few items on the supermarket shelves. And luckily for me, what remained tended to be imported Western food rather than Japanese staples — the kinds of things I might have bought anyway. The rice was gone, but the pasta was still there. We were not going to starve.
Toilet paper, of course, was hard to come by.
Living through a disaster is a trial-by-fire, as many others learned during the pandemic, nine years later. But in the weeks following that earthquake, even as things began to normalise, I started making an effort to keep our pantry stocked. We bought a wind-up radio. We kept a bag packed with clothes, camping gear, and important documents just in case things in Fukushima got worse.
We prepared. I still try to stay prepared today, although I’d never call myself a ‘prepper.’ I just keep an extra bag of rice and a pack of loo roll in the back room.
Like others of my generation, I grew up under the all-consuming shadow of a possible nuclear holocaust. It hung over our heads in a way that would be difficult to explain to younger generations.
Except it isn’t that difficult to explain, at all. Because here we are, talking about it all over again. The apocalypse. Or is it the apocalypses? Environmental meltdown. Once-stable governments leaning into authoritarianism. A nascent World War skulking in the reeds. Super-bugs and mutating viruses. For the old-school prepper, the lyrics are different, but the song is the same: Times are strange and uncertain, and if you want to survive, you must do it alone. Hoard, defend yourself, get out of the city and hide.
The central tenet of the ‘prepper’ mindset is that civilisation is fragile. The moment an emergency hits, all bets are off. The structure of society will fall apart, and after that, it will be every person for themselves. Preppers are prepared to hunker down in the forest after all human support has failed and fight off the cordyceps-infected, the zombies, the aliens, the corrupt government forces. They are prepared to give up their home for a tent; their toilet paper for leaves.
It’s a tantalisingly masculine, individualist outlook. And it maps to the way we tell stories. Our narratives follow a single survivor who is smarter, better prepared, and more experienced than everyone else. This person uses their skill and cunning to survive alone. Perhaps they save a few helpless people, while the unprepared masses die around them. Everyone wants to be the main character.
But hidden in this idea of a fragile civility is also the tacit acceptance of a hierarchy of care: we must take care of ourselves and our families first, then care for our friends and social connections, then, maybe, if we have time, we can think about our neighbours and physical community.
But what if the opposite is true?
The more uncertain things become, the more people consider preparing for uncertainty. Zoe Williams’ recent article in The Guardian looks at the prepper scene as it is developing in Britain, and points out that the image of the paranoid gun-fanatic, ready to abandon society for the forest, doesn’t align so strongly with Brits — or with the current state of unease. The people visiting ‘prepper’ shops come from all walks of life and all political leanings.
The one thing they have in common is knowing that when disaster strikes, our systems of supply and communication often take a hit as well. To what degree? No one can be sure. That’s why they prepare.
What do you do if you feel the need to be prepared for disaster? Well, beyond stocking your pantry with nonperishables and buying a first-aid kit, you make your community resilient.
In an article focusing on supply chain fears due to US sanctions, George Monbiot talks about how to do this:
Start with this principle: don’t face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbours, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without.
Monbiot goes into a little more detail on building these kinds of connections, but the point is that resilience in our systems doesn’t begin and end at the national level. Again and again, the COVID-19 lockdowns showed us that neighbourhoods that helped each other fared better and came out of it stronger. In a community that communicates, those who have extra resources can offer more. Those who have time can donate it. The national supply chain becomes a local one.
It will be a small and inconvenient chain, and there will be petty squabbles and shortages and accusations of doing too little. But it’s a far more robust fallback than fleeing to the Scottish Highlands, living in a tent, and poaching sheep.
The fear that society will break down, that the veneer of good manners will peel away until we are all in a battle royal for resources, is less indicative of the reality of our social behaviour and more indicative of the kind of person who believes that violence is the human default setting. The people read Lord of the Flies in school as if it were a psychology textbook.
People who fear looting and violent opportunism fear it because that is what they would do. They have seen looters on the evening news and said, “This is the inevitable outcome. Deep down, people are monsters, so we must behave like monsters if we want to survive.”
It isn’t true. Nothing about our history says this is true. Human history is the history of social groups and mutual support. We have always lived in groups. It is our cooperation that has kept us alive and continues to do so.
Yes, we also have a history of violence. Wars and conflict are, globally speaking, a constant. Yet, every conflict can be traced back to a reason: fear, scarcity, competition. If war were our default, we wouldn’t be here.
Even crime is an outlier of human behaviour. Every day, 68 million people in the UK get on with their lives, peacefully and sociably. But our media steeps us in tales of violence and murder because that creates engagement. And so, crime begins to feel so commonplace that it’s all we can see.
Violence is the human response to stressors that cannot be solved by cooperation. Community and collaboration are, and have always been, the default.
Before I moved to Tokyo, I’d done some Japanese language and culture lessons. I remember reading that a person moving into a new house or flat would bring a gift around to their neighbours as an ice-breaker and a gesture of good faith — hikkoshi aisatsu, or the “move-in greeting.” Similar traditions exist in many cultures. Sometimes existing neighbours bring gifts to the newcomer. Sometimes the newcomer does the giving. Sometimes, when people aren’t sure what to do, no one makes the first move, and everyone remains strangers.
Each time I moved house in Tokyo, I thought about doing hikkoshi aisatsu. Yet, every time, my awkwardness and outsider identity made me hesitate until, eventually, it felt too late.
However, in all that time, despite the many neighbours I’d seen move in and out around me, no one brought me a gift, either. Like many other traditions, hikkoshi aisatsu is falling out of modern use, especially in the biggest cities.
If any of the occupants of our townhouses had done this, it might have opened the door to checking up on each other after the Tohoku disaster. But as far as I know, no one did. We checked in with our friends and family over unstable internet connections, packed bags, and stocked up on dried goods alone — the very behaviour that traditions like hikkoshi aisatsu are designed to avoid.
Despite all of this, the Japanese pulled together during the crisis like never before. There was a warming in the usual Tokyo coolness — more small-talk in the shops and even on the streets. There was more acknowledgement between strangers, too: People met one another’s gaze, smiled sadly, shrugged over the empty supermarket shelves. The earthquake had brought out a willingness to help that replaced the usual anonymity of Tokyo streets. It brought out people’s humanity. At least for a little while.
I believe that if we had really needed help from our neighbours, they’d have given it — even without my hikkoshi aisatsu.
Most of the time, we don’t get to choose our neighbours. Yet the physical neighbourhood, in all of its dysfunctional glory, is where we will likely find ourselves in an emergency.
In a connected neighbourhood, the many can support the few. It is not a hierarchy or a pyramid. It is a web. By looking out for your neighbours, you are looking out for your family — at least the ones that live under your roof. And your more distant family are being looked after by their neighbourhood. You don’t need to be friends with everyone. You just need to be helpful when help is needed.
It’s an idea that runs counter to the ‘take care of number one’ survivalist instinct. But there are other choices in between the extremes of the large-scale nation-state and selfish individualism. And for most of human history, those were the spaces where we lived.
In a zombie apocalypse, short-term survival might very well depend on hiding in the woods. But the more mundane emergencies of earthquakes, severe weather, internet outages, and food-supply disasters don’t require hunting wild game or learning to build a lean-to; they require cooperation and sharing of resources. They require flour and ibuprofen. They require baby formula and loo roll.
Even the apocalyptic Walking Dead series made this point over and over: We are stronger together. We may differ on how to govern ourselves and what our values are. We may clash with other groups. But when the complex systems we’ve built begin to fail at national or global levels, the local can be a backstop.
And you don’t have to bring a gift to make it happen. ◾️
What I’m reading: I’m in the middle of Caryl Lewis’s addictive novel Drift. It was one of those books I’d forgotten I had. So I opened it to the first page to “see what it was about” and found myself on page 150 at two a.m. I’m meant to be working on my own novel, and I am, but Drift keeps pulling me back in. Lewis’s characters are wonderful, and the pacing relentless.
What I’m watching: My wife and I finally finished the Fear the Walking Dead series after realising that we’d only watched up until Season 6. I had genuinely enjoyed the first few seasons, but found Season 6 a little off, which probably explains why we hadn’t jumped on the opportunity to finish it as the newer ones came out.
Now, I wish I hadn’t.
I’m generally a positive person with a high tolerance for breezy entertainment. But the final two seasons of Fear the Walking Dead are so irretrievably bad, so dunderheaded, so patronising and nonsensical and scattered, that we just sat in disbelief through most of it, occasionally pausing the show to stare at each other and check that we hadn’t missed anything. It was like fan fiction written by someone who’d only read the Wikipedia entry.
It was so atrocious that we found ourselves checking to see if the writers had changed. And yes: at the point where the show nosedived into gibberish, there were indeed new writers. I can only assume that the showrunner was also trying to shoehorn in material that had been part of development back when they thought they might get 10 or 11 seasons.
Characters act entirely out of character. Unnecessary character arcs are invented and completed — sometimes in a single episode. The entire cast snipe and moan at each other over invented complaints. Dialogue sounds more like the writers explaining their intention than anything a human might say. Characters face their trauma by literally facing the same trauma all over again, because the writers apparently have nothing else in the bag. And the final Big Bad tries to kill Alicia and her mother, all because Alicia once saved his wife’s life. You see, the wife later died trying to help someone else, and thus, the Big Bad blames Alicia for giving his wife a sense of false hope.
Yes, this is as head-scratchingly obtuse as it sounds.
And speaking of Alicia — arguably the show’s main character up until now — she disappears for the entire season and shows up in the final five minutes. Not to save the day. Oh no. Just in time to have a happy reunion with her mother, and to leave Victor Strand some flowers and disappear again. (This, after the show spent ages building a familial bond between Victor and Alicia.)
Alicia is also the only character to ever have survived being infected by a bite, and yet this is mentioned with a shrug in the final scenes.
Am I ranting? Yes. It is a rant-worthy, brain-taxing trainwreck of a conclusion.
What I’m doing: Last week, I attended a Page to Stage event to watch a script I had written performed for an audience. Page to Stage London is a scratch-night on steroids: Four 10-minute scripts are chosen to be performed; actors and directors are given the script a month ahead but have only 90 minutes to put it together on the night of the show; and a panel of three industry experts critiques each performance for the writer.
My script was a strange little idea — I wanted to create a frustrating conversation of misunderstandings between a cat and his owner, but play the cat as though he were a human roommate. I wanted the audience to know he was a cat, but also see him as a human. A freeloading roommate, perhaps. It is meant to be funny, but it takes a serious turn in the final moments as frustrations boil over.
I hadn’t expected it to even be chosen. But it was. And it did well.
Look, I’m trying to be better at blowing my own horn. When I say it did well, I mean it was kind of insane. The jokes landed, the ending raised a gasp, the audience roared, and the panel gushed over it. One of them said that if it was on in the West End, she’d pay to see it. Another teared up. I’m not joking.
I didn’t even know how to react. It took me about two days to come down off the high.
The trouble with having that kind of success is that you feel the pressure to outdo yourself. And with people like me, the pressure to outdo yourself quickly turns into the inability to get anything done because … what if that was it? What if that was my 15 minutes?
So, let’s raise a glass to the liquor of praise and the hangover of impostor syndrome. The only way to get hold of another bottle is to keep on writing.