The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: It’s Always People

Tales of the Walking Dead Amy/Dr. Everett

The only worse than not having people is losing them to the walking dead.

As we watched the friendship evolve between Dr. Everett and Amy, we learned that one thing both had in common was that they had both lost people close to them in the apocalypse. For Amy’s part, the memories of those fallen friends served to help motivate her to carry on and cherish the people that she still had in her life. In the case of Dr. Everett, those losses were what motivated him to carry on his research into the dead and his hopes to understand them better, but also, it seemed like they were his catalyst for becoming a recluse and actively trying to push people away. As Amy seemed to have rightly assessed, Dr. Everett’s misanthropy seemed like a defense mechanism, a way to keep himself from getting hurt.

This raises the question: In a zombie apocalypse, is it better to never have people around you or to have had people at one time but to lose them to the dangers of the apocalypse?

Neither one are a terribly great prospect, as both of them will, inevitably, affect you psychologically, and both have the potential to be a detriment to your survival in the long term. While it’s bad to be isolated during the apocalypse, it may end up being more traumatic to lose someone, as there’s a very good chance that their demise will not be a pleasant one, and you will not only have to deal with the loss of someone you cared about but also, the horrible memory of how they died.

Honestly, I’m not sure what you can do about these problems. On the one hand, you can take steps to keep your mind occupied (Like writing in a journal, perhaps), to try to hold back the wear isolation can have on you, and on the other, you can try to focus on what you know or think your fallen loved ones would have wanted you to do (Rather than their death), and use that to motivate you. But, as for a surefire solution? I don’t know one.

What I can do, at the very least, is make sure you’re aware of these problems before they occur. This way, you can try to prepare your own solutions so that, should you have to, you have your own ideas for dealing with them. Sometimes, the best way to deal with a problem is to know that it’s there before you meet it, so you can prepare and brace yourself for them as best as possible.