a human's need for survival
inspired by my reads of The Road and I, Who Have Never Known Men
We live in interesting, uncertain times. So much so, that it has people wondering why others are marrying, having kids, being happy while chaos dances across the world. I guess this sort of “doomer” mentality makes sense when you truly see no purpose in life, but I’d argue that most humans are not wired to think like that at all. Or rather, we aren’t supposed to go straight to killing ourselves the moment we think times are tough. Humans aren’t built like that.
I’ve been reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, an American classic and an incredibly bleak survival story. I’m more than halfway through—I’ve made it to the part where the father and son find the huge stockpile of food, clothes, and water just as they were on the cusp of starvation. And that was exciting! It made me happy that they finally had a little bit of good in the big, horrible mess of awful they are in.
The world within The Road is one that is hard to fathom, and one that I personally wouldn’t want to live through. A world where murderers, rapists, and pillagers roam the desolate land, taking and destroying the life that remains. The protagonist of The Road is in an even riskier position, due to the fact that he has his young son with him. No parent wants to be put in a situation where your child is going to get brutalized. The wife of the protagonist has already killed herself before the novel’s beginning, not wanting to subject herself to such a fate.
And therein lies the question at hand: why would you want to survive in a situation as bleak, as desolate, as hopeless as this? Why does the protagonist and his son want to keep going forward, despite the terrifying obstacles in their way?
It’s the beauty of human fortitude. Without it, our species wouldn’t have come as far as it has.
With the amount of people saying they would just kill themselves in a time of catastrophe, it also exposes how complacent we’ve become in current society. Americans live comfortably compared to most of the world’s population. In an age of DoorDash, TikTok, and uncontrolled access to the Internet, people have become quite comfortable with their lives.
So when faced with the imagined possibility that they might lose this comfort, it’s straight to doomer mentality and how we’re all better off killing ourselves instead.
Humans Surviving Even When There Is Nothing To Survive For
What’s fascinating about The Road is that, from where I am in the novel (I may end up being wrong), there is truly nothing to survive for. There’s hardly any survivors besides the “bad guys” that the protagonist and his son encounter. There’s no livestock, there’s hardly any fresh water, there’s no civilization. So what’s the point of all this, really?
I believe that what drives humans, at the end of the day, is the possibility for a better future, a more hopeful tomorrow, even when the present seems completely hopeless. This is how we get through warfare and times of actual catastrophe. This is why people love shows like The Walking Dead and Silo. This is why stories about human survival will always resonate because the desire to live and see a better future rests within all of us.
I think this idea is explored more deeply in Jacqueline Harpman’s I, Who Have Never Known Men, where the circumstances are somehow even worse than that of The Road. In Harpman’s book, a young girl is trapped underground with 39 other women being kept alive by guards who give them food. One day, the guards are summoned by a siren (if I remember correctly) while they’re opening the prison cell to give them food. These women are freed, but when they emerge from their underground prison, they find a planet that has absolutely nothing going on. Nothing.
So the protagonist of I, Who Have Never Known Men has no knowledge of civilization, no memories of Earth, no idea of how life is “supposed” to look, and yet she decides to survive anyway. She doesn’t even have a way to further the human race, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting to live. She and the small group of women with her build their own communities and live together, with the group slowly getting smaller and smaller as the women die off.
Even when the protagonist is completely alone, trapped on this planet with no way out, she continues to travel this absolutely barren land (there is seriously nothing on this planet, it’s upsetting), explore, and she ultimately finds a lavish underground bunker that was supposed to be for an important person. We’re not clued in on who this might be, but it’s implied that more people were supposed to live on this planet to populate it and inhabit it, before that plan completely backfired. It has a lot of fancy furniture and good food, which she lives off of for years. But the final scene is when she dies alone, killing herself due to the complications of ovarian or cervical cancer, which is ironic because she had no use for her female reproductive system at all.
So in this book, the protagonist is completely and utterly alone. There’s no predator chasing her down. There’s no inherent danger looming in the shadows anywhere. There’s no people or animals around to hurt her. There’s absolutely nothing for the protagonist to do besides live, eat, drink water, and continue on. This seems to suggest that even when we’re stripped of everything that makes us human—emotions, civilization, relationships, companionship, hobbies, literally everything—humans will still have an innate desire to survive regardless of the circumstances. Despite everything, there can be little slivers of optimism that make us want to continue.
There’s a part in this book where she finds a bus full of the skeletons of guards, all carrying small guides on how to plant crops on this new planet. And after pages and pages of nothing, I got really excited with this development. Wow, skeleton guards! A clue to what might have happened on this planet! What else are we going to discover?
Literally nothing, but that small event was enough to drive the protagonist (and me, reading along avidly) forward. We received a little crumb of excitement and that was enough to power through. It also goes to show that lengths we will go to learn and possess new knowledge. It’s a testament to another hallmark of the human condition: the perpetual curiosity and desire to learn more.
So this circles back to my original question: why would anyone want to live in such horrible environments with nothing to live for?
When there’s even the faintest hope of something, anything really, that will better the current condition, people will continue on. I think this is what drives the father and son in The Road and I think this is what drove the protagonist of I, Who Have Never Known Men. It doesn’t have to be much. It just has to be a little spark of optimism to make humans feel, “things will get better one day, and I want to be there to see it.”
And I know that this sentiment exists in all of us.