If Society Collapsed Tomorrow, Would You Know What to Do?

Imagine a small group of about twenty people living in a large Western European city who have every reason to believe the world as they know it is slowly coming apart. Supply chains fraying, infrastructure crumbling, the systems that keep modern life running quietly failing one by one. What would they do? Where would they go? How would they eat, stay safe, make decisions, and hold together as a community? This is the thought experiment of the Munks: a tight-knit group preparing not for the apocalypse of science fiction, but for the far more plausible slow collapse of the society around them. What follows explores seven of the most pressing questions they would need to answer (on location, food, water, skills, numbers, and governance) and the answers may surprise you.

Should they stay in the city or head straight for the countryside?

Staying put feels safer at first, but the real answer is more nuanced than a simple choice between city and country.

The recommended approach is a phased strategy. In the early months of collapse, cities still hold enormous value: warehouses packed with food and medicine, ready-made shelter and a population not yet in full panic. The Munks would be wise to use this window and focus on tasks like scavenging, stockpiling and quietly transporting supplies to a pre-selected rural location. As civil order deteriorates, the city becomes a liability: concentrated populations competing for shrinking resources, sanitation breakdown and the ever-present risk of violence. The rural site should already be waiting for them with a natural water source, fertile soil, defensible terrain and ideally some pre-existing structures. Arriving unprepared in the countryside is nearly as dangerous as staying in a collapsing city.

What would they eat and drink in each scenario?

Food and water look very different depending on whether you are in a tower block or a rural farmstead.

In the city, the priority is cold-storage depots and wholesale warehouses, which are far more plentiful than retail shops and less immediately targeted. Tinned goods, rooftop gardens and small urban livestock such as chickens and rabbits round out the options. Water is trickier: rivers and canals require treatment and once sewage infrastructure fails, urban water becomes a serious health hazard within weeks. In the countryside, the calculus shifts towards arable farming (think potatoes, oats, root vegetables) supplemented by hunting, fishing and foraging. The single most valuable rural asset is a well or natural spring. Seasonal storage matters too; dry summer months can catch an unprepared group badly off-guard.

Which skills would matter most?

In a post-collapse world, what you know becomes worth more than anything you own.

The most critical universal skills, in order, are: water sourcing and purification, first aid and trauma care, fire-making, food preservation, physical security, navigation, negotiation and trade, conflict resolution, mental health support and basic construction. Beyond these, city life demands additional skills in scavenging strategy, urban navigation, disease containment and reading social threats in crowds. Rural life calls for farming and crop rotation, animal husbandry, hunting and trapping, forestry, seed saving and a working knowledge of herbal medicine. One skill threads through everything and is routinely underestimated: the ability to maintain morale and psychological well-being under sustained pressure.

How many people should the group include, ideally?

Twenty is a decent start, but it is not enough for the long term.

The ideal size for a cohesive, skill-diverse, self-sustaining community sits between 50 and 80 people. This range offers enough specialists to cover food, medicine, construction, security, and governance; enough physical labour for serious farming; and enough interpersonal trust that everyone still knows everyone else. It is also resilient enough that losing two or three members to illness or departure does not collapse the group's capabilities. The Munks' founding twenty is a good nucleus, but deliberate growth towards this range, through vetted allies and like-minded families, should be part of the plan from the start.

What is the absolute minimum to survive?

Below a certain threshold, the group becomes dangerously brittle.

The minimum viable group is around 12 to 15 people, provided everyone is of working age, in reasonable health and skills are distributed rather than concentrated in one or two individuals. Below 12, the physical demands of farming alone (particularly at planting and harvest) become unmanageable and a single serious injury or death can strip an irreplaceable skill from the group entirely.

Is there such a thing as too many people?

Yes and the ceiling is lower than most people assume.

Beyond 150 to 200 people, the community model begins to break down. Anonymity sets in, factions emerge, trust erodes and the local environment comes under increasing pressure from overuse. Governance becomes unwieldy. The recommended solution beyond this point is not to push through it, but to split into affiliated settlements: separate communities that trade, communicate and defend one another, rather than one sprawling group trying to function as a single unit.

How should they organise and make decisions together?

The right governance model depends almost entirely on how many people are involved.

For a small group of 12 to 20, full consensus works, where one person holds a limited, revocable mandate to act decisively in genuine emergencies. For the ideal range of 50 to 80, a rotating council of five to seven domain leads (covering food, health, security, construction, trade, and education) strikes the right balance between efficiency and democratic accountability. For a larger group approaching the maximum, a representative assembly operating under a simple written charter becomes necessary, with a small executive handling day-to-day operations. In every case, the rules should be designed and agreed upon before a crisis and not improvised during one.

So… Would you be ready?

This is, of course, a thought experiment. The Munks are fictional and with any luck, the slow collapse they are preparing for will never come. But the skills, the planning, the social bonds and the governance principles described here are all real and learnable.

Which leaves a question worth sitting with: if something like this were to unfold, gradually and then all at once, which of these skills do you already have? And which ones might now be worth picking up; not out of fear, but simply because knowing how to grow food, treat a wound, or hold a community together is never truly wasted knowledge?

The Munks thought experiment was developed (with assistance of a commercial LLM) as a structured exploration of community survival, covering location strategy, food and water sourcing, essential skills, group dynamics and governance models for a post-collapse society.

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