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Naked and Afraid
2013 · TV series · 19 seasons
What happens when you put two complete strangers - sans clothes - in some of the most extreme environments on Earth? Each male-female duo is left with no food, no water, no clothes, and only one survival item each as they attempt to survive on their own.
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This idea that “Thoreau faked it” comes from people fundamentally misunderstanding what Thoreau was trying to do.
His goal was to critically evaluate how you spend your time and energy, and focus it on what really deeply matters to you, and nothing else: to live deliberately and cut out the BS.
He got tons of regular help and support for his unusual lifestyle experiment from his community and friends, and his cabin was not way out in the wilderness. And he is totally honest and up front about all of that- he was trying to live simply, not trying to win an episode of Naked and Afraid as New Englands most badass survivalist as people somehow seem to assume.
What it means to live deliberately is different for each person, what would it even mean to “fake it?”
I blame kids that were forced to read Walden in school, but lacked the life experience to comprehend it, for this common, but absurd misconception.
The metric to look at is viewers per dollar. If Foundation or The Expanse drew in viewers for the millions per episode spent on them, that would be one thing. But if you spend a tiny budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars, max to make an episode of, say, Naked and Afraid, and got commensurate viewership, if not higher, what would you choose, if you're running a business. Combine it with the fact that reality tv contestants don't receive residuals, there are no union writers to pay, it's obvious which direction the American TV business is headed because reality tv is a ridiculously better deal for them. Get the theme song recorded as a work for hire as well and it's pure profit for Discovery.
It's not great for the industry but culturally, we're not supportive of strikes worker rights, especially if the media tells us it's okay to hate those workers for being "rich" Hollywood folk (most writers are struggling), and doesn't point out we're supporting scabs by watching reality tv.
Change can suck. It can also be great. I think our tendency towards loss aversion makes us focus on how much it can suck. Even if my future might be better, it will be different, and I can want to not lose the thing to which I currently feel attached.
> That's exceptionally difficult when the competing values, like climate, are more abstract than the ones currently held. I worry that humans are not psychologically equipped to manage problems of this scale.
I think we may be equipped, as we've handled problems on much larger scales than I think our ancestors would have expected, and yet I hear you, wondering what (if anything) could change to make us more equipped.
I wonder if reframing our identity could help. Instead of me only being a coal miner or Michigander, I'm also more connected with my human identity. Maybe more backwoods experiences, watching and living TV shows like Alone or Naked and Afraid...I dunno. I wonder if we don't actually have to try to connect to the planet but just more deeply to our local wildlife and to ourselves.
> Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning an Oscar.
Very true, this is the first thing I thought of when I head of the popular show "Naked and Afraid".
So this was an interesting book, well written and using empirical evidence that humans are killing the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History
I tend towards the view that this book is accurate, simply because I read a lot. When you read explorers accounts hundreds of years ago you have sea and land teeming with life and biodiversity. Now, when you watch a reality TV show like 'Naked and Afraid', there is very little to no wild animal life, the show should be called show up and starve.
>Even a single fertile couple cannot successfully reproduce in the wild (if you doubt this, watch a few episodes of Naked and Afraid). The minimum viable reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a tribe or a village.
Do you have evidence for this that's not a reality TV show?
Edit: I have found the Lykov family who had two children in isolation; they did already have two children who would have been 13 and 6 at the time of the third child's birth in isolation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family
I sometimes give lectures on evolution and I usually open with this classic puzzle (due to Dawkins): most ants (and other social insects) are sterile. How is this possible? Why would evolution select for genes that produce sterile individuals? (You might want to see if you can figure this out before continuing.)
The answer is that ants are not organisms, they are organs. The ant colony is the organism. It just happens to be made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.
Well, it turns out that humans are much like ants in this regard. A single human individual cannot reproduce. Even a single fertile couple cannot successfully reproduce in the wild (if you doubt this, watch a few episodes of Naked and Afraid). The minimum viable reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a tribe or a village.
This sort of organizational grouping is found at all of the levels of abstraction in life. Even your DNA is not really a unified whole, it's a bunch of genes that have glommed together in a cooperative effort to reproduce themselves, but it's not an organized or homogeneous effort. That's why you have freeloaders ("junk DNA") and defectors (cancer genes) who put their own interests above those of the group. What happens at the cellular and molecular level is really not so different from what happens in human societies. The presence of brains changes the dynamic, but not in any fundamental way. At the end of the day, it's all just self-replicating information looking for an ecological niche and a reproductive edge. The idea that human individuals are somehow special in this process is mostly a prejudice brought on by our particular point of view, namely, the fact that our thoughts reside in brains that are strongly bound to bodies. The ability to see beyond onesself can be both powerful and humbling.
Always boil the water.
Source: Binge watching 7 seasons of Naked and Afraid.