On Doom

3/19/23

So by now we've passed several critical, no-going-back climate thresholds. The world is going to get worse. Already entire agricultural seasons are increasingly lost to flooding, wildfires, pollinator collapse, drought, and political unrest - and we haven't even begun to feel climate impacts "in earnest." Hope in this context becomes false hope by default. And hope for what, exactly?

Still. We look up from that train of thought and we're still breathing flesh with needs, flesh that can't move faster than time even if we know what's coming, and there are cats to feed and roofs to try to sleep under and shit jobs that make that possible. It is very hard to go to work when the end of the world, at least how we know it, is a foregone conclusion. It is harder not to. The despair comes in on several sides.

I studied climate science. I worked in an atmospheric chem lab. I am intimately familiar with the nuances of the ways we are fucked. To summarize: every detail it is possible to zoom in on reveals things are worse than they look. Looking back hundreds of millions of years to the biggest extinction events ever recorded reveals things are worse. Looking at a water sample from a single drop of snowmelt reveals things are worse. Searching for hope in electric cars, or the concept of a "solution" itself, is a purposefully executed con. It is technically possible the world could change overnight to the exact set of conditions needed to save billions of lives - but that will not happen. I am not interested in disecting what that world would have to look like to save itself. That world is not coming. What can we do with what IS?

Despair is a fact of this mindset. It is unhealthy, but the world is unhealthy, and I'd rather see the harm clearly and be worse off for it. It is a personal choice. You come out the other end of despair eventually. On that other end, there's a different sort of appreciation for the world we have, and the things in it. Fear shrinks back down to the size of something you can hold. It's easier to understand people.

When that happens, it is so much easier to find the existential balm that will soothe those end-of-the-world anxious pangs. Turns out "how to fight when you know you're going to lose" is a common theme in art. My Chemical Romance did it. The Untamed did it. Fucking Hamlet. Instead of extinguishing imagination, doom has opened it wide again. Cowabunga.

The other thing that you find on the other end of despair is love. You can't love or be loved without being vulnerable, and you can't be vulnerable without seeing the true bigness of the world and making peace with your own smallness. Let the doom in! And learn to garden.