The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Giving up is not an option

As the communities in The Walking Dead are hammered by misfortune, we learn that, in spite of how bad things get, giving up IS NOT an option.

When it rains (Or, in this case, snows) in a zombie apocalypse, it pours.

After losing ten members of their communities to Alpha’s bloodlust, The Kingdom facing raging fires, followed by their pipes finally breaking down, The Alliance is given a blizzard to serve as the topping of this calamity sundae.

With all of this, plus the possibility of being forced into a formal war with The Whisperers, one might think it a good time to consider the option of just giving up…

…Except, you’d be wrong, because, giving up in a zombie apocalypse is not an option. Giving up is failure.

Your goal is to survive; if you give up, it means you are, ultimately, failing at achieving that most basic (But most crucial) of goals: Survival.

Life is, was, and will always be a struggle. You must always fight to survive, as everyone before us had to do. If you want to ensure the living outlast the dead, you can’t consider giving up as something that’s even on the table.

As I said last week, nothing’s easy, and, don’t misunderstand me: I know that, in the bleak world of a zombie apocalypse, it will, at times, get difficult to survive. When faced with societal collapse, horror, death, loss, and time, there may be a part of you that just wants to let the world swallow you, and stop the struggle.

But, you see, there will always be forces, even in a normal world, that tries to drag us down into the abyss. We need to be strong, everyday, and resist whatever those forces are that want us to quit. We only get one life, and we can’t just give it up, instead, we must always fight back against the voices that tell us to.

Those voices will always seem loudest after something especially bad happens — Your base is destroyed, when you encounter hostiles, when you lose someone you care about — but, as my mom taught me when I was little: “It isn’t about how many times you get knocked down, it’s about how many times you pick yourself back up.”

You can’t let whatever these tragedies might be take you down. So long as you can still draw breath, so long as you can still move, so long as you can still fight the dead, you have a chance, you have an opportunity to keep going and live on, having been made a little bit tougher for surviving the latest disaster.

You will need to be tougher, too, because, the day will come when the apocalypse will end. That’s right, end. Nothing lasts forever, and the dead won’t be any different. They’ll eventually decay, and, when the last zombie is gone, there will still be people left behind, and they will need to be tough to rebuild the world the dead destroyed.

Now, before I finish, I want to elaborate on why giving up is not an option: Giving up is not an option because…it’s not a solution.

Do you think that giving up solves anything? It doesn’t. Giving up is death. Death is not a solution. It is the ultimate problem.

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that you’re part of a group, if you give up, that just leaves the rest of your group, maybe even your family, with more problems! If you give up, you just leave behind a bunch of problems for everyone else to clean up: You’re gone, they now have to deal with that loss, they now have one less person to help fight the dead, and one less person to help work to keep everything together. That is not a solution.

No one ever said the zombie apocalypse would be easy, but, difficult or not, the one thing you can’t do is give up. Giving up doesn’t make things better, it makes things worse. Giving up is not a solution, and that means it’s not an option.

And that’s our Survival Rule Of The Week! Hopefully, you’ve gained a little insight into all the various things you’ll need to look out for. If you like this and want to find out more rules to survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!