Last week Julie and I watched Don’t Look Up, Netflix’s satire-turned-documentary about two astronomers who discover that the earth has six months before a biosphere-ending comet will crash into the Pacific just off Chile. There might be time to deflect it if they get the word out.

They do get the word out, but the word is ignored until it’s too late. The movie ends happily, if the end of a moronic and omnicidal species makes you happy.

It made me sort of happy. Normally I like documentaries, because they impose narratives on the random events that pass for our reality. But Don’t Look Up hits a little close to home. Chances are, a comet will not crash into our planet this century, but nuclear wars, runaway greenhouse effects, spontaneous meltdowns of nuclear waste storage ponds, pollinator extinctions, and designer viruses are all better-than-new comet substitutes.

The movie’s message is clear: humankind lacks the intelligence, much less the consciousness, to confront oncoming existential crises. There’s a strong possibility there won’t be anybody left to celebrate the new year in, say, 2032, because humans have placed our stupidest, least competent, most narcissistic specimens in leadership positions.

As I said, it made me sort of happy, but in the same way the abstract contemplation of my own death makes me sort of happy. Death uncomplicates things wonderfully, for moronic species as well as individual morons.

If consciousness persists after death, we won’t be worrying about retirement accounts, Covid in the brain, whether the firewood and coffee supplies will last the winter, and if it will get warm enough to wash the car. Existence might be a simple matter of contemplating our sins for a century or a millennium before going back on duty—on a whole new planet this time, as the old one has been totaled by the Cosmic Insurance Adjuster—and sinning some more.

Epicurus long ago noted that he wasn’t going to fear nonexistence if he wasn’t going to be present when it came, a solipsism that applies to death from comets as well as from more immediate dangers. If consciousness—the highest and best form of being present—doesn’t persist after death, even our sins won’t be anything to worry about.

 

Today is the first Monday of the new year. I was going to offer up a list of 2022 predictions, but the past few years have destroyed cherished narratives of progress, civil behavior, cause-and-effect, rationality, and truth. It’s hard to predict anything to an audience whose recent training has been to disconnect one event from the next.

As a civilization, we have lost the plot, and even if a copy of Time Magazine’s 2022 year-end review issue were to appear in your mailbox tomorrow, you’d know it was a fake, and throw it in the trash, right? You’d refuse to read what countries got invaded, who 2022’s Jeffrey & Ghislaine were, which startups turned into trillion-dollar companies and which turned out to be frauds, what cheap over-the-counter drugs guaranteed hundred-and-fifty-year lifespans, who died, who got elected, married, and divorced. You’d turn your back on the ten best performing stocks, the winner of the World Series, the winners and losers of the Academy Awards, countries with nuclear accidents, and the moment Satan finally appeared to his Q-cult followers in Dealey Plaza.

Time’s 2022’s year-end review will be remarkably similar to 2021’s, the issue that did show up in your mailbox, sadly after-the-fact.

Even though the The New York Times insists on showing you a new set of events every morning, it feels like the past is doing its best to stop anything from happening in the present.

This scenario sounds ridiculous until you look at the phenomenon of PTSD, where flashbacks—of the murder of a family member, a rape, a mugging, an IED—destroy the thin space of the now. The comeback tours of JFK Jr., Jesus Christ, Trump, the Soviet Union, and salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest suggest that what we’d most like to do as a culture is repair the damage of our yesterdays. Whatever agency we possess is directed backward.

Not that we have a lot of agency anywhere else. The future has started making our choices for us. We suggest changes in plans at the risk of being thrown out of the Party, the family, the Church. Anyone with a smart phone knows technology has become a series of inevitable upgrades. Polling has become pushing. Scientific facts have become hostage to study parameters, truth has become hostage to moral context, elections hostage to pre-announced results. Life comes with spoilers whether we ask for them or not. 

Our psyches have banned surprises. The present as a domain of human possibility is finished. These are not new ideas.

 

If the future could really be known, I would have won the Powerball long ago, except that if I could have foreseen the winning numbers, I also could have foreseen the complications a few hundred million dollars would bring to my life, and I would have torn up the ticket. I know that plenty of people would take those winning numbers and run with them, complications be damned, but they have more faith in the ability of money to change the future than I do. Studies suggest people have a set-point for happiness, and it doesn’t change whether they’re sent to jail or win the Powerball, get divorced or receive tenure. After three months, they’re just about as happy or unhappy as they were before their circumstances changed.

Which brings us to the idea of Fate, and the impossibility of avoiding ours, especially when the past and future have taken control of our lives. We are who we are, and each instant of our lives is part of the same tapestry that includes our births and our deaths, and the birth and death of our culture/country/civilization.

 If you flee to Samarra to avoid Death, you find that death has an appointment in Samarra. If you design your republic to last forever, you find that your republic has an appointment with Julius Caesar or Vladimir Lenin or Adolph Hitler or Donald Trump.

 

The Greeks had a better handle on these matters than we do. If you wonder what it’s like to live in a world where your choices won’t have any effect on your outcome, try reading a Greek play. Any Greek play will do, but Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex probably says it best:

Told by an oracle that he’s going to kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus moves from Corinth to Thebes to get away from the city where he thinks his parents live. But they’re not his real parents. On the way to Thebes, Oedipus kills the King of Thebes, his real father, and defeats the Sphinx, who is terrorizing the city. The citizens of Thebes, missing a king, and grateful that the Sphinx isn’t bothering them anymore, crown Oedipus king and marry him to the old king’s widow, Jocasta, who is Oedipus’s real mom.

The Greeks who watched Oedipus Rex knew its plot before they went into the theater. In fact, the only person in the whole play who doesn’t know what’s going to happen is Oedipus himself.

 

Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and a bunch of other playwrights who vanished from the discourse when the Library at Alexandria burned weren’t impressed with surprise endings. They knew the most important thing they could put on stage was the moment when a human being realized, with a great deal of pain, that Fate versus free will was Godzilla versus Bambi (or the Greek equivalent of Godzilla and Bambi, the gods and human beings).

Much depends on how well Oedipus reacts to finding out what’s really going on. After his mom hangs herself in shame, Oedipus blinds himself by piercing his eyes with the gold pins from her royal robe, which is a most literal way of expressing his refusal to see the truth for most of his life.

The sequel: in Oedipus in Colonnus, Oedipus is an old, blind, halt, lame beggar, being led about by his daughter, but he’s better off than he was when he was the powerful king of Thebes. He’s become reconciled to what the gods have had in mind for him.

“In spite of all the crap I’ve been through,” he says (my translation), “things have turned out okay.” Then he dies. There are worse words to die by. I want them for my epitaph.

 

Don’t Look Up is a Greek tragedy for our time. In the first few seconds of the film, we know that the earth will be destroyed, and within a few minutes, we know that humans are too blind and full of pride to try to save it. The heroes of the story are all people who tried and failed. They have become sadly reconciled to the fate of the earth and all the living things it sustains, and they spend their last night of existence having dinner together, telling each other their favorite memories, expressing their love for each other, and facing the truth that it will all end before their last meal does.

The people who wielded earthly power in the film flee the ruined earth in a starship. Twenty-two thousand years later they emerge from cryogenic cocoons on a new, Edenlike planet. You can imagine how well that works out. 

Astronomers have known what the gods have planned for almost a century now. The sun will turn into a red giant and expand out to the orbit of Venus or beyond, heat-sterilizing our planet. It wasn’t supposed to happen for a billion years or so, but humanity has apparently convinced the gods to speed up the schedule.

 

Death really does uncomplicate things, but that doesn’t mean I want to experience its simplicity anytime soon. I like my life. Planetary catastrophe aside, the fact that it’s going to end more or less in line with the actuarial tables makes me sad and angry. What’s the point of spending seventy-odd years developing consciousness if it winks out like a switched-off lightbulb? What’s the point of becoming more ethical with age if the system you’re a part of is destroying the planet, ethics and all? What’s the point in reconciling yourself with Fate if, as Shakespeare notes,

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods
They kill us for their sport 

King Lear is only one of the plays where Shakespeare shows that the gods act most cruelly through our fellow human beings, the ones who think they can control their own fate and ours.

 

Julie and I find ourselves at a banquet these days, one that threatens to end before dessert, one all the more delicious as dessert approaches. We spend a lot of time thinking about favorite experiences, telling each other we love each other, and trying to see what’s happening in the world as accurately as we can. This last is the hardest part.

Things don’t look good in this new year, and all those comet-substitutes I mentioned earlier get a little closer every time I take my eyes off them. I deeply and sincerely hope that I’m wrong about what they’ll do to us. While we’re waiting, we make plans—about travel, about camping in the Sawtooths next summer, about skiing the nearby backcountry if it gets warm enough to go outside. (Last Saturday it was minus 27 Fahrenheit at 9 a.m. We adjusted to Fate by staying inside by the woodstove most of the day.)

 

If free will is an illusion, good will is not. With that in mind, and while I’m deeply and sincerely hoping, I hope that all of you out there have wonderful new years for as long as new years are possible. May the gods smile upon you.