Last week, we asked the universe, or God, or the people who created Fallout, whatever, why society hadn’t recovered in the two hundred years after the bombs fell. Now, I hope to answer that question: frankly, the pre-war society was just too good.

Wait, you may be saying, wasn’t it like some kind of fascist cult that eventually turned into the Enclave? Yeah, the government was that way, but the economy was apparently pretty bitching. I mean, they could product so much Nuka-Cola, that even with the bottling plants shut down. They still haven’t run out of it two centuries later. Robot butlers and nannies. Medicine where you can heal wounds by just injecting yourself with whatever they put in stimpaks. To say nothing of machines that can perform surgery and get people off drugs.

As I said in earlier posts, the world is getting better, not worse, which generally means technology is getting better at producing goods and services. While they lack the semi-conductor, the Fallout world could be expected to have much higher productive capacity than our world. Then a nuclear war reduces the population to a fraction of what it was. Suddenly, the normal output for one year is enough for the entire country to live off of for centuries.

Indeed, those consumer goods could have been so abundant that there was no need to travel to other parts of the country to obtain anything other than very rare goods. No need to rebuild the roads. Or the factories. Or even the power plants. A few generators can keep the lights on. And it doesn’t take much work to do that.

You might argue that the clothes and foodstuffs would rot pretty quickly. I think people actually did argue that when Fallout 3 occurred. However, that’s assuming that people in 2070 America don’t have access to preservatives and fabrics that are capable of keeping that stuff fresh.

Necessity is the mother of invention, or activity generally, and the people in the Wasteland don’t have to work to get food, medicine, and energy. They just need to rifle through the next building. That’s probably why nothing has been rebuilt. Rebuilding means working and working means having to deal with people, some of whom may not be the most trustworthy.

It’s an allegory for modern society. The system is so good at providing for our basic needs, we don’t need to go to the lengths previous generations did. This doesn’t stop us from working. It stops us from socializing. Why go to the grocery store when you could just have DoorDash deliver? When you don’t leave the house, you stop forming civic groups and start forming chat rooms.

We always imagine the collapse of society to be some kind of nuclear wasteland or zombie filled Hellscape. What if it’s just the collapse of relationships? Maybe we don’t need to blow up half the buildings on the eastern seaboard to destroy society. Maybe we just need to be so good at producing and delivering goods and services that no one needs to go out and meet other people to have their desires fulfilled. We’re getting closer there with AI. How quickly will the day come when a single person can survive without actually talking to another human being? Imagine a future where there is no poverty or war, but we all spend our day talking to Alexa? Maybe that’s what the real apocalypse looks like.