The Collapse CXXXVIII: Sorting

09 July 20XX +1

My Dear Lucilius:

Pompeia Paulina, when a suggestion is made, does not delay – unlike myself, who can often push things off to when choices have been effectively eliminated and only one decision is possible: “procrastination”, I believe is the vulgar term. Within 12 hours of my thought that we might want to examine everything we owned in order to organize it for the future, a list had been produced and a categorization matrix presented.

I should watch myself around this wife of mine, Lucilius; a suggestion can be a very dangerous thing.

The categorization presented itself into three buckets:

A) Items which are required for survival (e.g. food, shelter, protection);

B) Items which are not required for survival but make survival “better” (better, of course, being a somewhat subjective term);

C) Items which have limited or no intrinsic or extrinsic value in the current environment.

Category A is pretty well defined: items for food, shelter, and protection are rather self evident at this point as we have been in the situation for almost a year now. And Category C is also pretty well defined, although in some cases I do not know that getting rid of things makes sense: for things like lamps, they take up little enough space and a refrigerator can be used for simple storage. And DVDs, while useless, have no more use to anyone else than they do to us – except, I suppose, as potential targets.

Category B, items not required for survival but which make survival better, is the sticking point.

Many things can be considered to fall into this category. Books? Not every book I have is directly related to survival or survival skills, but does every book have to be? At some point who knows: I may end up with the last copy of Dostoevsky this side of the Mississippi. Decor? It adds nothing to surviving, but it does break the monotony of walls and even prehistoric man may have “touched up” their living quarters.

I wrote of things like dehydrators, where the tray may have benefits while the unit does not, or even my clothes washer, which might have parts of value while the unit does not. For now, these things have been parsed out as things to consider; we are in no immediate rush to get rid of anything.

Even before everything essentially stopped, I had made a conscious decision to minimize my needs and wants – that said, it is apparent that this had not extended to the possibility that things might drastically change. I had based my thinking on what seemed likely to happen, although I will be fair to myself: worst case scenario thinking sometimes seems beyond the Pale to us in normal circumstances, except when suddenly it manifests itself in ways we did not expect.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca

(Postscript: Following up from my last letter, my initial discussion with Young Xerxes went well. He actually discussed it with a couple of other people. I need to flesh out the idea soon, which gives me a perfect topic for the next letter.)