A couple of weeks ago, I published a Halloween-themed short story called Cardboard Robot, in order to enter it into a contest that I did not win (it’s OK I forgive you
).It’s fine! It’s fine.
Anyway, today, on the actual day of Halloween, I thought this bit of nonfiction I’ve been working on seemed appropriate.
I would say, “Enjoy!” but I don’t think that’s quite the right sentiment for this one.
Endure!
Things are Bad
As you may have heard, there’s a war on. Well, several. Let’s get this out of the way right up front:
War is shit.
Obviously, and foremost, it is hell for the people on the inside of it, and then, also, it’s really good at sucking up all the world’s attention. We can’t help it. We’re suckers for the drama.
Please trust that if I sound a bit flip, it is not because I am trivializing the truly unimaginable atrocities and suffering. It is because my aim today isn’t to dwell on one horrible, potentially cataclysmic event.
My aim is to dwell on all of them.
We All Worry
If you stop to think about it for two seconds, you can probably name the things that stress you out the most right now. The top contenders likely have something to do with money, or family, or maybe your idiot boss at work.
But also, thanks to the unending drumbeat of sensationalist “news,” at least one of your persistent stressors is probably tied to impending global catastrophe. If pressed, you might admit that this is a terrible waste of your precious energy and attention, but we seem to be hardwired for worrying about future events we cannot possibly predict or control.
And so, as my treat for you today, I’d like to propose a counterintuitive solution to this wasteful worrying. It’s something that has been working pretty well for me, so maybe it’ll work for you too.
Either that, or it will send you into a spiral of panic and despair from which you will never recover.
Trick or treat!
All of the Apocalypses
Hypothesis: Maybe if we can overload your anxiety circuits they’ll just shut down.
I have assembled a list of 27 potential apocalyptic events. In the first version, I included reference links for further reading. But then I realized that might send you down any one of several dozen rabbit holes.
Instead, I’d like you to do your best to read these like a mid-2010s Buzzfeed article, letting the glib summaries wash over you in one continuous spray of bad vibes.
Sociopolitical Instability
WWIII
Might as well get this one out of the way right up front. Because if we feed all the relevant information into a magic 8 ball and give it a shake, it’s gonna say “All signs point to yes!”
Chinese Implosion
A bunch of experts seem to agree that China’s projection of strength and ambition is mostly a cover for deep instabilities that almost guarantee a toppling of the current regime. That might sound great to us ‘Murican anti-commies, but it would be very, very bad news for global economies (which includes ours, btw).
Russian Collapse
Putin used to love to ride horses bareback and shirtless, but now he’s old and mired in an unwinnable war with his neighbors. And this is after consolidating political power for decades, which has made his government very brittle. Before you drink the schadenfreude-flavor Kool-Aid, consider the potential fate of Mother Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal in the absence of a (mostly) stable government.Iran
You know what let’s not talk about Iran.
Economic Disruption(s)
General National and/or Global Collapse
It doesn’t take much research to get the strong sense that the entire economy is basically just a house of cards, and it’s gettin pretty windy!
Resource Scarcity
Seems like every week, you can find a new article making the rounds in investment circles from some domain expert about why [insert vital resource] is precariously close to running out in the near future. What happens when the supply for one (or more!) of them actually hits E? (Hint: “Blood on the streets” is not a euphemism.)
Biological Threats
Bioweapons
As technology advances, unhinged sociopaths (or well-meaning but incompetent scientists — looking at you, Wuhan lab workers!) could very well whip up a virus that would make Covid look like a fun prank.
Antibiotic Resistance
Every year that goes by without a miracle breakthrough that reduces our total reliance on antibiotics to treat deadly bacterial infections, we get closer to an era where antibiotics become virtually useless. It’s an evolutionary race, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win it.
Fungus Among Us:
People don’t talk about this much, but fungal experts (yeah, I know) are losing a lot of sleep over the various strains of fungi that are adapting to live in warmer (human) temperatures. And you thought Last of Us was fiction. Guys one of the main reasons we are warm blooded is to keep from getting colonized by fungus.
Technocalypse
Cyber War
I mean this is already happening, it’s just a question of scale. The more reliant we become on integrated digital networks, the more vulnerable we are to cyber-induced armageddon.
Grey Goo
Nanotechnology is a rapidly developing field, with all kinds of exciting breakthroughs every year. Let’s cross our fingers that one of them doesn’t wind up accidentally leading to unstoppably self-replicating nanobots.
Skynet
AI is already here, and it’s advancing faster than anyone can clock. People make ambitious predictions about what will be possible in six months, and then it happens in two weeks. What does this mean for our future? It’s probably not The Terminator, but other than that, we literally have no coherent idea.
Psycho-Cultural Madness
Contentious Reality
Or, the dissolution of so-called “consensus reality.” Another one to file under “already here.” There is a widespread crisis of trust, and it seems increasingly less likely that any of our institutions will make it out alive. And a society without trusted institutions is…well, we call that anarchy, and it’s not great.
Digital Enslavement
Almost everyone is already addicted to their smartphones. Can we even imagine how much more addictive the next generation of consumer tech will be? What happens when it’s up to the current crop of iPad babies to keep the lights on?
Total Isolation
The consequences of social disconnection accrue invisibly and logarithmically, hollowing out the structural integrity of civilization until, to everyone’s great shock, it collapses. By the time you realize you have termites, it’s already too late.
Ecological Catastrophes
Runaway Warming
Apparently, there are a lot of things that could tip us right on over into becoming Venus. All we can do is hope that our technology advances fast enough that we can manage the inevitable chain reaction of greenhouse effects once they get started (assuming they haven’t already, which…you know what, nevermind).
Ocean Acidification
Already happening. The question is whether we can change course before the process becomes irreversible (sort of like the “Runaway Warming” scenario). What happens if our ocean gets too acidic and most or all of the life in it dies? Sounds like a good exercise for your imagination!
Biodiversity Collapse
If you took a road trip back in the early 2000s, you had to scrape a thick layer of insect paint off your windshield every time you stopped for gas. Now? You might make it all the way across the country without having to worry about it. So, hey, it’s not all bad news!Coastal Flooding
If the ice caps keep on melting the way they’ve been melting, we’re going to have to make some major changes to our maps. Which will be just one more annoying thing to have to deal with during the global refugee crisis catalyzed by mass migration from every coastline in the world.
Geophysical Disasters
Super-Volcano
You’ve probably seen some fun YouTube videos about this one. There was a bad film by Roland Emmerich. We’re probably past due. Good news is that might mean it doesn’t happen for a thousand years. But also, yeah, it could be tomorrow.Mega-Tsunamis
This is when a big earthquake says “hello” with a wall of water. How likely is it that one of these rolls through that’s big enough to qualify as apocalyptic? Eh, see above.
Threats from Space!
Major Meteor Impact
The hope is we’ll see it coming from far enough away that we could do something about it, but of course we can never be sure.
Solar Flare
Every 25 years or so, the Sun lets out a little burp that can devastate sensitive electronics across the world. The last one was in 2001. Would you say that now, 22 years later, we’re less reliant on technology for every major feature of modern life, or…more?
Supernova
The good news is that if a star blows up close enough to be a problem, we’ll see it coming for a long, long time before it eventually obliterates us all.
Not Enough Babies
This one gets its own special category, because unless we can figure out how to get a lot more people to start having a lot more babies pretty soon, the world is going to be a dramatically worse place in just a generation or two. Lots of people have started writing and talking about this recently, but nobody seems to have any good ideas about how to fix it. Maybe we were wrong about teen pregnancy after all? (Kidding! (mostly))
Super Fun Ones
False Flag Alien Invasion
Have you noticed how there seems to be a lot more stuff about UFOs and (*whispers*) aliens coming out of our government recently? Well, one less-crazy-than-you-might-assume explanation is that the population is being psyoped by a shadow government into fearing the threat of alien invasion, so that sometime soon they can fake one in order to seize immense political power. I’m not saying this is likely, but I am saying that if you want to build a case for worrying about it, you can.
Simulation Shut-down
Frankly, too many very smart people believe in the we-live-in-a-simulation theory to dismiss it out of hand. So what happens if the simulation stops? Well, nothing. Literally. It would be like the entire human race died of an aneurism, instantly, all at once. By some threads of logic, this probably already happened, and we’re just living through a rerun.
OK…what now?
Faced with such a preponderance of dismally probable world-ending scenarios, doesn’t it feel a little bit silly to worry about just one of them?
Put another way, you can’t possibly worry about all of them to the degree that they seem to merit. If you try, you’ll just shrivel into a tight little knot of panic until you either die, go insane, or…get over it.
So why not get over it?
Tend your own garden
A few weeks ago, when I was test driving this idea with an intimidatingly well-read friend, he said it reminded him of Voltaire’s “Candide.”
I know, so obvious. This guy, amiright?
Anyway, just to make sure he knew what he was talking about, I asked him to clarify.
The gist is that the titular protagonist is first educated by a naively optimistic tutor named Pangloss, whose outlook on life is obviously the product of uninterrupted privilege. Thereafter, Candide suffers many or most of the worst calamities a human can experience (exile, earthquakes, war, slavery, and so on), all of which eventually bring him to the conclusion that, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
"We must cultivate our own garden."
As we become more aware, both intimately and abstractly, of all the terrors stalking us through the darkness of our future, we can choose either to rant and despair, or we can engage as productively and earnestly as possible with the contents of our immediate reality.
There is little or nothing I can do about any of the 27 horrible (and horribly likely) scenarios I’ve outlined above. Do I then shut my eyes and ears and hum happily to myself in denial?
No.
I choose to turn my attention instead to the work this day presents me. I show and practice love for my family, my friends, and the people in my communities who need me the most.
I cross off the next thing on the never-ending to-do list generated by my business.
I write another chapter of my book.
I publish this essay.
These are all the flowers and fruits of my garden. Sooner or later, God or fate or the roiling violence of an untamed universe will sweep them or me or all of us away.
In the meantime, I’ll save my worrying for the tending.
I'm going to read this pick-me-up later today. The only real reason you didn't win is because your entry was so good, I just couldn't bring it down to my lowly level by giving it a Lunar. You deserve something even better. 😉
Don't get discouraged! I want to see more from you in the future. Besides, you got an honorable mention for "Shadowloss" and now you're duty bound for your entire life to keep submitting until you win! D-U-T-Y BOUND!
A refreshing reminder of how pointless it is to worry about things outside my control! I just can't worry about 99.99999999% of all things.