Apathy Jack writes:
I used to worry about the future of a lot.
No, I mean, proper worry. None of this existential “will I get a job and sell out to the man and become a corporate whore” bollocks. I mean your professional circus grade worry.
When I was a kid, I read Revelations and Nostradamus (or at least the Reader’s Digest versions thereof) and looked around at the general milieu of the Regan-era Cold War, and decided that we were all pretty well buggered. (I didn’t really understand a lot about Regan – if I had known all the details, I probably would have been more worried, not less...)
I had a deep and chilling certainty that, in or around the year 2000, we would all die in a nuclear armageddon.
As I got older (shall we say my late teens and early twenties), this fear subsided (ironic in a way, as 2000 was rushing closer and closer by this time) but my worries for the future continued.
My reasoning was thus: Technology is increasing exponentially. I heard somewhere recently that seventy percent of the jobs that today’s newborns will be doing when they enter the workforce haven’t been invented yet. And if that sounds a bit far fetched, think about how many people you know who work in or around the internet industry. (My kids are occasionally shocked that I didn’t have an email address until I was twenty or so. I have to explain to them that no one I knew even had the internet before I was about eighteen, so I wasn’t that far behind the times...) We no longer need to evolve, because we can change the world to suit us, and we’re getting better and better at changing our own bodies to new specifications. Every day we’re answering more and more questions about the nature of life, the universe, and whatever else Douglas Adams mentioned in that book of his.
So at some point, and even with the rapid increase in technology let’s say it’s a million years, humanity will have explored the entire universe. We also will have explored every facet of our own mental and spiritual existence. To top it off, we will have adapted our bodies to the pinnacle of physical evolution. I’m not sure, but I would imagine that involves being some sort of energy-based life form.
And then we’ll be left with nothing to do.
Now, of course, we will have evolved past the point of death, so our descendents will be sitting around for the rest of time with nothing to occupy themselves.
Eternal ennui.
It made it hard for me to enjoy the general air of hedonism that university was supposed to offer, knowing that in a million years the entire human race would be suffering a never ending case of existential boredom.
Of course, I don’t think about that anymore for two reasons, mainly. (And no, “the fact that it’s bollocks” is not one of the reasons.)
The first reason is that there is no way to tell the future. I refer you back to the thing about most future jobs not having been thought of yet. The internet and cellphones have single-handedly reshaped the world: and yet the internet is not what William Gibson predicted it would be, and (although I’m not the first person to make this point) my cellphone can do more things than Captain Kirk’s communicator on Star Trek. And remember, this is my cellphone – not only have I not figured out what all of the buttons do yet, but I still think “what the hell is that?” whenever it rings, and let it go for a while before I remember...
The second reason is that there’s no point in second guessing the future now that I’m living in it. I always figured I knew what being a teacher would be like, and it’s like that. Only on drugs. And you know, I’m too damned busy to spend time worrying what life will be like for my descendants in millions of years – hell, I spend so much time making my life up as I go along that I don’t have time to worry about the immediate consequences of any of my actions. Ask my students: The ones who don’t know me so well get offended when I walk away from them mid-sentence (theirs or mine). The ones who have had me for a year or two know better: I’m not ignoring them, and I haven’t forgotten them (not permanently, anyway) – I’ve just seen something shiny that has attracted my attention, and I’ll be back to them as soon as my brain cycles off the new thing and back onto whatever they wanted out of me.
I suppose you could say that for the first time in my life I have forgotten the future and am living in the Present.
But really I just have attention-deficit issues.
Either way, bring on the apocalypse. I don’t fear the bombs because I wouldn’t notice that the damn things were dropping...
7 comments:
No comment I could possibly make could ever be as... interesting and remarkably atopical as Mr. Seven Star Hand's.
Mr. Hand, I salute you. Twenty-one guns. You.
Many people have ambitions of building their dream houses. The difference with mine is that it would be a completely self sufficent little farm complete with bunkers and able to withstand a nuclear war or similar civilisation disintegrating calamity. I get warm fuzzy feelings whenever I think of me and mine living underground while everyone else develops into mutants. On the other hand I've always dreamed of being a mutant...
Hey Seven Star Hand. You lost me at scoffing, 'cause you know, I like to scoff. And then I had my own verion of ADD and switched off.
Well Jack, we must have had a lot of the same formative experiences, because I remember not being able to sleep after reading some tripe about Nostrodamus when very young.
Sure we can't tell the future, but that's where living in the moment and having an external locus of control come into play. I don't want to tell the future, but I want to see it, and be there.
Let's hope that humans as a race WILL see out the next million years. That is, if the sun doesn't explode to a red giant or whatever, or the universe doesn't fall into entropy. Either way, that will be a natural part of the mechanations of the universe, therefore nothing to be feared. Nobody lives forever, and nothing is permanent.
However, what DOES make me wary is when self styled harbingers try to tell us the end is nigh. If enough people keep saying this, people will eventually believe it. Think about how many stars, planets and civilisations must be out there. To think that our petty social symbology and 'prophecies' actually mean anything in the grand scheme of things is nothing short of dangerous hubris.
Make up your own mind, people. Don't let modern day Nostrodami fuck with your heads. The future needn't be something to be feared.
"However, what DOES make me wary is when self styled harbingers try to tell us the end is nigh. If enough people keep saying this, people will eventually believe it. "
Yerp, what's more worrying is the number of "Christians" and other religious folk who beleive it's part of their personal duty towards their faith to hasten the second coming, or whatever the dogma calls it.
I had similar fears as a kid. Not about Nostrodamus, but nuclear holocaust. They started when I was 10 or so, though I was always sensitive to the violence shown on the news. Mine got worse as I got older and had expanded into a full blown phobia by the age of 13-14, which stayed with me throughout highschool. Prolonged loud noises like planes going over still creep me out a little, since that was the usual thing to trigger the more physiological side of it. It just shows that even tho the source of such fears might be real, the expression of such fears may not nessesarily follow a logical progression. Planes do not sound like nuclear bombs exploding, nor rockets about to land, and yet the knowledge of this gave me no comfort at the time. It makes me wonder what fear based misconceptions are floating around society that aren't so obviously fraudulent.
As for Mr Hand.. our new messiah. I was fairly intrigued by your statement,
"Did you ever consider that Christianity is the False Prophet symbolized in the Apocalypse, that Rome (Vatican/Papacy) is the so-called anti-messiah, and Jesus Christ is the false messiah?"
but then you lost me with,
"I have produced stunning and comprehensive proof that this is the true interpretation of pivotal prophecies long confounded by Christianity's founders and leaders."
A. People will make their own mind up about what is stunning and comprehensive.
B. I've seen enough debate about religious doctrine to realise just about any interpretation can be "Proved". But then, I guess that MAY be your motivation behind creating all this dogma (ie. crap)about you being the, "long-expected Hebrew Messiah and Lion of the Tribe of Juda (Yehuda)."
GL with your interwub cult though! we can always use more of them keke ^^
Mr. Silver Seven Fingers, or whatever he calls himself, also claims to the long-rumoured messiah. Which is nice. I've always high hopes for myself in that respect but I've never been able to bleach the robes appropriately.
As for circus grade fears; my Mother put the fear of nuclear armageddon (unwittingly) into me as a primary school student (I think I was eight) when, after my musing about bombs that could destroy cities she confirmed that such things exist. For years I wanted to get each king of the world (I didn't comprehend this thing called 'democracy') to promise never to use them. Gave me nightmares for years. Eventualy the fear faded as I learnt more about how the world works. Which is not to say that nuclear armageddon isn't possible, it's just that if it does happen there really isn't anything I can do to stop it.
Anyone who was growing up in the 80's could not avoid the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear winter. It was in the school books you had to read, in the newspapers and in the news. I remember looking at a map of Southland with a red ring marking the area of fall out if a bomb hit Invercargill. How could one not fear the end of the world. I wonder what it would be like to be born mid 80's and be a teenager in the 90's with no major threats to world peace or media hyped paranoia. And I am afraid what young minds are being moulded into now in a post 2001 world, where the bogeyman is not a red button but the stranger, the other, the terrorist. A world where police chase people and shoot them just on the suspicion of wearing a backpack. It is not remote politics like the cold war, but closer to home, on the streets. Even on the edge of the world we have our moments of paranoia, but at least we are sane enough to see it. We can not alter the future but we can change how we react to the present.
The mind boggles at the concept of someone troubling themselves to determine what the radius of destruction would be, should the godless communists take out that prized cultural centre Invercargill.
Don't worry anon - as I recall, the cops were just as willing to shoot you for no good reason back in the 80s.
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