We call it entertainment, but it’s really exposure therapy for the human condition. Survival shows let us play with fear from a safe distance, testing how far we’d go to win, to belong, or just to matter.
The survival shows we binge-watch aren’t that different from the lives we lead—they just make the rules more obvious. Shows like Squid Game and Alice in Borderland don’t invent cruelty—they just hold up a mirror to it. They remind us how easily empathy collapses when survival is at stake. Each storyline is a test of integrity in the face of scarcity—whether the resource at stake is money, power, or dignity.
Beneath the blood and betrayal lies something achingly familiar: the quiet, calculated negotiations we make every day to belong, to be seen, to stay afloat. Game theory offers the logic behind these choices; survival psychology reveals their cost. Together, they illuminate the paradox of our time: that in the pursuit to outlast one another, we risk losing the very humanity that keeps us alive.
We like to think we’ve evolved beyond survival, but modern life tells a different story. Squid Game, Alice in Borderland, The Walking Dead, The Boys—they’ve all struck a nerve because they expose the quiet panic we live with: that there’s never enough to go around. Not enough time or attention. Not enough money or power. Not enough love or sex. Not enough freedom or security. These shows just make the scarcity visible.
What fascinates me most as a clinical hypnotherapist and licensed psychotherapist isn’t the violence or the spectacle—it’s the psychology. The way people rationalize cruelty when survival’s on the line. The way desperation masquerades as strategy. The way empathy erodes when the prize is safety. Watching these shows is like holding up a mirror to our own nervous systems, revealing the constant push and pull between fear and connection, competition and compassion.
We watch people fight to survive because it’s easier to face someone else’s nightmare than admit we’re already living a softer version of it.
Most of us will never wake up in a dystopian arena fighting for our lives. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t playing. We’ve just learned to disguise our survival strategies as ambition, romance, or self-improvement. We call it hustle. We call it dating. We call it self-growth. But beneath the filters and frameworks, it’s the same human story—compete, perform, adapt, repeat.
Our modern “games” may not kill us outright, but they slowly erode something more essential: connection. We compete for attention instead of intimacy, validation instead of value. We treat relationships like negotiations, affection like currency, and vulnerability like risk management. The scoreboard might look different—likes, promotions, followers—but the psychology is identical: win or be forgotten.
In The Walking Dead, survival means deciding who’s worth saving. In real life, it’s choosing which parts of ourselves we can afford to show. We curate authenticity for safety, ration empathy to avoid depletion, and justify self-betrayal as strategy. But the more we adapt to survive, the further we drift from what makes survival worth it in the first place—our humanity.
We don’t talk about it this way, but much of what we call anxiety, burnout, or heartbreak is really unprocessed survival energy—our nervous systems trying to play a game we never agreed to. The rules keep changing, the players get meaner, and the cost of staying in is exhaustion. Yet we keep playing because opting out feels like social death.
Every Game Has Its Rules — The Illusion of Fairness We Can’t Stop Believing In
In Alice in Borderland, survival starts with understanding the rules. The players don’t die because they’re weak—they die because the game weaponizes human emotions against them. Squid Game follows the same pattern: before the game turns deadly, there’s always a contract, a clause, a choice that feels voluntary until it isn’t. It’s not the violence that hooks us—it’s the illusion of fairness. We crave structure to feel safe, then resent it the moment it starts to feel like control.
Rules promise certainty—the idea that if we just play them right, we can predict the outcome. They give us the illusion that chaos can be managed. But the moment the rules start working against us, we see them for what they are: someone else’s design for our behavior. That’s the trap of every system, from government to gender to the workplace. We need structure to function, but when it stops serving us, it starts suffocating us.
That’s what these shows get so right. They’re not about the game itself—they’re about how people adapt to systems they can’t escape. The Boys takes that to the extreme. It’s not about surviving the system anymore; it’s about controlling the narrative. The higher you climb, the more survival depends on perception—not principle.
And while we may not be dodging bullets or corporate superheroes, we still play by invisible rulebooks every day—the workplace, the dating pool, social media. We measure our worth by our bank accounts, our likability by how many friends or followers we have, and our belonging by how often we’re invited to the table. We follow the rules because they make us feel safe, even when they quietly rewrite who we are.
Every Game Has Its Players — The Mirror We Don’t Want to Look Into
Rules shape the system, but players determine the outcome—and in everyday life, we’re all playing whether we realize it or not. There are the ones who follow the rules, the ones who bend them, and the ones who quietly wonder why they’re even playing at all.
In Squid Game, it’s not just desperation that drives people—it’s debt. The show dramatizes the quiet terror of financial shame, the kind that makes death feel like relief. In Alice in Borderland, intellect may win the game, but connection makes the game worth playing. The Walking Dead reveals how morality collapses under chronic fear, and The Boys shows how power curdles into performance when the system rewards illusion over truth. Different worlds, same survival instinct: everyone’s just trying to stay alive in a system built to keep the powers that be in power.
We’d like to believe we’d be the noble ones—the helpers, the heroes, the ones who play fair. But the truth is, most of us have already been every archetype: the rule follower, the rebel, the opportunist, the observer. Fear has a way of rewriting our character. It’s not until we face our fears that we discover who we really are underneath the façade.
That’s what makes these stories hard to watch and even harder to forget. They don’t just expose human nature—they expose our nature. It’s uncomfortable to confront the parts of ourselves that crave more than we need, or the moments we’ve quietly justified self-preservation at someone else’s expense. We’d rather call it ambition than admit we’re hungry for love, safety, and significance.
But that’s what survival does—it distorts morality into math. It’s not that we can’t be both the hero and the winner. It’s that the closer we get to winning, the easier it becomes to forget why we wanted to win in the first place.
And maybe that’s the point. Growth isn’t about proving we’d do better—it’s about facing the parts of ourselves that probably wouldn’t.
Every Game Has a Playbook — When Survival Becomes the Only Strategy Left
Once you know what the prize is, the next question is how far you’re willing to go to get it. Every game has its playbook—the strategies we use to get what we think we want or need. Some of us learn to perform. Some of us learn to please. Others learn to disappear until it’s safe to be seen. But no matter the tactic, the goal is the same: to survive the game without losing ourselves in it.
In Squid Game, the play is compliance—following the rules of a system that punishes defiance and preys on desperation. In Alice in Borderland, it’s intellect—solving the puzzle before it kills you. In The Walking Dead, it’s loyalty until survival demands betrayal. In The Boys, it’s performance—the hero mask hiding the hunger for control. Different plays, same story: fear dressed up as self-preservation.
We do the same thing. We hustle for validation, charm for affection, control for safety. We call them habits, but they’re really defense mechanisms—strategies that once protected us and now quietly govern the way we think, feel, and behave. Our playbook becomes our personality, and we don’t even notice we’re still running the same plays in completely different games.
The irony is that these strategies work—until they don’t. They keep us alive but not fulfilled, connected but not intimate, successful but not free. At some point, the playbook that once saved us starts to cost us everything we were fighting for.
Real evolution begins when you stop playing a zero-sum game and start playing with awareness—when your moves come from intention, not instinct.
Redefining the Game — Finding Meaning in a System Designed to Break You
If every game has its rules, its players, its prize, and its playbook, then the real question isn’t who wins—it’s how you choose to play. Because even when the game is rigged, you still have a choice in how you show up for it. You can’t always choose the game, but you can choose how you play it. You can die a coward, or you can die with dignity.
That’s what makes survival stories so captivating—they corner their characters until the only thing left to play for is meaning. In Squid Game, Seong Gi-hun chooses to end the cycle of violence, even at the cost of his own life, to save someone else’s. He doesn’t escape the game; he transcends it. In that moment, he redefines what victory even means.
If the lesson of every survival story is that someone has to lose, maybe the next evolution of humanity is learning how to win differently. What if survival isn’t about outlasting everyone else, but about outgrowing the systems that keep us competing in the first place?
In Squid Game, the system thrives because people keep playing. Sure, the game master can use violence as a tool for submission, but there is no game without the players. In The Boys, corruption endures because people keep consuming it. In The Walking Dead, morality decays because survival becomes the only metric that matters. And in Alice in Borderland, even intelligence becomes a trap when logic replaces heart. Each world collapses for the same reason ours teeters now: people forget they have a choice.
All of these stories—Alice in Borderland, The Walking Dead, The Boys—reveal the same truth in different ways: you can’t always control the outcome, but you can choose your integrity along the way. Fear tells you to protect yourself at any cost. Freedom asks you to protect your humanity no matter the cost.
That’s why we watch. That’s why we relate. Because whether it’s life or love or legacy, we’re all just trying to figure out how to play a game we didn’t ask to enter—and still find a way to win without losing ourselves.
Maybe that’s the real plot twist: in a world obsessed with winning, the bravest thing we can do is stop competing. Survival, at its highest form, isn’t about fear—it’s about freedom. It’s the moment you stop fighting for control and start creating from integrity. It’s cooperation with boundaries. Compassion with discernment. Love without losing yourself.
The new kind of survivor isn’t the strongest or the smartest. She’s the one who knows when to disengage from a rigged system. The one who stops measuring her worth by who chooses her, promotes her, or applauds her—and starts defining it by how she chooses herself.
If the old world rewarded power, the new one will reward presence. In a culture obsessed with dominance, tenderness is rebellion. Empathy is strategy. Integrity is survival.
That’s the real endgame: not to outlast each other, but to evolve together.
About the Author
Niki Payne is a clinical hypnotherapist, licensed psychotherapist, and creator of Survival of the Singles—a provocative series exploring the intersections game theory and survival psychology shape human connection. She helps people move beyond survival mode to build emotional resilience and create relationships that reflect their healing—not their hurt.
