10 Ways Life Would Suck as the Last Person on Earth
#10: Finding Shelter
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Your search for a safe place to hunker down could take you anywhere, since there’ll be no guarantee of long-term structural stability in major cities. Without people to maintain large buildings, they’ll eventually fall into disrepair, becoming dangerous, unstable, and uninhabitable. They also won’t have much of a water supply or any electricity, and you run the risk of gas and pipe leaks with nobody around to fix them. With that in mind, the best shelter may be a mobile one - a large vehicle of some kind. Provided you could find enough car batteries and fuel, a vehicle would also give you access to electricity.
#9: Maintaining Clothes
Clothing is another chief concern, but you better ditch any cares you might’ve had for looking fashionable. You’ll want comfortable, warm and all-weather threads. While you should probably try to keep your clothes clean, you’ll be so busy roaming the empty streets looking for other resources this probably won’t be the first thing on your mind. Initially, finding new, clean clothes to wear in abandoned stores will be easy, but if you venture further away from cities, you’ll want to learn how to mend your own clothes, and start doing laundry by hand - which takes a lot more time and energy than you might think.
#8: Scavenging Food
There are only so many five-star fry ups you can make until fresh ingredients run out, so you better make the most of them in those first few days. After that, it’s time to start planning your meals carefully. Once the electricity cuts, all the fridges and freezers will switch off, so you’ll need to grab as much canned food and long-life products you can carry. This also applies to bottled water, as filtration systems will break down, too, and you might end up far away from a reliable source of clean water. Eventually you should learn how to farm, but until you get that down pat, you’ll need as much stockpiled food as possible.
#7: Travelling
We’ve already mentioned that you might find yourself taking shelter in a vehicle, like a van, truck, or ideally an RV, but this isn’t without its own hindrances. Constantly being on the move may be a good plan as you continually pilfer stores and houses for essential resources, but navigating the roads might not be so easy. Depending on the nature of this particular apocalypse, the roads might be full of empty cars, making getting anywhere a lot harder. There’s also the matter of fuel – you’ll have to learn how to siphon it out of other vehicles.
#6: Dangerous Wildlife
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Without us, animal populations will undoubtedly flourish. Humans won’t be there to regulate livestock or hunt, and escaped house pets will start breeding and slowly going feral. Some zoo animals might eventually break out, leaving exotic creatures prowling the city streets. This will make them even deadlier places to go back to, though they may hold the most fruitful opportunities to scavenge for food in desperate times. A world without people could be great for animals, with their habitats no longer under siege by human experience, but dangerous for a lone survivor.
#5: The Need for Weapons
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Now that wildlife has free rein, you’ll need some way to hunt, or at least defend yourself from predators. That means getting your hands on some weapons, which is easier said than done depending on what country you’re in. Lots of nations have such strict regulations on guns, and even without people to guard them, it won’t be easy to break into police stations of military bases to access powerful firearms. If you don’t know how to use a gun, you might have to teach yourself on the fly.
#4: The Lack of Medical Care
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The combination of unfamiliar firearms and unpredictable animals could easily lead to injury. And, in a world with no working hospitals or doctors, even an everyday wound could be deadly. The manufacture of drugs and medicine will’ve stopped a long time ago, and most medical supplies that still exist will sport a use-by date. On the plus side, there won’t be any other humans to spread dangerous disease. But, there’ll also be no-one else to help you should you fall ill. Even if you happened to be a doctor yourself, there’s no guarantee you’d be able to fix whatever injuries you suffer without help.
#3: Accessing Information
With nobody else around, it’ll only be a matter of hours until the entire internet goes dead, making gathering the necessary survival information a million times harder. Sure, there are libraries, but there’s only so many books you can carry around with you, and who’s to say how many you’ll have to read before you find the answer to a simple – but vital – question? Without the ability to do a quick Google search, finding out something basic, like how to filter water, how to build a campfire, or how to hotwire a car, becomes a huge chore.
#2: Entertainment
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When all the surviving is out of the way though, you might find yourself struggling to find something to do; your entertainment options will be seriously limited. Game consoles, televisions, DVD players, even VHS players won’t function, and you won’t be able to go to the movies or see a play for entertainment, either. Your best bet might be hooking up a TV and DVD player to a car battery, but could you really afford to waste power on frivolous things like that? Sure, you’d still have books, and board games - although you’d only have yourself to play against. But digital entertainment would definitely be missed.
#1: Loneliness
In the end, you could do precious little to combat the loneliness. It’s one of the biggest concerns anyone would have when entertaining the idea of being the last person alive. The daily determination to keep yourself healthy might dominate your thoughts, but your primary purpose will also be your only one - because you’ll have nobody to socialise with, laugh with, talk to, and nobody to listen to your ‘End of the World’ anecdotes. All in, even if you do manage to face all the other challenges, the hardest thing might just be not losing your mind . . .
