What If Human Life is in its Middle Age?
Being in the middle of things is a struggle
One day, not long ago, I asked my students to imagine human life on Earth in 200 years. The room erupted in disappointed and cynical laughter. As it turned out, most of the people in the room couldn’t bring themselves to indulge that fantasy. They are twenty somethings who’ve been told, for much of their young lives, that the game is pretty much over.
They’re not alone in this feeling that time is almost up, of course. Maybe it’s the mixed effect of pandemic, climate change, the eruption of war, the constant stream of apocalyptic films, novels, games, and shows. Whatever the cause, it seems to me there are a lot of us who are convinced that human life (at least as many of us have come to know it) is very close to its end.
It’s easy for me to entertain this line of thought. The field I’m trained in—religious studies and theology—has made me very good at thinking about beginnings and endings. I think about creation and apocalypse stories all the time. It often feels to me as if only two things happen: things are either just getting started, or they’re almost over.
But what if the story of human life on earth is neither at its beginning nor its end, but instead is caught up in the difficult middle?
I’m probably motivated to see things this way because I am now in the season of my own life that is the difficult middle. I look at everything, now, through middle-tinted lenses. But entertain me for a moment, because I think the middle of things is important.
It’s not especially easy to think about the middle of things; it can feel like a struggle. There’s a clarity or crispness to being one thing, rather than another. The middle is neither here nor there. Neither beginning nor ending. Neither young nor old. In the middle of things, in the middle of a life, you’re still not quite free of those driving ambitions of youth. And yet you’re also already being pulled apart by time itself. There is incredible pressure, from opposing directions, in the middle of things.
The space of the middle is a zone of uncertainty. But zones of uncertainty are spaces that are, if we can see them this way, inhabited by mysteries.
A mystery is ambivalent, to be sure. There’s no reason to be positively disposed toward something just because it’s mysterious. But one of the risks that many religious and spiritual traditions take is to imagine that our disposition toward the mysteries matters in some kind of ultimate and consequential way. How we think about mysterious things, how we show up as we stare into them, what we do to (or with, or for) one another in the face of them: all of these things have mattered, in different ways, in different times, and in different places. But ultimately, maybe the middle of things calls us deeper into the mysteries. Maybe it calls us to become someone sort of new, as we stare into the mysterious uncertainties. Maybe this calls us to account. Maybe it calls us to change.
How we think about time, and our relation to time, matters. At least that’s how I think about it. I suppose this is why I wrote a book about death. It’s a book about mortal time, and how we are disposed towards it, how we struggle to make sense of it. We shape time, and it shapes us back. The shapes we make matter.
I recently spoke with Dan Miller, who is one of the co-hosts of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, about my book Sister Death, and one of the things we spoke about in the second episode was this idea of collective mortality: our mortality as collectives, and not just as individuals. Western philosophy, especially, has been consumed with reflections on our individual mortality. How do each of us, as isolated and atomized individuals, feel as we face into our mortality all alone? This is what it’s often meant to think about life and death, in the western tradition. And the whole scheme of Christian theology is often read as nothing more than a plan for the salvation of your own individual soul.
I think individual mortality is an important thing to talk about. It matters. But so many other human communities, across the long spread of time, have been better at thinking about collective mortality: the life, death (and afterlife) of a people, a community, a group. I feel like my own cultural context and intellectual training has been rather void of this sort of contemplation. I’ve been kind of hungry for it. The only place I really see it showing up, in mainstream American discourse, is the fearful and obsessive reflection on human extinction: the ritual incantation that it’s all on the verge of falling apart, for all of us.
The fact is, of course, that we really don’t know. Whoever convinced my students that this is the case doesn’t know. None of us know. We can count on radical change ahead, but none of our predictions are destiny. The future doesn’t yet exist for us to consider and contemplate. It might feel like a certain kind of justice, to imagine that the human life forms who do so much damage to the earth today, will soon be gone. But for now, it’s just a fantasy. It might feel like a certain kind of emotional preparation to remind ourselves that none of this will last, that all of this will soon be gone. But, for now, it’s just a fantasy. For now, we really don’t know what 200 years from now looks like. Or 20,000. And sometimes our hubristic predictive confidence can be a form of violence against people making their way toward the future. Human life, whatever that actually is, might be in a sticky and uncertain middle of things.
What if we were to look into that abyss of the future with something other than the fresh-faced optimism of youth, or the weathered surrender of old age? What if we brought more of that capacity to struggle that we practice, and live into, in the middle of things: a willingness to be called to account, to be called to change, a mad charge to live into the uncertainty because it’s the only thing we can see?
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.