“Island Rules”: Survival Skills for City Souls
On a dreary, foggy Monday in Cleebourg, France, the Mayor dials into Campo Grande, Brazil. Two dots on a map; one conversation about survival—less machetes and palm fronds, more mindset and modern street smarts. Ritesh from Bangalore can’t make it, which nudges the theme away from a geographical compare-and-contrast and toward something intimate and universal: how we keep our heads when life gets wobbly, how we act when the script dissolves.
What follows is not a hero’s manual for jungle fire-making. It’s a gentle, sometimes wry exploration of what it actually takes to get through a hard day—and how we might become the kind of people who do.
A spark that won’t light
“Can you light a fire without a lighter?” the Mayor asks, half-teasing.
“No,” Ismar says, laughing at himself. “Can you?”
Also no.
It’s an honest opening gambit—and a useful metaphor. We think survival is about the kit: the steel, the flint, the knife in a boot. But in a city of 1.2 million people, what kind of “fire” do you really need? The pair sketch a desert-island fantasy—tropical trees, clean water, a hut you build with your hands—before letting the fantasy dissolve into the more complicated reality of urban life, where the dangers are subtler and the skills more social.
Takeaway: Survival often begins with admitting what you don’t know. Not as weakness—but as orientation. Where are you, really?
Two maps of the same place
Ismar’s city map starts with a rule: don’t walk at night. It’s not melodramatic; it’s practical. In his Campo Grande, there are people who “watch” your parked car—friendly if you’re friendly, tense if you’re not. It’s a micro-economy of eye contact, small bills, unspoken agreements. Ismar is clear-eyed about it, not judgmental; he understands these exchanges as survival, too.
Water? “Not a problem.” There are fountains, homes where you can knock and ask. Food? Harder if you are broke, but there are church groups and charities; there’s also hustling—selling sealed bottles of water at a markup in the heat, carrying loads, doing whatever a body can do without a résumé. If you’re lucky, you get a supermarket job stocking shelves. If you’re honest, it might pay less than a day on the street. If you want dignity, the job—with its payslips and bus allowances—can still be worth more.
The Mayor nudges, reframes, plays the sceptic-ally: “So why take the job?” Because, Ismar says, begging wears the soul. Wages—even small ones—are proof you belong.
Takeaway: Dignity is a survival resource. You can’t swig it from a bottle, but you know when you’ve run out.
Shelter is more than a roof
When you lose an address, Ismar argues, you lose the key to conventional work. Being unwashed is not a moral failure; it’s a logistical trap. The conversation turns slow and careful here, like two people walking a narrow path together: shelter enables hygiene; hygiene enables interviews; interviews enable income; income enables shelter.
It’s a loop that either spirals up or down. Education tugs the loop upward—if it’s there. The Mayor prods with a future-of-work angle: what happens when robots restock the shelves? Ismar doesn’t flinch. Then you shift the hustle. You sell things in the sun; you find the next human edge. He doesn’t romanticise this. “Brazil is not for amateurs,” he says, with a smile that carries both pride and warning.
And yet, beneath the pragmatism, a quieter current runs: connection. Ismar calls it the survival skill he most lacks and most wants—socialising. Not the clinking-glasses kind; the everyday choreography of belonging. He tells stories: initiatives that didn’t take, reunions that fizzled, kindnesses unreturned. He wonders if the problem is him—too direct, too uninterested in football, not into beer, not into bragging.
The Mayor won’t let the narrative harden against his guest. He challenges the premise: what if it’s not your deficit but poor manners on their part? What if your “island” isn’t loneliness but integrity in a noisy bay? Together they test the edges: how to find your people in a city that keeps changing the meeting spot at the last minute; how to keep inviting when the world RSVPs with silence.
Takeaway: Belonging isn’t a single door; it’s a street of small porches. Knock more than once. Also: you’re allowed to leave a porch that doesn’t welcome you.
The quiet pivot — From “how” to “who”
If the first half of the conversation is about how to survive, the second is about who you become while you do. This is Pineapple’s favourite axis—practical and philosophical, at once. The hut on a beach becomes a proxy for a shelter inside yourself. The sealed water bottle becomes a symbol for trust and the uneasy line between commerce and care. The supermarket aisle becomes a corridor into the future—will there be work for me there, and will I recognise myself if there is?
Ismar, to his credit, keeps trying to tell the truth about himself without making himself small. He is not antisocial; he is a man with precise rhythms. He doesn’t want the party; he wants the conversation before the party, the part where people notice each other. He has organised reunions. He has helped students who were new to his country and his language. He has—this is crucial—kept offering. If some offers were ignored, he did not become less.
The Mayor names this out loud. “We spend six hours a month talking about other things,” he says, gently rerouting the story from transaction to friendship. He situates Brida’s work in the same spirit: topics chosen by Janita, adapted in real time to the rhythms of many ages and continents, so the circle always has room for who’s in the room.
Takeaway: When you can’t change the crowd, change the circle. Curate the conversation. Invitation is a survival skill.
Field notes for a city survivalist
- Know your red lines. Ismar’s are simple: don’t walk certain streets at night. That one habit is worth ten gadgets.
- Keep one clean layer. A shirt, a routine, a way to look and feel like yourself. It’s not vanity; it’s identity maintenance.
- Name the economies you’re in. Whether you tip a car watcher or work a till, say what it is. Clarity beats shame.
- Find the non-market spaces. Water fountains. Libraries. Churches. Groups that meet because they choose to, not because they have to.
- Practice micro-socials. The three-line check-in. The “I thought of you when…” message. Survival is cumulative; so is friendship.
Takeaway: If you can’t light a fire, learn to carry a spark—tiny, portable, repeatable.
The hard part: When help doesn’t come back
Ismar shares a story that will be familiar to anyone who has ever carried a sofa up a stranger’s stairs: you help; later you’re met with silence. It stings, because it confuses your map of how the world should work. The Mayor refuses to make cynicism the lesson. We let the story breathe, then insist on a better reading: it’s not that help was wasted; it’s that the return didn’t come from the address you expected.
There’s a difference between transaction and contribution. One generates a receipt; the other, a life.
Takeaway: Don’t stop being the person who brings the extra chair. The party is better because you exist—even if the thank-you is late.
The desert island returns
By the end, the island reappears. Not as sand and palms, but as a thought experiment with teeth: If you were stranded in your own city, what skills would matter most? Neither of them needs a bow drill. They need the mindset Ismar keeps circling: observe, ask, adapt. Talk to the people who already live there—the street vendors, the guards, the women who know which taps still run in a heatwave. Watch how the smaller economies breathe. Learn to build a hut out of routines: a place to sleep, to wash, to read, to plan.
And maybe the most subversive lesson of all: allow yourself not to be entertained by what entertains the many. You don’t have to drink to be invited. You don’t have to love football to love people. There is a room somewhere in a city of 1.2 million where the conversation is exactly your speed. The trick is not to stop knocking.
Takeaway: Your desert island can be a city bench at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday if that’s where you finally feel like yourself.
Creating our own summer
Pineapple likes to end where the air warms. The Mayor often talks about but warmth people make. That feels right here. Survival isn’t swashbuckling; it’s deliberate. It’s a clean shirt hung to dry by 7 a.m. It’s telling yourself, I am not defective because I prefer the porch to the stadium. It’s choosing the supermarket job because, for now, it keeps your documents in order and your bus pass paid, even if some days the street looks richer. It’s sending the reunion invite again in spring. It’s insisting the world is still a place where strangers can become neighbours.
A city can be a desert that never stops talking. The trick, as Ismar shows, is to answer only the voices that help you build.
