Soon I’m going to devote the rest of my writing career to writing thinly disguised fiction about my adolescence (which ended some time ago) and my adolescent impulses (which continue fierce and unabated in my old age).
By October I’ll have written approximately 110,000 words of essays and reportage, and when you write as slowly as I do, that’s a lot. I’m tired. I’m also suffering from exogenous depression. That means that my sadness is not coming from the inside. No chemical imbalance. Just watching the news and remembering what Flannery O’Connor said: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Depression is classed as a mental illness, but if you’re sad because the world is unutterably cruel and full of psychopaths and getting inexorably warmer, it’s a sign of that your brain is functioning reasonably well.
You still suffer, though. You’d probably suffer less if the world were simply hellish, rather than hellish and sad and beautiful and full of loss.
Friends who tell you that depression is all in your head are just evidence that you’ve got insane friends, which doesn’t help a bit.
So: tired but sane and hopeless for humanity. I haven’t lost my grip on reality, although I recognize that a lot of people have. It’s a little worrisome that they all think they’re sane, too, and some of them are happier than I am. They put a lot of energy into staying hopeful about the future. Even if they’re making stuff up about the Rapture or cold fusion or the Singularity or benign aliens saving humanity from itself, they’re grinning and I’m not.
Plenty of people believe that the only thing that matters in this life is happiness, and they serve as cautionary examples. Go after unqualified happiness and often enough you’ll end up with the consciousness of an eggplant.
It’s a truism that happiness is always a product of something else—hard work on a journal or a painting or a deep and abiding desire to get to know another thinking human being—but it’s more accurate to say that happiness is a waste product of not worrying about happiness. Happiness doesn’t seem to be toxic or climate-changing, but it’s not the point of human existence, either. In my experience, it just kind of piles up and eventually gets in the way of serious endeavor.
If happiness were the point of human existence, we’d all be better off believing in happy lies than in reality. But—I’m going out on a limb here—the point of human existence is to be ever more aware of the truth. These days, the dark truths of war, extinction, climate catastrophe, population overload, and human inhumanity to other living beings argue against peace of mind, much less any kind of lasting personal bliss.
In a world where the truth is hard to stomach, there are plenty of people who will try to ease your pain. Politicians, priests, medical personnel, in-laws, life coaches, professors, human resource officers, coal company climate scientists: if you’re suffering from exogenous depression, they’ll comfort you for a small fee.
But most people know when a lie is a lie, no matter how happy it would make them if it were true. Whether we want one or not, most of us have built-in bullshit detectors, and believing in a happy lie represents a deliberate suppression of your own cognitive abilities.
The suppression of my cognitive abilities that I’ve been conducting thus far in this discussion is that early this November, the human population on the planet will reach and exceed eight billion. To give you an idea of how big that number is, if you were to take my two years of journaling and continue it until I had written one word for every living human being, it would take me a hundred and forty-five thousand, four hundred and fifty-four years.
Last week I was asked to show up at Beckwith’s Lodge in Lower Stanley and speak to a class of College of Idaho students. They were studying the ecology—social and physical—of the Sawtooth Valley with an emphasis on the wild salmon runs that had once been here but now, because of the Snake River dams, are an endangered species.
So I read some of my early writing about the salmon runs I had known as a kid, about my father’s experience as an obsolete salmon fishing guide, and my conviction that the wild salmon runs have long been extinct. I also read them last week’s journal entry, which—while fiction—does flesh out political and environmental worst-case scenarios for the Pacific Northwest.
Smart young people make for a good audience. They listened carefully, and if they were surprised by my worst cases, it wasn’t because of the bad news. It was because someone my age wasn’t telling them, over and over again, that everything was going to be all right.
These young people were quite aware of what could happen in their lifetimes. They knew what a population of eight billion humans would do to the planet. They said that they felt powerless in the face of our civilization’s momentum toward disaster. There was little they could do to stem the tide, they said.
I told them that the single biggest thing an individual could do to save the planet was not have kids.
“We need the human population reduced to a billion if we’re going to sustain civilization,” I said. “Not having kids is the easy way to get there.”
They said that wasn’t going to happen. “Everybody has kids,” they said.
“That’s not true,” I said. “People who worry about their carbon footprint don’t have kids.”
Humanity will get to a billion or fewer individuals sometime in the near future, but not by a general refusal to procreate. Instead, war, pestilence, famine and a changing climate will do the job, probably in a cooperative effort.
I know that previous prophecies of apocalypse have not come true. Thomas Malthus was proven wrong by advances in agriculture that culminated in the Haber-Bosch process and the Green Revolution. Pestilence was defeated by advances in public health policy, antibiotics, and medical technologies indistinguishable, for most people, from magic. War has been on the decline for decades and is approaching the point of diminishing returns, at least if you believe Stephen Pinker over Vladimir Putin.
But eight billion humans, while not a magic number, is a good milestone to announce the return of humanity’s traditional scourges.
We knew that at some point we were going to run out of planet. Fossil fuels, topsoil, and living space would collide with hard limits. Heretofore harmless microbes would have eight billion opportunities to mutate into lethal variants.
On a slightly longer time scale, black magic of the gene-splicing variety would allow the oppressed peoples of the world to design biological suicide bombs to complement the atomic suicide bombs that have already been stockpiled by the thousands.
Artificial intelligence, I read yesterday, has been harnessed to find new and better nerve gas varieties, and a few hours after computer scientists applied an algorithm to various available molecules, it came up with 40,000 possibilities.
Any of these methods of population control will end civilization. The earth’s experiment with conscious intelligence, in all its terror and beauty, will be over. The species that survive humanity will not be sapient, given that sapience has taken eons to develop and then will end in a geological instant.
I am not a believer that dark conspiracies rule the world, simply because any group of people larger than three will inevitably contain accident-prone incompetents. But it’s tempting to think that a group of technologists with savior complexes might try to create a virus that would create sterility in humans, so that we could wind down slowly and peacefully rather than die in a frenzy of collapse.
Kurt Vonnegut explored this premise, and the concept of unintended consequences, with his novel Galapagos. His solution sterilized all of humanity, save for a few stranded on the Galapagos Archipelago. These survivors, with plenty of fish, decent weather, and no predators, evolved over eons into a congenial seal-like species of low intelligence that spent their lives lying on the beaches and gently barking at each other. Dreams of space travel were gone forever, but the average level of human happiness was much higher. Things worked out all right for those for whom happiness was the point.
I don’t think that in the world outside of Vonnegut’s imagination, humans will be so lucky.
I don’t know if I’ll ever again be speaking to groups of undergraduates about their future, even if they invite me. My message doesn’t allow for much hope.
(I’m not alone. When Vonnegut, toward the end of his life, was asked to predict the future, all he had to say was, “Things will get worse and worse.”)
Even if the students find my honesty refreshing, their professors might not appreciate me questioning the future of college loans, homework, careers, and other fixtures of dreary institutional reality.
If I do end up behind a lectern again, I doubt that I’ll have much hope to give my audience, beyond telling them that civilization can sometimes persist in the absence of civilization. I’ll tell them that after Rome fell apart, monks in Irish monasteries, living in miserable subsistence conditions, somehow managed to copy decaying manuscripts and preserve ancient knowledge for future generations. It would have been hard for them to articulate the dream that drove them to sustain a hibernating civilization, one that existed only in legend, but they acted upon it.
I don’t know how young people will react if I tell them all to become Irish monks, but I’m beginning to think such a life might not be the worst way to live, post-empire. It’s a life without a lot of distractions, I’ll say. It’s a life with a purpose. It’s a life that keeps you worrying about problems you can solve. Best of all, happiness isn’t its point.
Julie and I love each other dearly and we live a privileged child-free life full of travel, good books, good friends, good food, and mostly good moods if I can stay away from the PBS Newshour. We have a good time together and we laugh a lot. After thirty years, we still have the ability to surprise each other. We delight in each other’s intelligence, lethal though it might occasionally be.
Civilization continues to provide us with food, clothing, a roof over our heads, and connection with fellow humans. Overpopulation will end all that, probably in our lifetimes, but civilization shows every indication of continuing at least through tomorrow and maybe the day after. We find that reason for cheer. Will we make it to nine billion? Not bloody likely. But tomorrow and the day after? We’re betting on them.
These are happy truths, which are much better than happy lies at easing the despair of war, financial instability, new Covid variants, mass shootings, and assholes moving to Idaho to establish an all-white nation.
So far we’ve been able to balance the bad things in the outside world with the good things in our joined lives, but we’re aware that those lives could be destroyed in the first flash of good luck turning bad. Our mechanisms of control are prudence, kindness in the absence of reasons not to be kind, and a general avoidance of nasty people. They’re hardly foolproof, but we depend on them because there aren’t a lot of other options.
We’re navigating narrow waters: we’ve managed to not be so happy that we’ve stopped trying to make things better (barking on the beach), and not so despairing that we’ve stopped loving and living. That’s our basis for hope these days, and it has much to recommend it. We think it will keep us going for as long as our world lasts.