'Alone': A Rhapsody Viewing Guide
How I watch things. Especially when they are about surviving in the middle of nowhere by yourself for several consecutive months.
When I first came across the reality show Alone on History Channel—the 100th episode of which airs this Thursday—I thought there must be a catch. The contestants get dropped off somewhere in the wilderness by themselves and whoever lasts the longest without radioing for help wins $500,000. Each contestant can choose 10 items out of an approved list to bring with them, and that’s all they get. You may be thinking, “Well, surely there is a film crew. They aren’t actually alone.” Wrong. The contestants are given camera equipment to film themselves. The only outside contact these individuals have is during periodic health checks in which a team of medical professionals comes to their camp to take their vitals. They offer no assistance; they can only remove contestants whom they have determined are facing serious illness or death. The survivalists do have a radio, but all they can use it for is to “tap out” and quit the game.
The show markets itself as “the ultimate test of human will” and while I’m not sure if that’s true, it’s undoubtedly one of the greatest windows into the human condition ever made available to a mass audience. Of course, there are still production elements at play that can provide incomplete or misleading portrayals of an individual's experience (someone has to edit months worth of footage, after all), it’s still a rare look into what it’s like to be, well, alone.
Today I wanted to write about what’s going through my mind when I ingest various forms of media, whether that’s a TV show, a movie, a book, a podcast—the format really doesn’t matter. I’m always on the lookout for lessons or narrative devices that tell us something about what it means to be human. Sometimes messages are clearly telegraphed by a writer or director. Other times, I imagine I’m inferring things that were not necessarily meant to be inferred. In each case the objective is the same: try to gain a deeper understanding of the human condition, which in turn helps to effectively navigate the human condition to be happier. To be clear, I’m (usually) not sitting around with a notebook and a pen scribbling psychological or philosophical treatises as I watch things. It’s just how I think about stuff. That being said, Alone is particularly suited for this kind of analysis given that its premise is to push human beings to their limit physically and mentally, and it’s often in those extremities that we learn.
1. Motivation
Why are people doing things? What is the force behind decisions and actions? I like to think about motivation in relation to psychological and physiological needs, but I’m going to focus on psychological needs here because….well, I find them more interesting and less straightforward than food, water and shelter.
It’s become a habit of mine to try and identify two things about characters in shows pertaining to basic psychological needs1. First, do they seem more generally oriented toward extrinsic goals such wealth, status, personal appearance or are they more oriented toward intrinsic goals, such competence, autonomy, and relatedness2? This will tell me a lot immediately about someone’s state of mind and priorities. For example, in Alone if someone is there more or less exclusively for the $500,000 prize, they have almost no chance at winning. Even if they are well provisioned, have excellent survival skills and are in good health, they will eventually get bored or miss their family and leave. If they are there because they want to go through this experience, learn something about themselves and test their own skills—in addition to winning the prize money—they have a much better chance at success.
The second thing I observe is how well the basic psychological needs are being supported or thwarted and what the contestants are doing about it. In a show like Alone, the need for socialization (relatedness) is almost entirely thwarted. There is one exception to this: Some people use the camera and its perceived audience for connection, almost like Wilson in Cast Away. This provides at least some sense of community. You can pick up a lot about a contestant from how they are communicating to the camera.
Also important is how they go about the work of survival. If a contestant is complaining or generally nonplussed about the work they are doing at all times—complaining about building a shelter, complaining about fishing, complaining about whatever—they are in trouble. Similarly, if all activities are only for survival, they’ll probably at some point say, “You know what? I could simply quit and go home.”
But some people intrinsically enjoy the tasks. They aren’t strictly instrumental, they provide joy in and of themselves. For example, the winner of season three was an extraordinary builder. I don’t know how else to describe this person, but it went well beyond woodworking. The person made a functioning, remotely controlled paddle boat. I’m talking legitimate MacGyver shit. He talked a lot about keeping busy by making things. This wasn’t just idle work to keep his mind occupied, it provided him with a sense of satisfaction each and every time he made something. In this way, he supported his basic psychological need for competence.
One of his opponents also wanted to keep busy, but for very different reasons. This person wanted to keep busy solely because it kept his mind off missing his family. All the work was instrumental—it didn’t provide him joy in and of itself. Of course, the first time it rained for a couple days and he had nothing to work on, he was overcome with sadness and longing, and tapped out. Two reasons to keep busy, two very different outcomes.
I won’t spend too much time on autonomy except to say that it’s important to keep in mind autonomy is not the same as independence or freedom—it’s engaging in things authentically on one’s own volition. It may seem that all contestants are 100% autonomous when they are alone in the middle of nowhere. But the moment they feel like they are not there of their own free will—they are there for the prize money, for example, or they are there to prove something to someone else at home—that’s a bad sign. Those who perform the best want to be there first and foremost for themselves and for the experience, not because some external force is in some way compelling them.
2. Mindfulness
It’s 2022 and everyone is a mindfulness practitioner, for better or worse, so let me state what I mean by mindfulness: awareness of present circumstances with acceptance. Mindfulness is the ability to see clearly what is actually going on so that you can respond effectively3. This is not just some hippie bullshit. If something bad happens, do you just react? Or have you cultivated the ability to extend that ever-so-short gap between stimulus and reaction? In the real world, if someone cuts you off in traffic, can you take a deep breath, accept that it happened and move on? Or do you start honking your horn like a maniac and let it bother you the rest of the day?
In a survival situation, you need to be living in the present moment and you need to understand the origins of your feelings and emotions to effectively respond. When you don’t catch a fish, are you going to get pissed off and mope around? Or are you going to regroup and find some other source of food? When it rains for three days straight and you’re restless and frustrated, can you identify those emotions as biological phenomena and let them pass? Can you stay in the present moment and appreciate each moment, each hour, each day as a valuable experience unto itself, or will you let your mind stay fixated on the uncertainty of your next meal or what the other contestants are doing?
Mindfulness is not just meditating, it’s an awareness of what’s going with your mind and how to use it to promote wellness—a critical tool for survival.
3. The interplay between individuals and environments
Nature or nurture? It’s both, right? Human beings are all endowed with certain genetic predispositions. We are tossed into the world, the environments into which we are placed interact with these genetic predispositions, and we are the “result” of this synthesis.
When I watch Alone, a few things immediately come to mind. The first is that humans aren’t meant to be alone for months on end. We’re social creatures. Yes, we need help doing things, but we also just need company for the sake of company. Without any comrades, the environment will beat us down—and in the case of this show, that happens literally.
But almost paradoxically, it also shows the adaptability of humanity. Yes, it requires an advanced skill set, but drop someone almost anywhere on Earth and they can figure out how to survive. This is probably why humans have populated nearly the entirety of Earth. We can find food of various sorts, we can find water, we can build a shelter out of almost anything.
But more important than all of those things in terms of living not just surviving is that as long as we can satisfy those basic physiological needs, we can be happy almost anywhere. Like I said above, Alone literally removes one of a basic psychological need entirely—the need for relatedness, or a sense of relation with others—and people still survive for months on end. It brings into high relief how many of the day-to-day problems in the “real world” are of our own making.
The primary challenge of Alone is scarcity, of both resources and socialization. And there are real risks with overly romanticizing or glorifying hunter-gatherer civilizations of the long past as entirely peaceful, perfect societies. But it’s undeniable that when you strip things down to the absolute essentials, there are lessons about what drives real happiness, and I think it calls into question our entire modern way of life and how we spend our time.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we all go be homesteaders. I just think our society incentivizes the wrong things. This is largely a function of profit motive, which has no real connection to human wellness. I don’t know how anyone with a straight face can witness the current boom in crypto scams, for example, and draw the conclusion that it’s a good thing people can make money selling bullshit to rubes who don’t know better, or more importantly, that a society which incentivizes that kind of thing isn’t deeply, profoundly flawed. Earlier, I mentioned my interest in motivation, and how people who are animated mostly by extrinsic values like wealth generally grow unhappy quickly and fail.
Well, our entire country is based on the idea that organizing society around wealth is good.
Maybe there’s a reason it feels at times like everything is falling apart.
If it’s easier, you can think of competence as experiencing a sense of efficacy—being able to execute or accomplish a task in the way you desire. Relatedness can be thought of as community. Autonomy is when an action is the result of authentic, self-endorsed volition.
I’m not sure who first formulated this specific phrase but I really loved it and I learned it from Dr. Shauna Shapiro, Professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University, in her lecture “What You Practice Grows Stronger”