If It Feels Like the World Is Going Crazy, and So Are You…Read This

A Little Advice About Being a Decent and Sane Person in an Age of Collapse

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It’s rough out there. And I wonder if many of you feel like I do. Am I the crazy one?

It seems like there are three different kinds of people out there in the world these days. A world that’s melting down at astonishing speeds. Democracy’s on the brink. Ocean temperatures off the charts. Emissions, still rising. Economies, stagnating.

Three kinds of people. Those that deny it all — while blaming the problems this polycrisis, as scholars have begun to call it — on innocents. This group of people has regressed at light speed back past modernity, into forms of authoritarianism and fascism. I don’t have to tell you what and who I mean. Think of the way that in America, everyone from women to the LGBTQ to teachers and doctors are under attack. Just this weekend, one of the world’s leading scientists was attacked on Twitter by the usual coterie of lunatics who took it over — and a violent fanatic showed up at his house. Let’s call this group the Regressives.

Then there’s the…masses in the middle. They appear…more or less unmoved. Indifferent. To any of it. It seems that this group of people are only interested in the next Netflix show or Marvel Movie or Instafluencer. They appear totally oblivious to any form of empirical reality right about now. Record temperatures? Turn up the AC! Crop-killing heatwaves? Hey, pass me the Doritos! Democracy under threat? Hey, I never really liked gay people anyways! LOL — they’re so weird! Giggle!

Let’s call this group the Indifferent.

Then there are…the rest of us. The ones who care. We’re trapped in the middle of all this madness. And we can’t help it. We’re in a Heideggerian twist. “Thrownness” was what he called human life — you’re just thrown into existence, and there you are, hurtling. You don’t know where you came from, where you go, even, really, who you are. You’re just existent now, and you can’t help it.

This is…the rest of us. People like you and me. Let me say it again, because this part is really important, maybe the key to what I have to say. We can’t help it. We’re the ones who care. We care too much, and I’ll come back to what that means. We always have. Mostly, we were born this way. Empathic, curious, sensitive, creative, relational. We are all born this way — but for some of us, well, it doesn’t get beaten out of us. Or, more accurately, the more systems and institutions of aggression, competition, and materialism try to beat it out of us, the more fiercely we cling to these inner truths and traits.

We can’t help it. This is just who we are. We care. Maybe you’re like me. Today, I took little Snowy for a walk. There I was, having a coffee, tweeting about…Extinction…standing under a tree. And one of those moments happened. A little ladybug fell, right there, on my phone. Puzzled, he — she? — started crawling around on the screen. I laughed, out of surprise, and delight. Maybe it was a message from the universe. Hey, little guy, I asked. You doing ok?

Snowy looked up at me. Who are you even talking to? Weirdo. Don’t worry, Snowy. I’m just here…discussing Extinction…with a ladybug.

LOL. Do you see what I mean? We’re…these kinds of people. We’ll just…do things…that the rest of everyone considers a little bit crazy. Why is that guy talking to a bug? Hey, sometimes I do it with my favorite trees. I just rest my hand on their trunks and say hi. Crazy, right?

Or sane?

We’re made this way. I can’t help being this person. After all I’ve been through? I was born…like this. The other kids seemed to be…if not happy…to get socialized into the adult ways of aggression and materialism and conquest…at least…to be capable of it. To accept it, and then learn to celebrate it, with trophies and money and prizes and accolades. I was never like that, and maybe you weren’t either. I bet, in fact, that you weren’t.

Then, as I got older, I got sick. You know the story. I lost fifty pounds in a month. Went to the doctor. You have cancer, Umair, and you’re going to die. I spent a year…right there…at the edge. Not dead, barely alive. I met a girl. She told me: you have this rare condition. The light can kill you. 

She was right. We got married. Today, she’s a doctor. And me? I wear leather jackets and stay in the shade.

You don’t live at the edge of death and become…complacent towards life. You only grow…even worse, in the eyes of the other two kinds of people, the Regressives, and the Indifferent. You only grow more empathic, curious, aware, alive. It was in those days — right at the glittering knife edge — that I finally forged a connection with life itself. I’d stand in the garden and just watch. Not even. Just be. And it felt in those days as if the universe was whispering to me, through the trees and the wind and the little creatures. 

The day I met my wife, a — what’s a group of butterflies called? Hold on while I look it up — a kaleidoscope, how beautiful and true, landed all over me. I had no hope, nothing, just death holding me tight in his arms. I laughed at the sheer astonishing improbable wonder of it. A dying man covered in butterflies. What was the universe trying to tell me? Suddenly, I understood. I wasn’t scared anymore.

Maybe you see the point of my little story. We can’t help it. Those of us who are the way we are. Extra, extra, sensitive, empathic, curious, relational. We’re just made that way…and then sometimes, strangely, things happen to us that make us even more so. So we become…exquisitely aware. Maybe you’re like me. You don’t even need to really read the news, because you can feel it in the air. You can feel the energy and the vibes, a mood or current, pulsing through humanity. You stand there, sometimes, and it seems that the stars are singing to you.