Who are you without your job title?

I’m not a doomsday person – but I enjoy the philosophical inquiries these scenarios pose to give us a glimpse into what shapes our humanity (or not).

I’ve started asking friends and founders the question of: what role would you play in a post-apocalyptic village if you couldn’t rely on your job title or have the leverage of digital support or comforts of modern living?

The answers reveal a lot about a person!
Hidden skills they might have, their orientation around safety, their level of ambition, how well they collaborate, how much they want to lead, and what they would deem worthwhile working towards. It’s actually a great founder match-making interview question.

So next time you’re out over drinks – ask the people across from you: if I invited you into my post-apocalyptic village, what role would you play?

Take a 5 minute break….

INSIGHT (what we need)

Our true nature shows up in the way we relate and take care of each other. 

Imagine being thrown into a societal collapse. Governments have fallen, stock markets crash, catastrophes ensue, citizens hoard, and people run for the hills. Once everything has settled in the aftermath, villages form to stabilize the chaos in interest of our collective survival. 

Bear with me, I know this isn’t a pleasant start. 

After a period of destabilization, systems will eventually strive towards a rebalancing. So are the laws of nature. And in a world that feels on the brink of massive changes, there are no shortages of people imagining the end of days. From religious groups, to survivalist camps, to network nations…the super vigilant (and perhaps paranoid) are planning for collapse.

It begs the question, without the current context in which you orient within this system, how would you reorient if forced into a new one? How adaptable are you to catastrophic events? Who would you become if your world collapsed?

What would a new world reveal about you? The word “apocalypse” has Greek origins to mean ”to pull the lid off something” or reveal. Later adopted into Christianity to mean “revelation.” Today it comes with more doomsday vibes: imagine fight/flight/freeze on sustained high amplitude. But let’s borrow from the original term to consider what is revealed about people’s behavior when the complexity of our lives is reduced back to pre-modern style living in smaller contained tribes. We will eventually find a way to congregate in villages of under 200 people in order to orient around available resources and recalibrate roles for our survival.

We begin to define our value in relation to the collective again. Our isolated, consumptive existences of production and transaction has now been replaced with a sense of collective responsibility. When people in close vicinity would carve out dutiful roles alongside their craft. Perhaps a skilled carpenter would also tend to communal gardens. Or a hunter might contribute to teaching teenagers bravery in the wild. Or a natural healer would bury the dead. These may be romanticized notions but there’s something about getting one’s hands involved in collective tasks that transcends what charitable donations might do in a more prosperous world that has been over-leveraged by artificialness and automation.

Our internal systems are intrinsically linked to our external ones. Our well-being is intrinsically linked to the stability of the larger systems that support us. From families, to social networks, to institutions, to the natural environment. When these falter, so does our sense of self. When we can no longer rely on the infrastructures that once defined our former stability, people will rewrite the laws, customs, and chores of a preferred coexistence. We would cope differently to rebuild the structures needed for a healthy, functioning society. We would take on different role(s). With no immediate salary, we would have to dig deep to understand the non-compensated value behind our true nature.

INSPIRATION (what we want)

The Network State: a virtual nation bound not by borders but a group of netizens with a collective sense of national consciousness operating within digital systems of support. 

A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

• Founded as a startup society where the founder(s)’ legitimacy comes from whether or not the “citizens” want to follow them. 

• Organized by a sense of collective action through a purpose or unionized common cause.

• Equipped with its own internal economy using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology for resource allocation and transactions.

• Physical nodes are crowdfunded to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities. 

• Mixed reality experiences create the virtual borders of security and access to online and physical locations.

• Startup societies with sufficient scale eventually negotiate diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government and gradually establish themselves as startup societies. 

Disclaimer: though I may not admire the totality of this example, it inspires a gradual shift towards digitally-supported societies for mutual benefit. The decentralized nature of them inspires how clusters of people unbound by geography can form around varying ideologies and coordination of members. 

Note: a version of this was actually my business school moonshot project back in 2015 where the key insight was: "a sense of nationality is bound by duty.” I allude to it in this innovation called Nomadica.

INNOVATION (what we wish for)

ApocaMatch: a match-making app to pre-gather your village members for a post-apocalyptic society. (And who knows, meet the love of your apocalypse). 

A tongue-in-cheek thematic match making service for vigilant planners who want to explore the notion of “who would I want in my tribe?” and, more importantly, “what’s my value and how might I serve my tribe?”

• All netizens must give up their titles, material possessions, digital identities and join the network only with their raw human skills and spirited sense for survival. 

• Create your post-apocalypse profile to get matched to a village in need of your skills, talents and energy. Or create your own. 

• Profiles focus on hard and soft skills that would be relevant in a post-apocalyptic world: from building to farming to governance. 

• Build tribes of people you know according to your value to society and expressed “duty of care” for your village. 

• Meet new villagers anywhere in the world by sending out recruitment notices for roles that are currently unfilled.

• Reach out to village members you may have a romantic interest in.

• Build small intimate societies centered around a physical location for real world planning OR gather your network from across the world. 

• Plan for survival far in advance: membership fees pay into a slowly compounding “ApocaCoin” cryptocurrency that offers citizens a universal based income from the start should real world demise eventually happen (or not, value is value). 

• Runs on satellite connection so it does not get disturbed by outages from municipal grids (just in case the world really does end).