Angus of the Apocalypse

Mind wandering gone awry

I’m trying to spend less time on my phone. I have discovered that this makes me an incredibly unlikeable person—quick to judge people on the train, generally smug about my rollover data balance, passing the burden of ordering Ubers and photographing core memories onto the people around me. The problem with ‘living in the moment’ is that a lot of your moments have to be spent telling people that that’s what you’re doing. Plus I’m bored.

The reason is to do more ‘mind wandering’, a vaguely defined pseudo-neuroscience sort of thing that’s apparently like jogging but for your synapses. I heard about it on a health-adjacent self-help podcast. Pretty sure it’s illegal to lie on a self-help podcast. Unmediated, stimulus free thought roaming is supposed to help your brain to process information, form connections, access cobwebbed nooks in your subconsciousness, communicate with animals, pick winning stocks, microwave popcorn without touching it, and so on.

What has happened instead is that, without my phone around, I’ve found myself with enormous amounts of time and space to daydream about zombie apocalypses.

This is the problem with brains: they have a mind of their own. Even though I’m a squeamish, cowardly city boy with chronic sinus issues who would not thrive in any kind of survival situation, on long and ostensibly enriching (but really just boring) walks around Newtown, my brain keeps serving up outlandish apocalyptic hypotheticals and asking me what I’d do. Die (quickly) is the answer a lot of the time. But some of the scenarios are fun to sit with.

I’m hoping that writing them all down will free up my synapses for some higher-grade and more enlightened mind wandering—fanciful medical inventions, impossible maths problems, where is Wally, that kind of thing. At the very least, it’s another month’s blog post that’s all but written itself. Here we go.

Alien Invasion

The universe is so vast that the chance of bumping into one alien, let alone a whole armada with weird tentacle guns, are vanishingly small. And yet every year there’s a new sci-fi blockbuster, featuring some freakish intergalactic goobers hellbent on harvesting our uranium or our organs or whatever.

Hollywood seems to think that there are two strategies when aliens invade: submit or rebel. I believe there is actually a secret and less televised third option, which is to offer to do their marketing. I work in communications, and if there’s one area that hostile extraterrestrial invaders tend to fall short in our science fiction, it’s in nuanced brand awareness and key messaging. Take the Daleks, for example—as in, the lethal murder robots from Doctor Who who wheel around screeching “Ex-ter-min-ate” at anything with a pulse. If your only public facing message is… homicidal, well, I’m sorry to tell you, you’re not going to get very far with the public. That’s where I come in. I can write persuasive emails, develop case studies to humanise the Daleks, maybe get a podcast going. By simply betraying my species and my planet, I can (at long last) put my arts degree to good use and win favour with the aliens.

Sounds simple, but it’s never as easy as you think to pitch a Director of PR role to a conquering extraterrestrial armada. There will be plenty of survival challenges along the way. The only real “weapon” I have at my disposal is passive aggression, and I don’t think that sarcastic post-it notes will be able to deflect a cosmic death ray? I will have to hide. Flee. Duck. If I can make it through the first few annihilating waves, all I’ll have to do is connect with the occupying force on LinkedIn. Slam dunk.

Survival outcome: Eviscerated by lasers one month into the occupation, trying to give a foot soldier my résumé.

Zombie Apocalypse

I give zombie media an extremely wide-berth. The undead give me the ick. I want to be far, far away from whatever experimental vaccine or radioactive mushroom mutation sets the zombie train in motion. But I have a basic understanding from pop culture of what it takes to survive. First, a good narrative arc. Second, a kind of gruff, buccaneering do-it-yourself approach to the new world order. It helps to also have military training, limited dietary requirements, crisis first aid skills, an ongoing sense of where “true north” is without the aid of a compass, and the ability to play hardball in the savage post-apocalyptic barter economy. I possess exactly zero of these qualities. Zero. On top of all that, once my orthotics break down, I’m going to be mildly uncomfortable with every single step I take. And you better believe I’ll let the other survivors know about it.

My entire strategy, literally my only hope, is to find and ingratiate myself with a group of jocks. Once there, I’ll just have to be a good team man. I’ll fill up people’s water bottles, I’ll have an endless supply of cliff bars and hydralyte. I could write pithy little blog posts for their amusement, I could juggle while they clap and throw coins at me. Importantly, I’ll seem like I’m always willing to sacrifice myself for my comrades while being extremely careful never to actually put myself in any real danger. Deadweight, and secretly deeply selfish, but on the surface good for everyone’s morale.

Survival outcome: After a year or so, attempts to monetise my blog don’t go down so well and I’m sent out as bait for a zombie ambush.

Antibiotic resistant superbug

We can save ourselves some time on this one and just say that two years ago I got sinusitis so often that the medical clinic I went to literally had me on file as “Ankus Macdonald.” I think I’ll be an early casualty.

Survival outcome: Bleak.

The TV Show Alone

Alone is the most physically and psychologically compelling reality TV show in the market. Sorry, MAFS. Ten contestants are dropped into extremely unforgiving terrain with a few necessary survival items and a camera. Then they just try to stay alive in total isolation—the last one standing wins. That’s it. That’s the whole show. Contestants are almost exclusively enthusiastic survivalists who craft innovative shelters, hunt and gather food, and fight their own demons for weeks and months at a time. At the end of all of that, the winner gets $200,000.

Coincidentally, you couldn’t pay me enough money to participate in this show. Fun to watch, not fun to do. Contestants are almost always eliminated for hubris related reasons. Good news! I don’t have that. No way will I try to build a fancy stone house or launch headfirst into the bracken because I have a ‘good feeling’ about finding a better fishing spot. I’m just going to locate drinkable water and lie down. Do your worst, mother nature. I’ll eat grass. I will lie completely still and expend no calories. It won’t be very good TV, though.

Survival outcome: Exactly as many days as it takes to perish from starvation, I guess.

Artificial Intelligence Takes Over

Chat GPT and I have been in a (fairly one-directional) feud since its very beginning, and in many ways I would feel a great deal of righteous vindication if the robots were to actually rise up and overthrow the government. ‘See!’ I’d yell, as sentient flying drones try to inject wires into our brain stems. ‘I told you something like this would happen!’

I think that being Matrix-ed, or otherwise enslaved by AI, is the only apocalyptic scenario where I might actually fight back. But, like, at a distance, like smug guerilla marketing campaigns about reducing screen time. I could brag to other survivors about how I actually uninstalled Instagram in the weeks leading up to the uprising. The key to survival is to have a long list of past IT grievances stored in my mind—not only will this give me the motivation I need to keep fighting the good fight, it’ll also function as a list of weak-points for our machine overlords. To give a taste of their own medicine, I mean. I’ll overload their RAM or whatever! I’ll make their bluetooth devices have trouble connecting to each other for some reason! Take that, you stupid robots!

Survival outcome: Don’t see myself getting much more than three days of glorious resistance in before I am deleted.