You know I'm here for the uncertainty. That kind of "the game is pretty much over" thinking is still bound up in the myths of modernity, that there are defined outcomes that we humans create and can either progress towards or fail to achieve. But in the composting of these modernist myths, we also have to compost the idea that we get to extract ourselves from the middles of all sorts of relations and save the world. And this is a different kind of grief from we're not going to fix it. It asks us to live into the middle of things, to not turn away from all that is unsolvable, from all that doesn't resolve into beginnings or ends.
I understand the point you are making here, but I do not think it is fair to represent the “the game is over” mentality as based purely in cynicism seeking a sense of certainty. I’m sure that does apply to many, but I belong to that mentality and “seeking certainty” does not feel like a representation of my thought process.
Personally, it hurts - a lot - when I have to digest optimism regarding the state of the human condition. It feels like being gaslit by culture at large to be told to live my life as if there is any kind of hope for the future our parents told us we could believe in. At the rate AI is advancing at, whatever comes after us is approaching fast. My own theory is that whats left of humanity following the environmental apocalypse we are hurdling through will leverage AI in development of a wide range new, post-human biological beings. I think we should expect a world that is as alien to us as the modern world would be to the age of the dinosaurs. And I think any visions people entertain of an everlasting humanity (which I am not saying you are promoting) require a lack of recognition of the processes that brought us into being. No biological empire lasted forever. We like to entertain ideas of ourselves as the apex of a process, but we have always been a link in the chain.
My particular theories of what comes next are obviously shortsighted and speculative, but just because you don’t know what the injuries will look like doesn’t mean it’s sensible to say that the boulders on the track “may simply rearrange the train”.
Personally, I require open acknowledgement that “yeah things are as bad as they seem”. Because the lack of openly discussing it makes me feel isolated, like I’m the only one who feels it, like I’m the only one who sees the things I see, like I’m not actually allowed to feel the hurt when I do feel it. I have spent years shoving it under the rug for periods only for it to sneak back up and punch me in the gut, always harder the longer I’ve managed to keep it suppressed. And while you’re actively not advocating for blind optimism either, blind optimism is unfortunately just about the only rebuttal ever offered.
The only antidote for me has been making peace with it - living my life acknowledging that whatever the end is, it is affecting or will be affecting all of us. And I let that inform my life, in the way a Stoic or Buddhist will use the reminder of their own personal mortality - and which your own book may well hit on. It reminds me to treat people with love and kindness. It means I will not be producing any biological children to suffer needlessly - but may still adopt. It means I swiftly terminate any notions of any work of mine “living on” and don’t allow such a motivation to inform my actions. I don’t avoid thinking about the future, but I don’t make plans that rely on a “happy ending” view of of life in 40 years.
It is motivation to show up every day as the best version of myself that I know how to. It is the motivation to work on myself - physically, mentally - because I can’t make the journey hurt less for others if I’m not taking care of myself on the way.
There is nothing inherently wrong with looking for another way to frame things, but I needed to provide another perspective. For many people I believe that rejecting “the end” can itself be a source of hurt, and for those people it may be more helpful to explore ways to process that feeling instead of attempting to replace it. You don’t get to grieve properly if you never get past the phase of denial.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I’m certainly not advocating that we reject any possibility of endings (or end times). I would never counsel a denial of our finitude and mortality (the fact that so many people try to get us to ignore or forget about it is one of the primary reasons I wrote a whole book about death.)
Middle age isn’t a mark of the eternal, it’s a mark of time that’s foreshadowing an end. I don’t think of aging is disconnected from death, endings, finitude, or mortality in any way. As someone who is now in the middle of life, aging feels very much connected to my finitude. I am much more aware of my mortality than I used to be. And frankly, while there are good things about aging, a lot of it also sucks.
So I’m not trying to advance some sort of sunny optimistic viewpoint here. I’m not trying to get people to put on a happy face, or pretend like everything will be fine. I think that most optimists could use a sobering dose of humility. But I could say the same thing about most pessimists. I reject the idea that I am supposed to feel either one way or another about whatever the future throws at us (either positive or negative), and I don’t like the thought that young people would be forced to feel one way or another, either. I hope there is room for a range of feelings about the future (that does not exist and will look radically different from what almost all of us can imagine ): sorrow, grief, rage, awe, wonder, joy, love, whatever.
“I reject the idea that I am supposed to feel either one way or another about whatever the future throws at us”
I like and appreciate this. And i think this points toward something underneath my response. Because I think what I detect (and may be wrong, do correct me if so) is that you more specifically reject the hopelessness associated with “the game is over” than somebody simply having negative expectations. And I think what i was trying to highlight in my own processing of the world is that I can both have bleak expectations and not allow that to let me live as if there is no point in continuing to try - that it can in fact be leveraged to reintroduce purpose and force me to evaluate what really matters - *because* of the feeling that time is limited. There’s no exact telling of when things will go downhill, or why, but there’s a sense that it will, and that makes the present all the more important.
Perhaps that was already the point you were making in the description of “middle age” that my 30-year-old self less immediately picks up on? Or perhaps I’m still a decent margin removed.
In my field, religious studies and theology, there is a long ongoing conversation about hope vs hopelessness. The feeling I often get is that I am always being asked to pick a side, or being called out as if I have picked a side even when I haven’t. I don’t want to be forced to choose one affect to inhabit, as if that’s my permanent affect. And I don’t want others to be pushed into that situation either. I feel differently about the nature of reality every day, my feelings are fluid. So I’m not rejecting hopelessness. But I’m not romanticizing it either. The same goes for hope. For me, being in the middle and embracing the uncertainty in it is also a way of refusing to be trapped in a static feeling.
You know I'm here for the uncertainty. That kind of "the game is pretty much over" thinking is still bound up in the myths of modernity, that there are defined outcomes that we humans create and can either progress towards or fail to achieve. But in the composting of these modernist myths, we also have to compost the idea that we get to extract ourselves from the middles of all sorts of relations and save the world. And this is a different kind of grief from we're not going to fix it. It asks us to live into the middle of things, to not turn away from all that is unsolvable, from all that doesn't resolve into beginnings or ends.
You are one of my muses of the middle!
I understand the point you are making here, but I do not think it is fair to represent the “the game is over” mentality as based purely in cynicism seeking a sense of certainty. I’m sure that does apply to many, but I belong to that mentality and “seeking certainty” does not feel like a representation of my thought process.
Personally, it hurts - a lot - when I have to digest optimism regarding the state of the human condition. It feels like being gaslit by culture at large to be told to live my life as if there is any kind of hope for the future our parents told us we could believe in. At the rate AI is advancing at, whatever comes after us is approaching fast. My own theory is that whats left of humanity following the environmental apocalypse we are hurdling through will leverage AI in development of a wide range new, post-human biological beings. I think we should expect a world that is as alien to us as the modern world would be to the age of the dinosaurs. And I think any visions people entertain of an everlasting humanity (which I am not saying you are promoting) require a lack of recognition of the processes that brought us into being. No biological empire lasted forever. We like to entertain ideas of ourselves as the apex of a process, but we have always been a link in the chain.
My particular theories of what comes next are obviously shortsighted and speculative, but just because you don’t know what the injuries will look like doesn’t mean it’s sensible to say that the boulders on the track “may simply rearrange the train”.
Personally, I require open acknowledgement that “yeah things are as bad as they seem”. Because the lack of openly discussing it makes me feel isolated, like I’m the only one who feels it, like I’m the only one who sees the things I see, like I’m not actually allowed to feel the hurt when I do feel it. I have spent years shoving it under the rug for periods only for it to sneak back up and punch me in the gut, always harder the longer I’ve managed to keep it suppressed. And while you’re actively not advocating for blind optimism either, blind optimism is unfortunately just about the only rebuttal ever offered.
The only antidote for me has been making peace with it - living my life acknowledging that whatever the end is, it is affecting or will be affecting all of us. And I let that inform my life, in the way a Stoic or Buddhist will use the reminder of their own personal mortality - and which your own book may well hit on. It reminds me to treat people with love and kindness. It means I will not be producing any biological children to suffer needlessly - but may still adopt. It means I swiftly terminate any notions of any work of mine “living on” and don’t allow such a motivation to inform my actions. I don’t avoid thinking about the future, but I don’t make plans that rely on a “happy ending” view of of life in 40 years.
It is motivation to show up every day as the best version of myself that I know how to. It is the motivation to work on myself - physically, mentally - because I can’t make the journey hurt less for others if I’m not taking care of myself on the way.
There is nothing inherently wrong with looking for another way to frame things, but I needed to provide another perspective. For many people I believe that rejecting “the end” can itself be a source of hurt, and for those people it may be more helpful to explore ways to process that feeling instead of attempting to replace it. You don’t get to grieve properly if you never get past the phase of denial.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I’m certainly not advocating that we reject any possibility of endings (or end times). I would never counsel a denial of our finitude and mortality (the fact that so many people try to get us to ignore or forget about it is one of the primary reasons I wrote a whole book about death.)
Middle age isn’t a mark of the eternal, it’s a mark of time that’s foreshadowing an end. I don’t think of aging is disconnected from death, endings, finitude, or mortality in any way. As someone who is now in the middle of life, aging feels very much connected to my finitude. I am much more aware of my mortality than I used to be. And frankly, while there are good things about aging, a lot of it also sucks.
So I’m not trying to advance some sort of sunny optimistic viewpoint here. I’m not trying to get people to put on a happy face, or pretend like everything will be fine. I think that most optimists could use a sobering dose of humility. But I could say the same thing about most pessimists. I reject the idea that I am supposed to feel either one way or another about whatever the future throws at us (either positive or negative), and I don’t like the thought that young people would be forced to feel one way or another, either. I hope there is room for a range of feelings about the future (that does not exist and will look radically different from what almost all of us can imagine ): sorrow, grief, rage, awe, wonder, joy, love, whatever.
“I reject the idea that I am supposed to feel either one way or another about whatever the future throws at us”
I like and appreciate this. And i think this points toward something underneath my response. Because I think what I detect (and may be wrong, do correct me if so) is that you more specifically reject the hopelessness associated with “the game is over” than somebody simply having negative expectations. And I think what i was trying to highlight in my own processing of the world is that I can both have bleak expectations and not allow that to let me live as if there is no point in continuing to try - that it can in fact be leveraged to reintroduce purpose and force me to evaluate what really matters - *because* of the feeling that time is limited. There’s no exact telling of when things will go downhill, or why, but there’s a sense that it will, and that makes the present all the more important.
Perhaps that was already the point you were making in the description of “middle age” that my 30-year-old self less immediately picks up on? Or perhaps I’m still a decent margin removed.
In my field, religious studies and theology, there is a long ongoing conversation about hope vs hopelessness. The feeling I often get is that I am always being asked to pick a side, or being called out as if I have picked a side even when I haven’t. I don’t want to be forced to choose one affect to inhabit, as if that’s my permanent affect. And I don’t want others to be pushed into that situation either. I feel differently about the nature of reality every day, my feelings are fluid. So I’m not rejecting hopelessness. But I’m not romanticizing it either. The same goes for hope. For me, being in the middle and embracing the uncertainty in it is also a way of refusing to be trapped in a static feeling.