I'm having one of those days where the Horror of Life is just pressing down too hard. You know the Horror of Life, right? The impending death, doom and destruction hovering over everything in the world? Some days I can distract myself from it enough that it doesn't bug me much. Today isn't one of those days.
I'ma go ahead and whine in a gender-specific way: who decided that men have to die younger? That's the ultimate Horror of *my* life these days. As we've discussed, I'm a 100% introvert, so I tend to have very few friends; in fact, I tend to have one friend at a time. Right now that one friend is the Spouse, who is male and seven years my senior. Despite the fact that I've made him swear to live to be 100, I know that he's going to pre-decease me. Every woman on earth knows this about her husband, and it fucking sucks. Why do we wimmens have to be the ones going through that every time? It's not bad enough we got stuck with the childbearing and the menstruation and the culturally-ingrained misogyny?
The day is sunny and beautiful and I know it's temporary. The planet is slowly being destroyed. Slowly, so that we don't notice. That's how Bad Shit happens. We could stop it, if we cared, but apparently we don't. We just keep crapping the nest and moaning about how awful it is.
Anyway. Life. What a joke.
I'ma go ahead and whine in a gender-specific way: who decided that men have to die younger? That's the ultimate Horror of *my* life these days. As we've discussed, I'm a 100% introvert, so I tend to have very few friends; in fact, I tend to have one friend at a time. Right now that one friend is the Spouse, who is male and seven years my senior. Despite the fact that I've made him swear to live to be 100, I know that he's going to pre-decease me. Every woman on earth knows this about her husband, and it fucking sucks. Why do we wimmens have to be the ones going through that every time? It's not bad enough we got stuck with the childbearing and the menstruation and the culturally-ingrained misogyny?
The day is sunny and beautiful and I know it's temporary. The planet is slowly being destroyed. Slowly, so that we don't notice. That's how Bad Shit happens. We could stop it, if we cared, but apparently we don't. We just keep crapping the nest and moaning about how awful it is.
Anyway. Life. What a joke.
I've actually given the end of the world a lot of thought lately. I won't address the issue of wives/girlfriends lamenting the loss of their spouses/boyfriends, since that's completely outside of my experience as a human being. I only know of it though observations of others and so can't produce any informed commentary about it.
ReplyDeleteThe end of the world, however, I have sort of been able to study and it involves some interesting phenomena:
- technological societies are ephemeral by nature and this is actually OK. The human mental faculties seem to constrain high-energy lifeways to always depend on some non-renewable, but cheap and widely available natural resource. So they inherently die out partly through resource depletion all by itself.
- technological societies tend to die out in a fairly specific way; they deteriorate slowly and lose their following rather than catastrophically self-destructing. The usual cause is the adoption of a lifeway that's too rigid to cope with environmental changes. This is what did the Viking societies in, for example. Ancient Rome died for similar reasons and the Republican/Tea Party movement in the US is doomed to failure the same way.
But it's not all bad:
- Western society doesn't actually have enough energy left to destroy the planet (except through some kind of nuclear accident which is relatively unlikely, hell most of the stockpile is so old it wouldn't even go off if we tried to light it up). Crude oil will become economically impractical before we'll be able to do this. In fact, the last 30 years has already been a story of gradual decline in fossil fuel economies around the world. That's going to severely limit the damage we'll be able to do.
- The West did not Get It Right This Time. It is thought by many that we did; we prayed just right and thought and did just the right things to make the West a permanent fixture on the planet. But in fact, we've already made the same mistakes as most technological societies of the past so we're probably going to deteriorate in the same way in the future.
- I predict, therefore, that there will still be enough leftover at the end of the party for humanity to continue and possibly with a superior lifeway in place instead. Industrialized society has been a brutal experiment anyway, with a lot of death and torture involved. We may default back to a gentler way of life that's not so destructive.
That's my take on the End Of The World anyway....
L
Hm... interesting...
ReplyDeleteI should emphasize a couple other things that I think will characterize the EoTW that I glossed a bit previously.
ReplyDelete- It's highly unlikely that we'll go back to the "horse-n-buggy", or even the hunter-gatherer, lifeways of the past. We've learned too much about the world we live in to return to that - science (and just rational modes of inquiry in general) has revealed enough to us to kind of eliminate the possibility of a truly retrograde movement away from high-energy society. This is resoundingly positive; an Amish/Mormon approach is a horribly brutal choice and hunter-gatherer just won't satiate out continued curiosity about the world we live in.
To me, this implies more of a Kurtzweilian type of future rather than a catastrophic return to something Stephen King-like, such as a Dark Ages or Crusades Part Deux.
- the end of crude oil as a cheap and widely available power source will be a relief. Warfare on today's catastrophic scales will become impossible without cheap crude oil. Invading even helpless areas like the middle east requires a LOT of fuel. Without it, warfare will have to return to being the terrible business it was before the current state-of-the-art in murder technology. So it's likely to be much more deliberate and, hopefully, back to being a last resort as it should be.
So I'm mildly optimistic at this point. The deterioration is going to hurt the criminal elements a lot more, ultimately. Innocents are suffering the most right now, but I think that's going to change...
L