The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Old Rules Don’t Apply

The Walking Dead – in an apocalypse, who you were means nothing

Okay, this is an oversimplification — If a person finds out you were a mass murderer, or a rapist, or a sadist, they’ll damn sure care about that — but generally speaking, who you were before the outbreak hit won’t mean a damn thing.

Let’s not kid ourselves: There are people out there who think that, because of their social status, or who they know, or who their parents were, or how much money they have, that makes them better than other people. If you’ve heard one person ask, “Do you know who I am?!”
You’ve already heard it too many times.

As Daryl saw in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, that kind of thinking is a quick way to get yourself killed in an apocalypse because those kinds of markers don’t mean anything when the society that they were built around has crumbled. Like I just finished saying in the last entry: Money won’t mean anything anymore, so any “status” built upon that will be equally meaningless.

The things of the pre-apocalypse world that will have meaning will be the emotional connections you have to other survivors and the skills you bring. That’s it. Knowing some blue checkmark on Twitter will mean jack unless that person happens to be in with a group of survivors you just met, same thing with who you are: Unless you have a friend or family member in a group of survivors you encounter, being a celebrity or something like that is no better than being a total nobody, maybe even worse.

What will matter is what skills you had before the outbreak. Doctors, scientists, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, roofers, masons, nurses, cops, soldiers, psychologists, hell, even celebrity chefs can all still have a practical function in a zombie apocalypse, but, simply being a celebrity? What good is that? If you’re not providing something to a group of survivors, you just become another mouth to feed, and that will get old really quick.