If you’re gazing at these words, future person, you may have found them in a book in a sealed aluminum box eroding out of a hillside close to your home in a small town devoted to subsistence agriculture. I wrote the book you’ve just finished and buried it there a long time ago.
A city was there at the time, but it wasn’t devoted to subsistence agriculture. It existed because of industrial tourism, which involved inviting visitors to your area and taking their money. You probably know better than to do that now. That’s why your town has walls and gun emplacements.
I’m assuming your town qualifies as civilized, which means that it functions as a community of people who help each other, who abhor the practice of slavery, who don’t burn witches, and who have a democratic form of government instead of a mafia. I hope you can read and speak English, because otherwise it’s going to be hard to understand what I’m telling you. Also, English is a language that lends itself to truth, kindness, basic food-producing technology, and occasional moments of beauty. All these are essentials if you’re going to have a worthwhile life on the hostile, ravaged, and resource-poor planet my generation has bequeathed to you.
Maybe all that is too much to hope for.
I’ll never know what you think of us past people—I couldn’t hear you if I wanted to, because it’s been many centuries since I’ve been alive. In the words of many a suicide, By the Time You Read This I’ll Be Dead. I suppose you can look at my book as a lengthy suicide note, although the method I chose for my demise is the simple passage of time.
Time is 100% foolproof as a suicide method. Poison, firearms, and jumping from high places with a rope around one’s neck all have horrible outcomes if they fail. Time is slow but sure, and in the big scheme of things, relatively painless.
Why do I bring this up? Because even though I’m long gone, I can imagine you and your difficult existence. I can imagine that suicide is an issue for you as it was for me—not that I ever seriously considered killing myself, even when my civilization was getting ready to. But lots of people I know have killed themselves. It’s a pity, but many of my privileged and pampered contemporaries preferred death to fulfilling the human requirements of their time.
________
In my professional life, future person, I was a high school and college teacher, with a plausible aura of wisdom, which made my office hours more like therapy sessions than those of most of my colleagues. Students confessed to moments of outrage at their and their parents’ relative poverty, moments of despair over romantic rejection, moments of profound uncertainty about a conscious existence in the afterlife, and moments when they thought suicide was a viable solution to their concerns.
I was small in relation to the size of these questions, but I did what I could.
To those students worried about eternity, I said that nothing in this life precluded a conscious afterlife. Consciousness itself, in all its mystery, was an indication that life had produced something inherently valuable, so valuable that it might be the reason for life in the first place.
I told the suicidal that humans are, from the perspective of the gods, as temporary as mayflies, so they should relax and let eternity work its magic. “Suicide,” I said, “is choosing literal death when what is needed is an abstract death, a tear-it-down-to-the-studs transformation into a new human being. Humans are a psychically molting species, and molting is invariably painful. But it’s necessary if you don’t want to wreck the people who love you, or spend your life in a tiny, cramped, starter self.”
I told those worried about maintaining conscious awareness after death that the most rigid scientific materialists, those people messing about with particle accelerators and deep-space telescopes, were treating abstract data as if it were literal fact. But they were no more certain about material reality than charlatan tent-revival preachers raving about the streets of Heaven while thinking mostly about the girls in the front row, sitting there in their summer dresses, positioning and repositioning their knees.
Beware of the literal, future person. It will hurry you through your life, which you know is short enough already.
________
I started writing during the Covid pandemic of early 2020, and have continued writing through a bunch of subsequent Covid mutations. As of now, there’s no end to the plague in sight, although I have enough faith in our medical science to believe a universal vaccine against all Covid mutations is a possibility. It’s only a possibility because a more likely possibility exists: medical science will cease to be because civilization will cease to be.
By now, being a future person, you know if that did or did not happen, and a bunch of other stuff besides. I won’t belabor you with all the things we should have been worried about: global climate, estrogen analogs in plastics, nuclear war, pathogens rising out of melting tundra, or a combination of all these and a thousand others.
I don’t doubt that whatever comforts you have are hard-earned, and whatever tragedies you confront are exponentially greater than anything I’ve experienced. Somewhere in the time between me and you the planet had to shake off whole nations of people, nations full of beloved pets and children and conscientious, loving parents. They’re all gone, along with the assholes who caused their deaths. I feel confident enough in my prophetic abilities to say that death came to the deserving and undeserving alike.
As near as I can tell, your ravaged planet will support 250 million humans if you’ve managed to keep civilization going, far less if you haven’t. The biosphere has no doubt done the arithmetic for you.
You might have trouble believing that 8 billion people were on the planet all at once, but we were. At the expense of the resources you and your children desperately need, we made it work for a century or so.
Were we crowded? Yes. Were we crazy? Yes. Were we aware that exponential growth, the thing that our economic system was founded upon, would result in catastrophe sooner rather than later? Yes. But we decided that bad craziness was better than accepting limits.
________
Future person, I hope you are a teacher or a historian or an artist, or all three, and that you have read my words in the spirit they were written, rather than the unconscious utterances of a selfish, ignorant fool who, by his very existence, stole your future from you.
I’m aware that in a subsistence economy, education is a luxury, expensive in terms of time, effort, and resources. I’m hoping you and your community consider that expense worthwhile. If you do, it’s because you know something lies beyond subsistence.
I assume you do see me as a citizen of a frivolous culture that burned the last available fossil fuels, polluted the atmosphere, overheated the planet, and engaged in civil wars that destroyed the last vestiges of comfort and security.
Why didn’t I do something before it was too late?
My only answer is that consensus reality—what your community believes is real—has a tremendous amount of inertia. It persists long after the world that created it is gone. It wraps itself around you and presents one or two courses of action in a world of infinite possibilities.
To put it simply, we couldn’t conceive of the hard work that lay before us. I suspect that your version of humanity is accustomed to hard work and knows not to avoid it. If not—if you, future person, are a member of a few remaining oligarchic families, living in a bunker, eating stock you’ve stolen from the global seed vault in Svalbard—you won’t last much longer than we did.
Sustainability is a word we used a lot, but we should have spent more time thinking about its meaning.
________
Future person, you can believe that I lived, loved, had moments of joy and laughter, suffered, and died, all more or less according to the cultural norms I was born into. I suspect that you’re doing the same, although what you’re doing and what I did have so little in common that we might not recognize each other as human. Also, you may see me as irredeemably evil.
Unlikely as it may seem to you, I went through life in a haze of neurotic good will, with a rudimentary sense of right and wrong. I tried with limited success not to hurt other people. I gave myself too little credit for the things I did right and felt horribly guilty for the things I did wrong. I even believed in a god, the god of Job, for whom human conceptions of righteousness were never enough, who hung out with Satan and allowed for Satan’s torture of his faithful servants.
I’m assuming you know the Story of Job and worship the same god Job did. If you don’t, your world is a lot better than I expect it to be.
I do know that we had longer lives than you, that we ate better than you, and that we controlled more power than you, even when we didn’t think we had any power at all. If our civilization hadn’t seemed like such a Leviathan, we might have done what was needed to make it more benign. But we had only to point to the wonders of technology, social organization, and established religion to make individual humans feel that they amounted to almost nothing.
It was fine. We didn’t rebel, didn’t upset the status quo, didn’t get active in the face of calls for action. Many of the people I knew in college, who were concerned with social justice—enough, they said, to die for it—ended up as doctors and lawyers, deeply ensconced in systems that became deeply corrupt and unjust well before our civilization’s end.
________
A quick bit of what for you is history:
Life has become dangerous. Sane people can no longer deny that humanity is facing the death of billions. Fires and floods have destroyed whole cities, but more than that they have wrecked essential parts of ecosystems, setting in motion the cascading forces of extinction. Heat waves have made large parts of the planet unlivable without fossil-fueled air conditioning. World temperatures have reached the hockey-stick part of the graph. Wars in Europe and the Middle East threaten to expand into a general world war. New plagues are on the horizon, and the human population is large enough that it has become, for microbes old and new, a target of opportunity. Corruption has spread through our institutions, and the people who shout the loudest about wanting to do something about it are the most corrupt. We know what we’re doing cannot last, but we’re not about to quit doing it.
I’ve said this before, but I thought I would die before the consequences of my generation’s behavior would hit. Now I know that those of us who thought we might leave the theater before the final curtain will get to see the finale.
________
In my youth, a popular song began, “In the year 2525 / If Man is still alive.” The lyrics deteriorated badly from that point on, but those first two lines seem better and more meaningful to me now than when I first heard them.
When I taught writing, I told my students they needed to know their audience, but over the 300,000 words of these blogs, I’ve consistently ignored my own advice. I have no idea if my audience exists.
If you do exist, I’ve got a poem for you. I didn’t write it. A 20th century poet named William Carlos Williams did, and he wrote it for future people everywhere. He was a physician, and spent his life helping people, but in much of his poetry and prose he focused on human nature, and in the end he doubted his ability to do lasting good.
A lot of people liked this poem for its truth. His poem may seem all too true to you. It’s titled This Is Just to Say:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
So: If you are alive, whoever you are, whatever you are, and however impossible it may be for you to forgive me and my kind for eating your plums and destroying your icebox:
I’m sorry.