The Wikipedia article "Societal collapse" perhaps takes a unduly-pessimistic view of life after collapse.
Author Maria Mies noted that her family farmed land once transversed by a Roman road. The Roman Empire collapsed but the collapse did not stop the soil from producing crops, did not mean that all human activity would come to an end.
(It is also pointed out that Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire fills eight volumes not because he wrote so much on the fall of Rome but because he discussed the next 700-odd years when the Eastern Roman Empire, centred in Constantinople, declined and fell after Rome's fall. These are long processes, to be sure.)
Maria Mies's remarks were made in the book Subsistence Perspective that she wrote with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen. In it they say that there is a range of "end-games" between the catastrophic end of the world that many fear and the plastic optimism of those who think that technology will find a cure for our ills. It is noted that technology takes decades before it is commonly accessible. The first computer was invented in WWII. Until 1985, the Grant MacEwan journalism program did not use computerized word processors. The first car did not come to Edmonton until 1903 - it came by train by the way - decades after the first was invented in Europe - and it was many years before horse-drawn wagons and carts left Edmonton for the last time - in fact horse-drawn milk wagons were in use right into the 1950s. Hope that technology will cure our present problems in time without causing whole new ones seems like long odds.
Mies is quoted in a book I would recommend (although I have found time to read just a bit of it) - A Nation of Farmers, by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton. (on page 164, 168).
One of the middle options for our future is subsistence agriculture. This would be a repeat of what happened before.
During the Great Depression, many families left the cities and moved "back-to the land." Adopting Bennet buggies (non-working automobiles pulled by horses) that did not need store-bought gasoline or expensive repairs, putting their hands and bodies to work in small fields and gardens, raising small livestock (pigs, rabbits, chickens), milking family cows, they eked out a living, subsisting on their own produce - basic natural foods - and home-made heating fuel - firewood.
This life provided them with the food they needed, which was more than many city jobless had.
Should our economy or society implode, the same techniques could be put to use again.
Any skills that a person has that would contribute to the new simple but complicated lifestyle would be valuable when/if they are needed. Use of axe and shovel, hoe and rake, hammer and saw, simple carpentry, animal care, outdoor cooking/cooking over a fire, fire-starting, berry-picking, gardening, sewing, hunting, trapping, bread-making, canoeing, understanding the effects of different types of weather -- these may all be valuable skills should we begin to live on small farms.
Even the ability to walk distances may be a scarce commodity - nowadays some are too lazy or harried to do that even, availing themselves of scooters to get around, not to mention the multitude who rely on cars.
What do we really need to survive -
food, shelter, security are the basics.
Good health is important for without your health, life is not much good. The best medicine is preventive - good food, plenty of rest, moderate exercise.
I am not the first to note that much of the world is taken up with un-necessary and ridiculous things. Much of what we buy we do for status or are driven by advertisements or unthinking habit. If the worst comes, it will be interesting to see how people who get around in large chrome-decorated pick-up trucks nowadays react to being forced to plod about on foot, without their status symbols to buoy their self-confidence, make them feel big.
In fact, if civilization collapses, it might be safer to isolate oneself on hidden farms and try to avoid notice by the bands of marauding thieves and pillagers who would troll the highways. Like Mad Max but with boreal forests instead of bare deserts.
A first step might be to block or dig up any paved roads in the area to prevent these free-wheeling marauders from getting easy access. A couple fair-sized trees would provide a significant block to marauder. Instead of a few seconds to get through that point, it would be minutes out of their cars, exposed and on foot, with maybe another block just past the next bend. If the fallen trees are draped with barbed wire, the road-block is likely to be almost impassable to any fast-wheeling bandit.
This might be pessimistic about our fellow humans, but seeing how some/ many drive today and the general me-first, selfishness out there, it is difficult to believe that under harsh conditions their behaviour will improve. For sure after a couple years the bad ones will do themselves or each other in, and the rough edges will be smoothed out of the rest.
Heck - probably the first winter - a true test of character - will winnow out those who don't share or care. Those who rely on someone telling them what to do - who are not self-starters, who are not self-disciplined - will have a difficult or impossible time of it.
It is said that hunter-gatherers were able to satisfy their simple needs with just a few hours of work a day. We too could live that easily if we lowered our needs. As an experiment in the 1920s and 30s, several went to live in the woods. Some more mainstream adopted "wilderness welfare," that I refer to above, but the ones I am talking about now actually tried to go back to stone age technology. If you are interested you may find references to these in old newspapers.
(see my other blog on the fall of Easter Island)
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