This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a sigh of indifference.
The world as we know it is changing forever. Has changed. We’re amidst a global pandemic set to become endemic. Environmental degradation and climate change are very much real. Some even believe we’ve entered late-stage capitalism and are witnessing the collapse of society as we know it.
So why aren’t we feeling slightly more, well, alarmed?
Even if you don’t believe all of the information available is true, that things just aren’t that bad, and that those crying out in alarm are pessimists and “doomers,” you have to admit that things aren’t exactly ideal either, right? So why does this realisation feel so removed from the normalcy of our everyday lives? How can we so seamlessly go from existential dread to busying ourselves with the daily business of living, making plans for the future, so detached from the reality of what is to come?
The truth is that it’s quite easy, actually.
The facts are incredibly hard to reconcile this with the reality we see on the daily. When I go out into the world to buy groceries, or go to work, or eat lunch with friends I feel at ease. I look around and I see people buying houses, planning weddings, having children, achieving career milestones, and this does not look like a world that is ending or changing in any particularly dramatic fashion. So it’s no wonder than talk of climate crisis, of economic collapse, of impending disaster seems to fall on semi-deaf ears. I’m guilty, too. I can talk about the wastefulness of consumer culture one minute and be lamenting over buying a new lounge in the next sentence. I know I’m not the only one.
The cognitive dissonance is real, and it’s strong.
It’s for a variety of reasons, in my opinion. Our existential concerns must be compartmentalised for survival: we’re busy making ends meet. Who has the time or energy to play Captain Planet in their after-hours? There’s diminished responsibility, too. Surely it’s not up to us to fix everything? There’s a sense of expectation that our generation gets to live the way each generation before us has: have a career, buy a house, raise a family. But with raising house prices, wage stagnation and the carbon footprint left by each new life introduced on this planet, these “normal” facets of life are either less achievable or less appealing than they once were. It seems unjust. We did what many of us were raised to do. How can living this way be somehow wrong when we’re just, well, living the way we’ve been taught to?
But our resources are very much finite, and not enough is being done to stop our earth from dying. The facts and figures are there, but so is a lot of white noise and distraction. Which countries will be uninhabitable due to extreme heat in mere decades, where will climate refugees go, and what’s for dinner?
We do have to keep on living, after all, and when the dissolution of life as we know it seems so far from reality, nobody wants to take it too seriously, because who wants to seem like an extremist, or conspiracy theorist? I know how many people react when people talk about this sort of thing, and that’s part of the problem; the dichotomy of reasonable versus hysterical, of sustainable versus unsustainable. However, with the information available, I’m inclined to think that the hysterical and the logical might be in close alignment.
I used to think that it said a lot about the human spirit that we keep functioning. We dragged ourselves off to our daily commute through the smog of bushfires, and now we work from home in lockdown, or head out for essential jobs, masks and QR codes at hand. It’s the New Normal. What will our new normal look like in five, ten, twenty years?
I’m not so sure that our desire to keep living the way we always have is a triumph of the human spirit; it seems more of a coping mechanism, or a hard-wired human desire for routine.
Maybe we’ll just keep going until we simply can’t.
