I have a persistent fear that civilization as we know it is going to collapse and I will have to make my way through its crumbling architecture and try, somehow, to survive.
This is not an entertaining theoretical but a fairly constant and concrete fear. I think about and plan for various kinds of specific disaster all the time. Sort of.
See I don't actually test or implement my plans for survival.
When I lived in northern Canada as a college freshman, for instance, (yes this has been going on for a while) I never actually tried to get through a frigid Edmonton night by sleeping over the exhaust vents of the university library. I just noted every building I passed that had large warm grates, places where the snow wouldn't stick, and I'd think, "oh yeah, I could sleep there." And it would temporarily ease my mind. I could survive one night as a homeless person in The Coldest City on Earth (my TM).
I do not even have the fairly sensible three-day kit - enough food and water assembled to get through a temporary but widespread loss of services to Seattle thanks to earthquake/air strike/tsunami/civil unrest/major power grid failure.
As a scientist this disaster mindset has both helped and hindered me. I can see, as I begin every experiment, about fifty ways it will most likely fail.
This is, of course, unlike my fear that I will suddenly be destitute and abandoned by all friends and family, actually pretty rational. Science is unkind to those of us with a dopamine addiction, and daily my fears are proven grounded in such brutally real ways that I could bar graph them and give you the error bars and chi squared on failure, accompanied by a linear regression showing the correlation between my direst predictions and actual outcomes.
And also, unlike my never-fully-realized plan to have a meeting spot where my friends and I could rebuild society and fight off the hordes of profiteers and militia, when it comes to research, being a negative future nancy leads me to plan my experiments very, very carefully - though not, unfortunately, well enough to consistently achieve success. I would say that my planning maybe shifts the failure rate from 75% down to 65%. 60% on a good day.
It's hard to know if this is worth the extra time and stress that it costs me. But I always have the most beautiful controls.
Lately I have been thinking that I maybe would feel better and even be more productive if I tried to balance my science-worry with my world-worry.
Maybe I could let go of my neurotic planning for every possible experimental outcome, and control for only the top five most likely contingencies. And maybe I could devote a little bit of time to emergency planning - for the top five most likely scenarios.
Maybe I'll put that 3 day kit together finally.
Meanwhile... I don't know that it makes much sense to ponder this one solo. I am now officially taking suggestions from you, the people, about where we should huddle together when the revolution/nuclear winter/zombie apocalypse comes.
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