Writing this is hard. It’s hard, not only because writing is hard, but because of how my feelings about humanity have changed. For most of my life, I’ve been an idealist and a humanist. I’ve believed that, on some level, we’re all the same. That on some level we’re all good. That if we all just told ourselves the right story, and believed it, good actions would follow.
I still believe that about each of us to some degree, but worse than any diminished faith in the goodness of each individual, I’ve felt my faith in our collective good fade recently. I used to care deeply about our collective fate. I desperately wanted to see us be what I know we can become. Now I often feel like I just want to be left alone. I want to create a safe place for me and mine, and build walls to protect us from the vagaries of the world.
Worse still, on some level, I don’t even see us humans as that important anymore. I see us as perhaps the shortest-lived, dominant species that this world, or perhaps any world, will ever know. Whereas the dinosaurs ruled this earth for nearly 200 million years, I feel like we can see the seeds of our own destruction while we’re still only in our first couple of hundred thousand years of existence.
My newfound apathy toward the human project stems from at least three concurrent developments. First, we seem imminently capable of inadvertently altering what makes this planet’s environment so conducive to human life while lacking the communal spirit to even rationally discuss what we’re doing. Additionally, our brains crave a stable environment, but we’ve become so driven to alter our world, first in reality and now through our virtual worlds, that I fear we’ll soon outstrip our psychological capacity to adapt. Finally, we’re so close to redefining the very bodies and brains that we are and developing alternate intelligences more interesting than our own, that I feel that we may be on the cusp of creating our successors.
Having said that, I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand why we are the way we are, and I’ve always believed in humanity’s ability to overcome. Not only that, but I’ve always believed in the ability of words to help us, both individually and collectively, to make that change. In some sense, I’ve been working my entire life to come up with these magical words, and the irony of my life is that at the very moment I believe I may have finally discovered a story about us that can make us better–one that will help us become the courageous and compassionate beings that I know we’re capable of becoming–is the same moment in history where it may not really matter anymore.
So, what do you do? What do you do when you’ve spent your life trying to understand and build a way of thinking that can ease our conflicts and help us evolve, right at the moment in history when we’re evolving to the point where those virtues almost no longer matter? The answer is you struggle. You constantly feel the conflict between making the effort to get the words out of you and the comfort of falling back into your own private world. As the years pass, you become more comfortable watching the world pass by as a spectator. You create a safe place for you and yours where you can be at peace.
The peace never fully comes though. And in the back of your mind, you still feel the responsibility to try. And after years and decades of suppressing and occasionally expressing your story, you finally come to the point of now or never, and if, and only if, you really believe you’ve got the goods, or at least a good, or at least the very beginnings of something good, one New Year’s day, you wake up and you commit to writing it all down.
That day is today, and what follows is a flawed and human, and yet nonetheless important way of believing, one that should you accept it, might fundamentally change who you are. Not only that, it might just change you for the better. Most outrageously of all, not only might it change you for the better, but it might just take you in so fully, that you’ll want to share it–because in believing, you will also believe that should the rest of humanity follow, that this human world, even for the short time it may continue, will be better for having believed.