How to Thrive in Wild Times
According to cooperation theorist Athena Aktipis ’02, the one thing we really need? Each other.
In the winter of 2023, a snowstorm had swept through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Athena Aktipis ’02 drove freshly plowed roads on her way home to Flagstaff, Arizona, from Crested Butte, where she’d been doing some of her favorite things: cross-country skiing, writing in nature, and jamming with friends.
Shiny black streets starkly contrasted with a landscape painted white with deep snow. The sun had yet to set, but the canyon she wound through covered the dying light, making it appear as night. Earlier, before Athena left, a barista at her go-to Crested Butte coffee shop had warned her about the weather and advised: If you’re surprised by an animal wandering into the road, don’t slam on your brakes—instead, slow down. Athena doesn’t believe in metaphysical forces, but that message seemed to be a funny kind of foreshadowing.
That evening, a herd of black cows blended into the black road, and when Athena ran into them, she remembered the barista’s sage advice, slowing down rather than braking sharply.
There were no human or bovine casualties, but the accident still totaled her car. Luckily, Athena is a prepared sort of person. After studying evolution and cancer for years, her recent work as a cooperation theorist has focused on how we can not only survive during crises, but thrive in them, too. She managed to get her car to the side of the road and unpacked her car emergency kit. Donning her reflective vest, she placed flares around herself, creating a triangle of protection, and, with no cell service, could only hope someone would stop.
Someone eventually did. Passing through with his wife, an off-duty worker from Dolores Fire Rescue—a fire department made up entirely of volunteers—pulled his truck over. The couple sprang into action: ensuring she hadn’t been hurt, driving down the road to call the tow truck, and contacting the police to report the accident. Athena sat in the warmth of their truck cab, thinking that this experience, despite how distressing it had been, proved something about her research: Humans do spontaneously have a desire to help others.
That night, Athena called up a friend nearby and crashed at his house. The next day, when she struggled to find a way home, it was he, accompanied by his dog, Smokey, who drove her five hours back to Flagstaff. Again, a key aspect of her work was proven: The most important thing to have in times of crisis is each other—our communities, our friends, our life teammates.
Athena understands it may be hard for some to buy. Are humans really a naturally cooperative and generous species? Much of the media we consume tells us we’re not. On TV, a troubled citizen shoots an unsuspecting comrade, stealing his supplies and leaving him to be eaten by zombies. In books, a final girl runs from the serial killer, abandoning her injured friend. In movies, a character betrays a friend, handing him over to the evil villain. Evolution and behavior research has long helped tout these claims, encouraging us to assume everyone, in most situations, is only going to help themself. Better to presume everyone will be selfish, and be selfish, too. This is the way to protect ourselves.
If you ask Athena, all of that is totally backwards. Her answer to the question of whether humans are naturally cooperative and generous is a resounding, undoubtable yes. More often than not, in fact, humans prefer to help rather than harm one another. “When things get ugly,” Athena says, “people don’t get ugly.” And her research proves it.
In , where she teaches in the psychology department (her students call her by her first name, in the Reed tradition), Athena and her team combine psychology, evolutionary biology, computer science, and anthropology to study human generosity, cancer and multicellular bodies, the microbiome, and even the microscopic ecosystem inside kombucha. Her work is the definition of interdisciplinary. But there’s one thread connecting it all: cooperation. How can we better approach treating cancer, essentially a breakdown of multicellular cooperation? How do the microbes within our gut work together to protect us? How can we use kombucha as a test case for understanding other instances of symbiosis? These are all questions she seeks to answer.
But most recently, Athena has been particularly interested in how people respond “when shit hits the fan.” “Do they help each other? Is that evolutionarily viable? If so, what are the mechanisms?” she wonders. Specifically, she’s interested in how we humans can survive and thrive as we face apocalypses.
She doesn’t necessarily mean apocalypses of the zombie variety, though she often uses zombies as a metaphor to explain her research. Rather, in her 2024 book, , she defines an apocalypse as “a catastrophic event that reveals the underlying risk that we face; an event that forces a reckoning and restructuring of the world as we know it.” There are direct correlations between past disasters and new eras: the Middle Ages brought the Renaissance; the bubonic plague led to the Enlightenment; even the COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to remote work. These periods can be summed up in a couple of words: “wild times.”
If the idea of “wild times” frightens you, Athena seeks to quell your fears: after all, she writes, our ancestors have survived such times before us, and we already live in an apocalyptic present. We face an apocalyptic future, too. As codirector of the , the first large-scale transdisciplinary project investigating the relationship between biological and cultural influences on human generosity, Athena has mined endless examples of instances in which populations in crisis display cooperation and generosity over division and selfishness.
In nine societies across the world, HGP anthropologists study how people share, focusing on the norms and cultural practices that underlie it. Lab work further explores the rules that allow human generosity and why it sometimes breaks down. Computational modeling helps HGP researchers discover how sharing rules shape social interactions and large-scale outcomes. Across the board, they’ve found that sharing systems based on need enhance human survival and help mitigate risk for the entire system.
By understanding if and how humans help one another in crisis, Athena says we can better understand how to survive and thrive in apocalyptic times, too.
An Interdisciplinarian is Born
For Athena, exploring and analyzing the way we humans deal with crises has been a lifelong endeavor.
From a young age, she had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right with the world. As she grew up in the ’90s, progress, capitalism, and technology were considered kings. But Athena thought about the way humans lived and wondered if there wasn’t a better path forward, other options that could help us better navigate our collective future. She is an endlessly curious kind of person. So, often, she would get on her bike and ride to her local bookstore in the suburbs of Chicago and read everything she could about the environment, ecology, evolutionary biology, and human psychology. “I came to the conclusion that the world was kinda messed up and getting worse,” she writes, “and that understanding human behavior was the best place to start if we wanted to do something about it.”
It was at Reed that this mission was set in motion. When she visited campus while applying for colleges, she felt almost immediately that she belonged. She sat in on Professor Dan Reisberg’s [1986–2019] psychology class, which he held outside. After presenting a question to the students in the course, Dan turned to Athena and asked for her opinion. At that moment she realized that, if she attended Reed, she would be respected as a learner. Sitting on the grass by the psych building, she thought to herself: “Oh, this is what I want my education to be like.”
Her freshman year, Mel Rutherford [psychology 1998–99], a pioneer of the evolutionary psychology field, had been hired as a visiting professor. Athena knew from the jump she wanted to work with him. Even though the class he taught was typically reserved for upperclassmen, he let Athena enroll after he tested her knowledge with a round of questions. The following semester, she took another one of Mel’s classes, and independently studied with him, too, eager to learn all she could from him. He gave her the same reading list he’d completed in graduate school and told her to pick a few things to put together a syllabus. In typical Athena fashion, though, she chose them all, reading every single book on the list and meeting with Mel each week to discuss them.
Reed fostered her interdisciplinary spirit, too. Aside from her psychology courses, Athena received mentorship from Professor Noelwah Netusil, and it was her economic expertise that encouraged Athena to apply her other studies to broader systems and concepts like game theory. If there’s one way to describe Athena, Noelwah says, it’s that she’s “truly fearless.”
That extended to Athena’s teaching herself programming languages, specifically NetLogo, an agent-based modeling language, so she could perform research for her thesis—a project about intertemporal choice and uncertainty about the future, which, funnily enough, are concepts not far off from the kind of work she does now on cooperation and the apocalypse. After graduation, her mastery of agent-based modeling got her a job developing and coteaching a graduate class at Portland State University at the age of 21.
Her early experiences studying evolutionary psychology, strategic interactions, and choice and uncertainty started her on the path to her cooperation studies. “Just being in an environment where everybody had the same focus and values around inquiry and learning and respecting each other,” she says, “that was really a very special time.”
But Athena was always keen to put the concepts she’d studied into practice and encourage others to do the same; hence why A Field Guide to the Apocalypse is structured as a step-by-step guide, a road map to navigating our wild times. Full of both helpful and funny illustrations, the book uses Athena’s research as the foundation to prepare readers for innumerable apocalyptic scenarios—and have fun while doing it. Bound like a genuine field guide, it’s meant for dire circumstances. As the front reads: “In case of emergency grab this book and go!”
Step 1: Buddy Up (and Choose Your Friends Wisely)
In the Great Rift Valley of Kenya and Tanzania, nestled among deep lakes and tall volcanoes, resides a group of pastoralists called the Maasai. Facing threats of drought, disease, and theft, the Maasai employ risk sharing through a special helping relationship called osotua, or “umbilical cord.” Every Massai household has osotua partners they can turn to when they’re in need—if a partner can assist without sacrificing their own needs, they will help. “If osotua partners do end up helping each other,” writes Athena in A Field Guide to the Apocalypse, “it’s done with an open heart and no expectation of repayment.”
When Athena hit those cows in Colorado and had nowhere to go, it was a friend—an osotua partner, one could argue—who gave her a place to stay overnight and then drove her home to Flagstaff. “No matter how careful you are or how much you try to prevent bad things from happening, sometimes shit just happens,” she says. “If you have a network of people who you can rely on when you’re out of your own scope of ability to handle it, then that can be really mutually beneficial.”
Athena is the sort to find community almost anywhere she goes. She’s the type to chat up strangers while in line at the grocery store, which is how she originally began a conversation with the barista in Crested Butte who may have saved her life.
As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, her cooperation studies began in earnest. But on the side, even her hobbies centered on cooperation, and community, too. With her husband at the time, she taught salsa dancing out of their house, something she’d also done on and off campus while at Reed. When they had a baby and therefore less room in the house, Athena and her partner opened a dance studio down the street.
“It was a way to be really connected to the community and to get exercise and add joy to a lot of people’s lives,” she says. And it ended up bleeding into her work, too. —getting in sync with our fellow humans—and how that’s based on ecological functions is one of her most highly-cited papers. “All organisms basically evolve to pay attention to rhythmic sounds, whether they’re predators or prey or whatever, because those are important indicators that there’s something intentional out there,” Athena explains. “So even our ability to detect rhythmic information is based on the existence of others.”
Does her research inform her hobbies, or do her hobbies inform her research? Athena says it’s both. “The way I exist in the world is I’m just really curious and interested in, I’m not gonna say, like, everything, but in lots of things,” she says. “And I find joy in lots of things.”
Anthropologist Lee Cronk has worked with Athena since 2008, mostly as her fellow codirector at the HGP. He says her ability to branch out and “take on the excitement of novelty” is what makes her a unique researcher in her field. “She doesn’t want to be boring,” he says. “She pursues interesting things. And she doesn’t just take it for granted that the current accepted wisdom is right, because it’s often not. Science is an ongoing process, and she likes to make science fun.”
When Athena left UPenn (as the first student to graduate from the PhD psychology program with a computational modeling dissertation), she began to realize how her work studying the evolution of cooperation applied to understanding the evolution of cancer, too. The human body is a cooperative cellular society, Athena explains, and cancer cells represent a failure and breakdown in that cooperation. In 2011, she cofounded the Center for Evolution and Cancer in San Francisco, the first center of its kind. As a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, she continued this work, discussing the big questions in cancer biology with a cancer evolution working group, which led to publishing a paper on cooperation and cheating in multicellularity.
This research culminated in Athena’s 2020 book, , which covers the ways cells break away from cooperation and cheat to create a lose-lose situation. This evolutionary approach offers new ways of thinking about how we address cancer and the ways we treat it.
There’s a fear around relying on one another, particularly those we don’t know. But Athena, based on her research, has found that it’s best to be “cautiously cooperative” with our fellow humans—watching out for signs of narcissism, selfishness, or bad intentions, but acknowledging that almost 100% of the time, it’s going to be a mutually beneficial relationship.
The HGP has found that it’s not only the Maasai who help each other in times of need. Such practices appear consistently in different societies across the world. “Humans, there’s never been a way for us to survive on our own,” Athena says. “We have always been part of collectives.” And we always should be, she says. If anyone takes any of her apocalypse-preparation advice, Athena wants it to be what’s exemplified by the HGP-studied Maasai: Build a team of people you trust—it could be the difference not only between demise and survival, but between survival and what Athena calls “thrival,” too.
Step 2: Build Your Bunker (or Maybe Just Start a Go Bag)
Just south of the Russian-Mongolian border, in a landscape etched with flowing rivers and tall mountains, live a group of seminomadic pastoralists. Facing severe winter storms and natural disasters, they cut and store hay, build shelters, and make preparations in advance because of their unpredictable climate. Besides their own risk-reduction processes, like providing assistance to one another while in need, this group is also ready for incoming apocalypses because of their foresight to prep.
When you hear the word “prepper,” what may come to mind is a gun-wielding, bunker-building conspiracy theorist. But, according to Athena, there are many variations of preppers. Some have deep pantries stocked with canned goods and meticulously packed go bags in their homes and cars for when disaster strikes. Others take to growing and fermenting their own food, or have already skipped town to live on a middle-of-nowhere piece of land. And some—hopeless helpers, Athena calls them—aren’t necessarily apocalypse-ready, but are prepared to take action when given direction in a crisis.
During the evolutionary history of the human species, 20 to 30 percent of all people died from some apocalyptic event, whether it was a natural disaster, famine, or disease. “We come from a long line of humans that dealt, one way or another, with apocalypses on a daily basis,” Athena writes. As a result, we’re built for change and survival, largely because we’re also biologically predisposed to communicate, cooperate, and use our minds to problem solve.
Our brains aren’t always helpful, though. Sometimes they can work against us in the form of what Athena calls our worst vulnerability: denial. Denial often leads to us avoiding problems or overshooting our own abilities, which can land—and has landed—us in deep trouble, and usually harms us in the long run for facing future disasters. In a way, denial can hijack your brain, an idea that Athena is exploring more in her next book, Hijacked, which discusses all the ways we can be commandeered by parasites, relationships, and social media.
Even Athena has faced her own challenges with denial—initially avoiding prepping because she felt overwhelmed by the task. Now, though, she keeps a deep pantry filled with nuts and grains, and a fermenting station where she makes kombucha, sourdough, and yogurt. A shelter-in-place kit lives in her house, too—a box of everything she and her family would need to survive for 72 hours without leaving the house. She keeps the car kit that helped her in Colorado, and often uses what she calls her everyday carry adventure kit, a collection of items—a whistle, hair tie, emergency blanket, and more—for whenever she’s going out into nature.
When it comes to prepping, Athena considers: “What’s my everyday life actually like? How can I have the things I need to manage risk in my daily life? And then, how can I play and have fun with it, whether it’s being more minimalist as I travel, or being more maximalist when I’m at home?”
Denial and avoidance can convince us that prepping is a surefire way to only make us feel doomed about our situation. But that hasn’t been Athena’s experience. “The act of doing things is why I feel hopeful,” she says. “It is the taking action that feeds back into the hope, and then I’m hopeful, so I’m taking action.” It’s this mindset that’s led her to face and embrace wild times, rather than turn away from them. It’s what inspires her not only to prepare for apocalyptic scenarios, but to seek them out—driving her to solo camp with nothing but a tent and cooking supplies or to go off-roading in the muddy sticks with friends. To Athena, these challenges are about getting yourself in trouble. “And then part of the fun is figuring out how you get out of it,” she says.
Step 3: Embrace the Apocalypse (Have Fun)
In the rugged landscape of Uganda, not far from the Kenyan border, the Ik people can sometimes be found reenacting raids from neighboring groups with drama, music, singing, and dancing. “These events are serious parties, in every sense,” Athena writes, “and are an example of how we can do the same in the face of true existential risks.”
In the spring of 2025, Athena and her friends gathered at Bubbling Wells Ranch in Desert Hot Springs, California. Among the palm trees of the California desert, they played music, laughed, created art, and discussed the apocalypse, too. The event was just one part of a traveling variety show called the , a production of the educational nonprofit Athena helps run, Zombified Media, and an alternative book tour all about embodying the principles of A Field Guide to the Apocalypse. Athena has traveled all over the country, from Los Angeles to Chicago, and all over the world, too, from Melbourne, Australia, to Reykjavik, Iceland, to blend fun with disaster prep. “It combines creativity and grappling with what’s going on in the world,” she says.
Athena says fun is a key part of surviving our wild times. Fun is a destressor, a revitalizer, and a way to be in community with others. And it’s something she applies to her work, too. “The necessity for rigor and precision [in science] is not mutually exclusive with novelty and excitement and fun,” one of Athena’s graduate students, Scout Mastick ’14, says. “Athena models that philosophy in her work, and takes measures to make sure that her graduate students don’t lose sight of it over the course of our education.”
For Athena, fun looks like lots of things—skiing, dancing, off-roading, music, comedy, and always, always adventure. She combines a few of these skills for the Apocalypse Roadshow to get folks excited about preparing for crises, rather than avoidant and fearful.
Music has long been part of Athena’s life. Her mother was a musician, and her maternal grandfather was the national musician of Austria. At Reed, she’d venture to the music department with friends and jam out on the instruments. Later in life, when her daughter began learning ukulele, she picked it up, too, and started carrying it everywhere she went. Often, that’s what she plays, but other times you’ll catch her jamming on the cello, the stand-up bass, or the Greek bouzouki.
At bluegrass festivals, Athena combines her love of music and community, finding not only joy, but hope, in tent camping and playing music with strangers. Especially if those strangers are not people she typically surrounds herself with. “It’s some of the most grounding times in my life, because you’re with people creating something together that you all appreciate, and meeting people who are very different from you,” she says. “In the bluegrass community, there are a lot of people who are very conservative, you know, waving Trump flags, but everybody is playing music together, and people like each other as people, even if they don’t agree with each other’s politics.”
That’s another thing that may set Athena apart from other researchers in and outside of her field—her willingness to explore beyond her echo chamber. She understands that the world feels frightening right now, and that finding common ground with others can be difficult. But when you study the science of cooperation as she does, it’s easy to see that in every disaster, you can find an instance of cooperation and generosity through conflict and tragedy. Community members helping a neighbor hose down the flames engulfing their house. Someone risking their own life to rescue another from a flash flood. Health care professionals continuing to work every day despite fear and risk during a worldwide pandemic. That’s what keeps Athena optimistic in our wild times: “It’s people being there to help each other in times of need, and seeing that in my work, and also seeing that in my real life, when I’ve been in situations where I’m in need.”
Her most recent project builds on these principles. This November, Athena launched , the culmination of many decades of her work. A public benefit corporation, the CFI applies biological and evolutionary principles of cooperation to shape systems that are mutually beneficial for humans, societies, and the technologies we create.
Athena still finds time to have fun, of course. In early September, she didn’t have to venture far for the Apocalypse Roadshow’s latest stop. At Pickin’ in the Pines, a bluegrass and acoustic music festival hosted in the tall pine trees of Flagstaff, Athena and her crew taught a workshop on how jamming is about cooperation, community, and intergenerational cultural transmission. It was another chance to foster community through music, all while discussing rather than denying our apocalyptic times.
As she jams with strangers, injects comedy into otherwise-daunting concepts, and continues to prove the generosity and cooperation of humans in her research, Athena finds hope in an uncertain climate, mostly, she says, “in the humanity of the people you meet when you go out into the world.”
Tags: Academics, Alumni, Books, Film, Music