Survival is Insufficient

In 2019, I read the novel Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. It’s set about twenty years after civilization has collapsed due to a global pandemic that was extremely lethal.¹ Jumping back and forth through time, it follows the characters’ stories both pre and post collapse. The post-apocalyptic storyline centers around a nomadic acting troupe, called the Traveling Symphony. They travel a route along the Great Lakes as a pack, hunting and foraging for survival, but also staging Shakespearean plays for the remaining pockets of civilization. Their motto is “Survival is Insufficient.”

It’s a beautiful novel with interwoven, complex storylines, but this theme- Survival is Insufficient –latched on to my heart and hasn’t let go. “What use is Shakespeare when the world has ended?” you might ask. But Station Eleven answers, “What use is living without art, beauty, connection?”

I realized I had felt like I was just “surviving” for a long time.

I was programmed to achieve, achieve, achieve, and that’s what I did, keeping my head above water long enough to swim to the next bank. And then I kept going. I wasn’t raised to prioritize my physical or emotional needs, so I simply didn’t know I should be.

I noticed there were parts of me I had suppressed, like my love for language, for stories, for writing. When I was in high school, I “wanted” to be a writer. But I didn’t even let myself really want that, even for a second. I allowed myself to admit that I enjoyed writing and that I would like to use that skill in whatever more practical career I chose. The idea of just being a writer was ludicrous. What would I write about? I didn’t know anything. And I certainly wasn’t good enough. And how on Earth would I pay my parents back for college if I had no realistic prospects for a steady salary?

So, I put my head down and got to work pursuing degrees in Physics. I don’t want to portray the decision to pursue science in a fundamentally negative light. The dichotomy in popular culture between the hard sciences and creative pursuits is entirely false. Asking fundamental questions about the universe is inherently beautiful, and requires an abundance of creativity, in both thought and experiment. Seeking real world solutions to intractable problems is fascinating. I genuinely enjoyed Physics, which is why I pursued a PhD instead of some other path like law school after undergrad.

The problem is that I over-worked and under-valued myself.

I also made important life decisions out of a place of fear, rather than honest vulnerability. I was surviving, but survival is insufficient. Joy and self-determination are essential.

Survival is Insufficient also struck me as a very familiar sentiment, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I found my answer in an interview with the author, Emily St. John Mandel. The motto is from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, which I certainly would have watched when it first aired in 1999. My father recorded every new episode of Voyager on our VHS recorder, so we never missed an episode due to a conflicting softball or baseball game. I went back and re-watched this episode to jog my memory.

In the context of the episode, a character has to make a choice on behalf of others– return them to the domination of the Borg, where their autonomy will cease to exist, but they will live a long life; or protect their autonomy but sacrifice their life expectancy. The character, Seven, determines that “Survival is insufficient,” believing that the individuals at stake would choose a shortened life of freedom, of autonomy, than a long lifetime without free will.

The meaning is slightly different between the two works of art, Voyager and Station Eleven, but the sentiment resonates with me in both senses. I expect this idea to mean something different for every individual, but at its core it really drives at what it means to be human. What we do with our sentience defines us as a species.

Who we are is what we do.

The play the Traveling Symphony performs during the HBO adaptation of Station Eleven is Hamlet (vs. Midsummer Night’s Dream in the book). I didn’t understand at the time why this was significant. I still haven’t read through the whole of Hamlet, but I read analyses, and then I read Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. At that point it all came together for me. Hamlet is a play about grief.

I was much better acquainted with grief than I had been while reading Station Eleven, having lost a friend of mine the year before, and having suffered during a global pandemic. With grief, the only way out is through. This is one of the messages of both Hamlet and Station Eleven. Yes, your Uncle murdered your Father; yes, society collapsed, killing everyone you ever loved and destroying your entire way of life. But you carry on anyway.

You don’t just survive, you live. You embrace the miracle of your own free will to choose, and you choose to continue, to fight, to love, to sing. The story plays on, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Footnotes

1. She has since written a pseudo-sequel about the irony of writing a pandemic apocalypse novel, pre-pandemic