21 Survival Myths That Will Absolutely Get You Killed

We’re what you’d called “indoorsy” people. We can fight our way out of the brush in a video game like nobody’s business and spot the native plant species that give away a movie’s shooting location as Southern California rather than the tropics, but if you dropped us in the middle of a forest, desert or island with nothing but our wits, we would simply sit down and cry.

As we waited for death to take us, though, we could tell ourselves that even we know something about surviving in the wild. Follow running water to civilization. If an alligator starts chasing you, run in a zigzag. If a jellyfish stings you, pee on it. (The wound, that is, not the jellyfish, although go ahead and pee on him, too. Son of a bitch has it coming.)

Aaaaand it turns out we’d be dead several times over if we did all that stuff. When you only know stuff from the movies, you end up believing a lot of lies, and that’s disastrously true for survival skills. Fortunately, people who know things from the internet are at least a little better informed, so when r/AskReddit was posed the question, “What survival myth is completely wrong and can get you killed?,” they set us straight.