Why History's "Alone" reminds me of graduate school

And why the survivalist mentality is self-defeating

Alone contestants for Season 8, from History

A few weeks ago while folding a mountain of laundry, I stumbled upon the reality series Alone. The show is a hit — there are now nine seasons of it — perhaps because the premise is simple. Ten people compete to see who will last the longest in a wild environment. Each competitor gets to choose ten items to help them outlast the others, and the last person standing wins $500,000. It’s like Hunger Games without the head-to-head combat.

Reality shows like this pique our yearning to escape from modernity. I imagine this holds across cultures, wherever cement and steel have replaced earth and water. But it is especially true for Americans, who are perennially confused, like Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James, about whether the wilderness, the homestead, or the successful farm represents the cradle of national values. In fact, escape fantasies share a great deal with modernity. Modernity was supposed to be a clean break from the past, a new beginning for humanity. But that faith in the future requires a lot of forgetting. I am haunted by a similar amnesia in shows like Alone, which imagine that we can rediscover something in our primitive past that will fix what ails us now. But it’s the same malady all the way back.

The premise for Alone also suggests a metaphor for academe, particularly graduate school, where we are trained as survivalists to trust no one but ourselves and nothing but our endless ingenuity within a world of make-believe, where the only real thing is our suffering. 

Growing up on a homestead

I am a sucker for survival shows because I grew up close to the earth. My father is an expert hunter: even at age seventy-one he spends many weeks through the fall and winter traveling as a guide. My mother still tends a large garden and orchard and is a master of many folk arts. When I was very young, she made most of my clothes by hand, carding wool, spinning it into yarn, and fashioning buttons from elk antlers. She even made an ill-advised sweater from dog hair, which I dutifully wore and which smelled exactly as you’d expect to in the rain. 

It was isolating growing up on a homestead, but I still carry some nostalgia for the days I spent watering our gardens, fishing alpine lakes, and picking wild huckleberries. That feeling drew me back to the Northwest for nine summers through college and graduate school to work with the Forest Service. For years I imagined that school was my job and those summers in the boreal forest were my real life. So when I see a show about backcountry survival, it is difficult for me to distinguish the staged elements from my actual memories. 

Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson, from IMDB

I don’t want to be too hard on my parents. They were young and idealistic, and some of their dreams really did come true. Our drinking water flowed from a mountain spring. There was nothing fake about eating golden raspberries straight from the bush, still warm from the sun. To this day, the best gift anyone can give me is wild game sausage like the elk smokies I ate by the pound as a child.

But there were some arbitrary rules on the homestead. No television or video games was one. This meant no sleepovers with friends who had those things, which effectively meant no friends. I had classmates, teammates, and church acquaintances, but no buddies to help me catch frogs in the creek. This was one reason why college felt so good later on: for the first time I could invest as much as I wanted to in relationships and talk until the sun came up. I knew then that there was nothing pure about solitude and nothing necessarily corrupting about society. This was one of the lies of my parents’ generation: a fantasy of becoming John the Baptist, living on locusts and honey, or Jeremiah Johnson, the quintessential mountain man. Bob Summers’ Out Back with Jesus, one of the books on my parents’ shelf, was published in 1975, the year I was born. And Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford, premiered in 1972. Alone is just recycled popular culture from the 1970s, which was itself an updated version of the ridiculous fictions penned by James Fenimore Cooper and the less ridiculous memoirs of John Muir.

From Amazon

The prophet, that cousin of the shaman, is probably the oldest symbol of romanticized solitude. If you accept the premise that God is fashioned from human sources, rather than the other way around, you might say that God is the purest embodiment of the ego in isolation, moving over the face of the waters before creation. 

But solitude is an unnatural condition. We evolved to survive in families, bands, and villages, not all on our own. The poor soul left to scavenge fish from the shoreline was, historically, a castaway, not an elite warrior or forager. Anyone unlucky enough to be banished was the least likely to reproduce. Voluntarily accepting that kind of exile from one’s spouse and children, in any context outside of a reality show, would be a symptom of madness, not fitness. Like the Green Beret or Navy Seal who withstands torture and imprisonment only to struggle with reintegrating into civilian life, the methods by which a contestant succeeds in Alone are often antithetical to the emotional intelligence and vulnerability that marriage and parenthood require. In fact, if you really embraced the ethos of Alone, you might reach the point where you never wanted to come home at all.

Technology is both sacred and profane

Alone is rife with contradictions. Contestants can use hunting knives, Leatherman tools, headlamps, “bear banger” cartridges, axes, lightweight saws, tarps, fishing line, and many other mass-produced technologies. But they can’t use actual rifles or fishing poles. This all makes sense if you approach the series as a very intense game show with a big cash prize, but it is incoherent as a story of survival. The fact that History sponsors the program is even more unfortunate. 

Humans and their evolutionary forebears not only worked in teams, as social units, they never voluntarily deprived themselves of available technology while trying to survive. New technology comes from abundance, not scarcity. One might even say that invention is born more of idleness than of necessity. So just as there is no historical analogue other than lepers, criminals, and exiled heretics to the desperate hermit trying to build a shelter before they starve, I know of no era in which humans staked their survival on forging primitive technologies with more advanced implements.¹

That was a long sentence, so let me illustrate. In Season 8 of Alone, the only season I may ever see, Nate is frustrated by fishing from shore, so he builds himself a pier. He begins with an A-frame held together by notches and grooves. Once he carries this structure out into the lake, he uses it to support poles that stretch thirty or forty feet from the rocky beach. Nate extends the pier a little further by fastening a smaller pole to the A-frame, and then running a trolling line from the end. But to believe in this as a survival story, you have to forget that Nate uses a factory-made axe and saw to cut the poles to length and to hack out the notches and grooves. The pier is a kind of technology, but people built boats long before they built piers. The societies that built piers did so at their leisure, not because they were starving. There is no historical “there” in Nate’s pier. It is a great example of ingenuity, but the story it tells is a fiction within the make-believe world of Alone.

European tropes often present humans and human technologies as separate from nature. But wilderness as “other” is a cultural invention, whether it represents the devil’s playground, as it did for the New England Puritans, or the Edenic antidote to civilization, as it did for John Muir. When I cleared wilderness trails in Idaho with a crosscut saw and axe, I found satisfaction in mastering those primitive tools. But I wasn’t getting back to an original understanding between myself and the land. I was merely observing an arbitrary technological line between factory-forged steel and the combustion engine. The wilderness regulations forbade one fuel belching technology while sacralizing the other, which had outsourced its noise, fossil-fuel dependency, and pollution to the Pittsburgh mills. I don’t have space here to get into the many ironies that sully the saintliness of nature writers, but there’s something like that at play in Alone, and it is more of a cautionary tale than an exemplary one. Beware the person who is sentimental or morally righteous about something that never existed, or not in the way that they think it did.

Jumping from a wilderness bridge during my own years of make-believe. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Nearly every historical series that I’ve seen falls apart under scrutiny. I watched the 2002 PBS program Frontier House as obsessively as I’m now watching Alone, but I stopped believing in it when the families began spouting platitudes about the purity of pioneer life compared to their twentieth-century vices. If a time-traveling pioneer, such as those featured on Frontier House, were to literally succeed, they would accumulate wealth until they could afford to build a school for their children. Then they would watch the next generation leave the homestead, get jobs in the city, and keep right on modernizing up to the present time. We can’t go back to a hunter-gatherer society or a log cabin in the Big Woods. It is an idle daydream to think so, but it’s a fantasy that sells. Hence the cash prize and the entertainment: the real premise beneath the phony narrative. 

As a writer I care about the integrity of a story. And if I were ever involved in designing a reality show, I’d base it on something more like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or Benjamin Vogt’s Prairie Up. There would be no competition, no Übermensch standing alone at the end of such a series. The goal would be communal: experts and participants would troubleshoot backyard hacks that might be easily replicated by viewers to alleviate poverty, hunger, or pollution in their own neighborhoods. Instead of participants subjecting themselves to fantastical challenges and unnecessary suffering like voluntarily enslaved gladiators, the goal would be to directly improve the quality of life for anyone with access to the program. But I suspect that it would be difficult to recruit corporate sponsors for such a show, because the branding stories companies tell have more in common with James Fenimore Cooper’s tall tales than they do with real life.

Is it any surprise that Jeep is one of the sponsors of Alone? The perfect tag line: “There’s only one.”

Alone is a metaphor for graduate school

Near the end of my Ph.D. program I started hearing stories from classmates about the “meat market” at the Modern Language Association conference, where candidates waited for job interviews in a hall filled with dozens of identical tables. When I took my place at MLA the next year, I watched the backs of my competitors’ heads, trying not to wish them ill as they spoke to the people I hoped would hire me. It was one of the most inhumane things I’d ever experienced.

That conference hall might just as easily have been a remote lake in Alaska where I was trying to outlast nine opponents. I made many good friends in graduate school, but all of us had to adopt a survival mentality out of necessity that made things tense when we began applying for the same positions. It was hard to resist the incessant feeling of scarcity, racking up publications and teaching experience the way Alone contestants smoke meat and cache rations of berries and mushrooms so they can starve more slowly. 

Just as those game show survivalists get to pick ten items to bring with them, we had our pick of literary theorists and primary texts. It was up to us to find novel uses for Foucault and Cixous, to forage for edible roots in texts that had already been combed over for generations. If we were lucky, we might try something no one else had ever attempted before, like the pit house Theresa builds in Season 8. With every update of the job list, we’d cast our lures into the shimmering water, enduring weeks without so much as a nibble, then — when we felt the thrill of that first interview invitation — splashing our way back through the shallows hoping to land the enormous trout on the end of our line. 

Just as contestants on Alone might struggle to reintegrate into family life after two months of solitude, it was difficult to resolve the cognitive tension between striving for dominance as a job candidate and making myself vulnerable to a college community after I’d been hired. I had some wonderful students, embraced team teaching, and contributed as generously as I was able to the life of the college over my sixteen years there. But I never quieted the voice that told me I wasn’t publishing enough, getting my name out there more, casting my line into deeper waters where the big fish swam, even after my survival stopped depending on those things.

I remember the shock of recognition when I happened upon Sharon Olds’ poem “Sex without Love.” I’ll risk a few mixed metaphors here, but I think the closing lines capture the common ground between the graduate school survivalist and the Alone contestant. 

…They do not

mistake the lover for their own pleasure,

they are like great runners: they know they are alone

with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-

vascular health — just factors, like the partner

in the bed, and not the truth, which is the

single body alone in the universe

against its own best time.

It could be that I was an outlier, that other people are able to protect their identities through graduate school better than I was, that I projected some of this extremism on my own experience unnecessarily. But I don’t think so. I’ve heard of too many suicides and divorces among professional academics. The common denominator in those stories? Succeeding too well at isolation, and then thinking that there is no way back into the world.

Paul de Man writes that modernity is “a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.” You might say that the $500,000 prize offers this prospect to the contestants on Alone. Many of them spend their solitude dreaming about how their lives could change with that money, what they could leave behind. 

But de Man’s modernity principle also works in reverse, when nostalgia for an imagined past lures us out of our present discontents. It is heartbreaking to watch Alone contestants awake from this fantasy. The sanest people are those who leave early, long before reaching the brink, recognizing that they are going to do permanent harm to their bodies or their souls if they stay. Some of them realize that the premise of the show is bullshit, that the money and pride aren’t worth abasing or harming themselves for others’ entertainment. Those who refuse to leave until the doctors force their hand remind me of what I feared for myself and my family if I white-knuckled my way through another twenty years at a college perpetually plagued by crisis. 

Last night on Alone I watched a man weep after the doctors told him that they had to remove him for his own safety. He had lasted nearly 70 days in the wilderness and had lost 86 pounds. He apologized to his parents for not making them prouder and cursed himself for focusing on fishing, rather than diversifying with hunting and foraging. Yet he was the only person who built a boat, who fished in deep waters, who had any meaningful success with a gill net. I wanted to give him a hug, tell him that he did great, that it wasn’t his fault. I knew from earlier episodes that he had always struggled with self-confidence, but there was nothing in his brokenness at the end that suggested he would rebuild himself stronger than before. You might say that his make-believe Stone Age only revealed more of what he already was, magnifying his weaknesses rather than transforming them. 

One woman in Season 8 recalled how she had always felt alone in her life after a rootless childhood. Even after marrying and starting a family, she made a home for her children that she never believed was hers. After the children left home, her husband did, too. She pushed her body to the max on Alone, suffering early signs of frostbite in her toes, blacking out while foraging, even temporarily losing her sight from malnutrition. When the doctors forced her to leave after a medical evaluation, they had to carry her to the boat because she could not see. I can’t help but wonder if her many life traumas have made her an unreliable narrator of her own story, if the self-reliance that she has always understood to be her greatest strength might also fuel a self-fulfilling prophecy of isolation. I know all too well how that cognitive distortion works. A survival mentality only makes sense in a crisis. Holding on to that defiance after the crisis has passed can create new and unnecessary emergencies. 

Undoubtedly Alone appeals to me and millions of other viewers because we see crisis all around us. But we are perpetually duped by the story of the lone survivor, the elite warrior who runs away from civilization and never looks back, needing no one and nothing but the bare necessities. The answer to what ails us is more resilient communities, not individual fortitude. Needing one another and leaning into that vulnerability may well be our greatest strength. We shouldn’t have to keep escaping into the wilderness to learn Chris McCandless’ tragic lesson. As he was starving to death in Alaska and suffering from eating toxic seeds, McCandless famously wrote above a passage in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago: “Happiness only real when shared.”

1. Communities like the Amish, Mennonites, or Hutterites might eschew some modern technologies while allowing for others, but these communities do not suffer hunger as a result.