John Zeitler

Essay Week 2010 runs from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Every year I take a week and write about some topics of interest to me that run slightly more serious than the usual fare on the blog. That’s not to say that games and anime won’t enter into it, but the predominant theme is that this week skews a bit more literary than epistolary. Today’s theme is the waste of a perfectly good course of action, and how to prevent it.

Earlier this week, I ran into a little bit of trouble with my car. It rattled me enough to derail the topic I did have planned for today, which I’ll get to tomorrow. The short version of the story there is that the thermostat coupling on the car broke, and threatened to overheat the engine. I knew from experience that when I saw the temperature gauge rising, I needed to stop immediately and get the thing fixed; the last time I’d let it slide, the car I did it to did not appreciate it one bit, and died a rather spectacular death on Interstate 480 in Cleveland.

As I said, I had not planned for this– but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t prepared for it. I have a membership to AAA, and I’d been rather conservative with my spending over the past few weeks in preparation for, if nothing caught my eye at the con, then repairs and upgrades to my Windows computer. It turns out that the part was not expensive, and that in the end all I really lost was half a day’s work and a mere fraction of what I had saved. It didn’t impact my con plans at all, in the end.

I have a tendency to overplan, though. Most of the time that I’m out of the house these days, I carry around my backpack, which at any given moment contains: a laptop computer, charging cables, headphones, my sunglasses, an umbrella, my DS, my e-reader (or a physical book), a USB drive, some Tylenol, an emergency Red Bull shot, a Sharpie, and a deck of cards. And that’s the “not really going anywhere” loadout; weekdays it also contains my lunch and one or two bottles of soda for the day, which honestly is where the majority of its weight usually comes from when it weighs a ton. Believe it or not, this is down from when I first started carrying a backpack on a regular basis a few years ago. Whenever I’m asked about it, though, my answer is always the same: “Everything in this bag, I’ve needed at some point or another.”

The motto of the Boy Scouts of America is “Be Prepared”. I flunked out of the Boy Scouts early on. But that lesson has always stuck with me. One of the things I really hate experiencing is the feeling of helplessness that comes with knowing you totally did not foresee something happening, and that exact circumstance is what’s going on right now and wrecking your day. To avert that, I tend to let my mind wander into situations where it would take a ludicrous conflagration of unfortunate and tragic coincidences to converge precisely right in order to justify, say, a couple extra hair ties. It turns out, though, I’m not the only person to take preparedness to a bizarre extreme.

Part of the recent resurgence of interest in zombie films and literature stems from a phenomenon and phenomenology study that was featured on Slashdot a few years back. Survivalists were training their students on how to be ready in the exceedingly unlikely event of a zombie apocalypse. The justification was that if you were able to hold out on your own for a couple of weeks while civilization and the military got their stuff together and mounted a rescue operation, all the while fending off the newly-risen undead, you were in theory prepared for almost any eventuality, from fire, to flood, to full-on invasion. The theory has some merit, as there’s little functional difference between a fast-moving cannibalistic corpse driven by eldritch forces, and a human enemy high on adrenaline and God knows what else, screaming towards you with guns blazing.

Then again, I live near Monroeville, which is pretty much Zombie Central, so I could be biased.

The odds of having to get Romero on a horde of shambling zombies are pretty low, even on the day after the Super Bowl, so the preparedness can be a little overspecialized. I also don’t realistically foresee myself needing to know how to fire a gun and having my life depend on it, but stranger things have happened. (Plus, in all honesty, I like shooting games, and I’m fairly good at them, but not terribly fast on the draw.) As with everything, the point of the zombie-apocalypse scenario is meant to serve as an example of the kind of flexible thinking needed for disaster preparedness, and not necessarily as the end goal.

What is the most valuable asset to have in the case of an emergency beyond human reckoning? Is it a firearm, for protection? Is it physical strength, for survivability? Is it medical knowledge, for preventing trivial wounds from becoming deadly? I posit that all of those are nearly unimportant next to the ability to think on your feet and quickly adapt to changing conditions. If you can avoid conflict, engineer solutions, and evade danger, you have no need for those things. If the worst happens, though, you can still come out of it smelling like a rose if you’re smart enough and adaptable enough.

One of my favorite board games of late is Agricola. The game is a very complex and intricate simulation of farming in the Dark Ages, and it is very difficult to do well unless you have a plan from the very outset of the game. The problem is that, even though you have your own plot of land that is untouchable by the other players, and even though the influence of luck on the game is minimal to nonexistent, other players can and will wreck your plans as soon as they get a whiff of what they are– or even just by competition borne of the scarcity of valuable resources. In order to succeed, you need to be able to quickly alter your plans in the event that a critical resource you were eyeing becomes unavailable, or to prevent your rivals from gaining an upper hand from which you might never recover. I don’t win as often as I’d like, but I’m doing a hell of a lot better than I did when I first started.

The point is, having a plan is important, but not nearly as important as knowing when to abandon a plan that’s gone awry and try to salvage what you can. For my part, when I’m caught in a bad situation, or when life throws me a curve, I find myself quickly taking stock of what resources I have at my disposal. I then work under the assumption that I’m going to take the greatest advantage of those resources possible, while maintaining their sustainability. Sometimes this means giving up on a part of the goal I set out to achieve to begin with. Other times, it means cutting my losses and trying to get away with the least amount of damage possible. Regardless, I try very hard not to fall into despair that things are not proceeding exactly as planned. A mood like that is self-perpetuating, unhelpful, and dangerous.

Sun Tzu’s most famous quotation comes to mind: “If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.” Planning without overplanning means knowing what’s coming at you, and knowing what you can and can’t do about it. A more recent military mind, Donald Rumsfeld, added: “There are things we know that we don’t know: the known unknowns. And then there are the things we don’t know that we don’t know: the unknown unknowns.” It’s best to focus on the known unknowns, and account for ways around the answers to those questions. Where adaptability comes into play is when a known unknown rapidly spirals into unknown unknown territory, and being able to turn an unknown into a known is a skill that is only forged by doing it.

For my part, I’m still going to haul around that backpack, with all its junk and all its seemingly useless stuff. Batteries die, ink runs out, and paper burns; but if I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere, with a rescue a long ways off, I’ll be damn glad to have that deck of cards to pass the time.