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Since I was young, I have seen the end of our world. I don't mean that in a post-apocalyptic, "zombies everywhere" way. I just see the end of us. This is not some literary way in which I am prophesying doom. It's in my mind's eye, but I see it. Sometimes the buildings aren't there anymore. Sometimes there is thick grass pushed through cracked roads and vines climbing broken walls.

I can imagine worse things and they do not feel like this apocalypse does.

Plants and animals still exist, but we do not. The world ends because we end, because we are no longer present to observe the world as it was.

This planet will go on. Humans are idiots, but we're not that bad (unless we launch nuclear weapons, or course, but I don't think we will). We are in a bad way. Our choices are abysmal. I don't know how the generation that grew up on Captain Planet can be doing this to itself.

Unfettered capitalism is going to ruin the world. I don't see how people don't see this.

I'm not optimistic that we survived another hundred years. The rate of degradation has exceeded the rate of progress. The more we know, the more we can do, the more we destroy our own living environment. We do it for a couple of dollars. That's all it is. This money doesn't matter. It is a notional concept, which I assume those ending the world know on some level. Once the world collapses, their bank accounts will be irrelevant, and their mansions will be the first things smashed. If you want to believe in evil, believe in an Antichrist, he's here already. He's called Amazon.com and he could not care less that the actual Amazon is irrevocably burning. Those indigenous tribes don't have Prime.

I'm culpable. I have a cell phone. Two years out of date, but I do. I know that slavery goes into most everything I've done in my life. What am I supposed to do with that? Disappear into the shrinking forest? How am I to help save the world without simultaneously participating in its corruption?

What I see may only be an overly active imagination. That is a better hope than that I am yet another Cassandra. If I am, I am among those doubting my prophecy.

I have no evidence we are not the only sapient species that exists. There is nothing inherent in the universe that encourages intelligence; we are not mandatory. Even life is an unlikely outcome. I am not given to believing in our inevitability or rescue, so I want us to stay alive as long as is possible, however genocidally myopic members of our species seem to be.

I don't think I have any place in this, dramatically saving or ending the world. It is merely a thing that will happen, I hope not in my lifetime (but my optimism is imperfect here). I don't know if seeing the end of the world qualifies as a delusion, but I would not be offended to discovered it did. I do not see it with my physical eyes, after all, or believe the gods have blighted me with preternatural insight. Think what that would mean. The only talent, the only genius, they gave me was the ability to work hard enough to phrase things slightly better than average. I would be useful in the End Times only as much as I keep a vet tech scientist farmer - someone helpful - happy.

They should have sent a poet, but we got me instead, someone who is near positive it makes sense that he has a wife and cats.

Soon in Xenology: Writing. Adam.

last watched: Schitt's Creek
reading: Trying Not to Try