What Do You Call the Feeling of a Dying Planet?

I’m Planetsick, And I Think You Might Be Too

Image: Angelos Tzortzinis, AFP, follow him here

I want to discuss something with you. Gently, though, very gently. A feeling. Just a feeling, I guess. But one like a hammer. I think it’s falling on all of us. So…if it is…gently.

I don’t know where to begin, really. Sometimes I discuss great and urgent messages with you guys. Sometimes I’m angry. Sometimes, I try to teach you. This time? It’s just this feeling. I can’t shake it. It goes with me everywhere. A kind of sadness. That I’ve never felt before.

They have words for it already, this new feeling. But I don’t think they do it justice, so I’m going to try to discuss it the way I think it should be. It’s the feeling of a dying planet. Of being the last of our kind. Of things falling apart. Of ending, on a scale that the 300,000 short years of homo sapiens have never known. The feeling of Extinction.

Do you feel it, too?

Some days, I want to scream with this feeling. I think that they’ll write books about it, very, very soon. When we’re allowed to finally talk about it. When we stop pretending that Oppenheimer and Instafluencers are a substitute for human culture. I want to scream the words out loud.

I don’t know how to exist in this world anymore.

This one. I know how to exist in a lot of worlds. When you’re like me, and you never belonged, to anything, a country, a city, a tribe, a family, really, even — you learn to exist in different worlds. And in those worlds, you have your heart broken in many ways. Just like people do.

I’ve been homesick. I’ve had that feeling. I’ve been the thing beyond homesick. Where is my home, anymore? I think it was the first real feeling I ever had. My parents, bless their souls, ripped me away from a happy childhood, and dragged me to the insane brutality of America, where, as a “gifted kid,” I was pitted against every other kid, in a kind of weird fight to the death. Survival of the fittest. All I wanted when I was a kid was to go back home. I was so traumatized by all that that to this day, from the ages of two to about eight? I have almost no memories whatsoever. There’s just a blank space where a childhood should be. Filled with the feeling of homesickness.

Happens to too many of us. Don’t cry for me. We’re just talking. About this new feeling. This thing that’s a sadness beyond all the sadnesses I’ve ever known.

Lovesick? You’ve been there, and I have too. Who hasn’t spent their teenage years lovesick? I was the prototypical cool guy as a teenager. I’d smoke pot on the roof of the school. Everyone knew it, from teachers to principals to parents, and they giggled…because it was my job. As the cool one. I was so cool I sneered at going to prom and did the unthinkable. I sent my girlfriend with someone else. God, how cool! Wow, Umair is the…yeah. I was lovesick. Like every other young person in existence. Maybe only more so, hence the diffidence, the impregnability, the sang-froid, the literal coolness.

These are familiar aches. Familiar. As we go through life, we know the taste of them. The metallic flavor of homesickness. The pulsing aridity of lovesickness. And they hurt. And that’s only the beginning. Then you lose someone you love. Grief pours in, like the ocean. Familiar aches. No life goes by without tasting them. This is what language was made for. This is what music is. The cry.

From one soul to another. Of all this pain.

But this? This is new.

I’m not homesick. I’m not lovesick. I shouldn’t be depressed or anxious or feeling bad in any way at all, really. I have a lovely wife who’s a doctor and I get to basically write for a living and I have this funny little dog…

So what the hell is going on? With me? With you? With us?

I watched the sun set, the other night. The clouds glinted a dark copper in the twilight. And I just watched, with this strange, strange mixture of emotions. Guilt. Shame. Remorse. For what? Why?

Do you have these moments these days too? This sudden rush of emotion? 

So what was it about?

A few months ago, I read a strange story. I keep thinking about it. About a “banker” (LOL) at HSBC who…let me quote him…said… “Who cares if Miami is six metres underwater in 100 years?”…during a presentation entitled “Why Investors Need Not Care About Climate Risk.” That’s just one of the highlights, by the way, of what he had to say.

And at first, I got angry. What kind of a-hole…you know where my thoughts went, because yours are going right there, too. Guys like this literally want to make money off of…

All this pain.

So I’m not homesick. I’m not lovesick.

I’m planetsick.

A whole new word. Sometimes, we need it. I am planetsick, my friends. I’ve mentioned it before, but we need to keep talking about it. And if you ask me what that means — thanks — I’ll be happy to tell you, because I think many of you probably feel the same way too.

Planetsick. How can I even put it into words? Have you ever read Basho? The old wandering Japanese Haiku master? One of my favorite poems of his is this. Just this. “Even in Kyoto — I long for Kyoto.”