What the Age of Extinction Is Doing to Us

Our Civilization Has Depression, And We Need to Do Something About It

Image Credit: Keenan Constance

Welcome, my friend. To the bluest season in the bluest decade…in modern history. Feeling a little…off, lately? Let’s talk about it. On a real level. One that’s about you, me, the world, our age, our pace in time and existence. All those things, and more. And let me say upfront: if you’re feeling burdened by it all? Well, take heart. That’s precisely the way you should feel. It’s healthy and normal and sane and perfectly reasonable. So the very first thing you should do? Stop being cruel to yourself for feeling the way we all are. Now. Let’s talk.

There I was, standing in my little European dog park. Snowy, the tiny white cotton puff, was bullying his buddy Judd, the big old husky. Snowy’d run at him and do little gruff barks. Judd would….howl like a wolf. It’s their game. The second they see each other, that’s what they do, happily, and they’d do it all day if they could. Judd’s human, Laura, was on the phone. With a friend in America. Nowhere special, some town in Texas. “What?!” she exclaimed, “Really?” I arched an eyebrow. Was everything ok? She leaned over to me, and said in a stage whisper, “eggs cost eight dollars in Texas.” “Eight dollars?” I whistled.

What does that have to do with…the most depressing winter….in the most depressing decade…in modern history? Everything, as it turns out. Eggs have skyrocketed in price because of avian flu. Birds have died off in incalculable numbers. And avian flu is an eerie sign of…the Age of Extinction.

Starting to see the link a little bit yet, between something as mundane as the price of eggs — and how people feel?

The sentiments of this age. They aren’t good ones. I don’t say that to be negative. Popular opinion aside, I’m not that kind of person. I say it so that we can talk about it like adults, and not succumb to the poisons of fatalism and nihilism. Which go on to weaken us from within — but I’ll come back to that. The sentiments of this age are unusual.

We’re depressed. As a civilization. Not as individuals — though probably that too — not as “people” or social groups or what have you. One pandemic you know about, and that’s Covid. But depression, anxiety, and pessimism — and what they breed — are another kind of epidemic racing throughout our world, and they define our age. This is the most depressed decade in modern history, let me say it again, but this time with more context: the sentiments of this age are that our civilization is depressed. Depression rates have been soaring for decades, and now, it feels as if things are hitting a kind of point of no return, a tipping point, if you like. They’re increasing to endemic levels amongst young people, especially girls. And they’re ripping across adults, too. No corner of the world is immune, either. America, Japan, Britain, Europe — the trend holds, more or less, everywhere.

So the question becomes: why are we depressed as a civilization? People have proposed a lot of answers to that question. One is about social media, another’s about loneliness, and still another, is about inequality. All those have an element of truth. And yet I think there’s a truer truth here. We are now crossing the Event Horizon of the Age of Extinction. And as we do, human societies, economies, and cultures are about to undergo seismic convulsions. Some of which have already begun. Like, say, the abrupt rise of the ten-dollar box of eggs. Let me put that another way: how would you expect living through an Age of Extinction to feel?

Let’s go back to the earlier theories. They’re all derivatives of what the grandfather of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, discovered long ago: a thing he put into a new word, “anomie.” Anomie was what happened to people as a result of living in then newly-modernizing, industrializing societies. Durkheim observed that this transition, what his intellectual grandchild Karl Polanyi would come to call “Great Transformation,” away from agrarian village life, came with a new set of discontents.

Because while agrarian life was far from pleasant — it was still a thing of peasants and nobles, of inequity and iniquity both, with an almost total lack of what we’d consider modern institutions, from the rule of law, to justice, to education, to healthcare — at least it was stable. You were born into a class, a place, a milieu, the same one your parents, grandparents generations had been — and there you stayed. The idea of change didn’t really enter the collective human consciousness until Enlightenment sparked Revolutions of Democracy and Industry — and began to liberate people from the shackles of millennia, race, class, gender, and so forth.

But with that liberation came “anomie” — all the discontents that Durkheim observed growing in this new modern way of life. Isolation bred alienation. Rote, disconnected work — not being able to see the fruits of your labors, literally — bred a sense of futility and nihilism. Those social connections and bonds, going back countless generations in agrarian villages, were replaced by “atomization,” which led to distrust, selfishness, and a kind of weary, jaded contempt. In the end, some kind of withering seemed to be happening to the self, a kind of malaise, produced by modernity, which, despite producing wealth, seemed to be — if you asked Durkheim, and his intellectual progeny, like Polanyi — impoverishing people socially, spiritually, emotionally.

All that was theory — more than a century ago. But now we live in an age where we can ask: was Durkheim right? Did the Great Transformation to living in market-based, individualistic, atomized societies — even if it produced a Big Bang in wealth — do something to us as people, deep down in the psyche, the spirit, the soul, and you don’t have to imagine those in some kind of supernatural way, just an emotional one. The answer to that question, if we look at the data, appears to be a pretty hard, resounding, serious, big, historic yes. Because as we’ve modernized, leaned into the atomized, individualistic, marketized way of life to the point that there’s almost nothing else — so too, for almost a century, depression and anxiety have been rising. To the point that they’re now endemic.

All of that, and now we stand on the edge of the Age of Extinction. So if modernization and industrialization — which necessitate atomization and individualism, too, people not living in those stable-for-millennia-systems like agrarian villages anymore — produced a century of anomie….what’s the Age of Extinction going to do?

You should see, perhaps, the gravity of the question. Because the Age of Extinction is already making the Industrial Age look like a fond memory.

No wonder we’re all so depressed.

Right about now, that guy’s going to come along. Hey buddy! I’m not depressed!! Look at me!! I’m like…Andrew Tate by way of Elon Musk with a dash of Jordan Peterson!! I’m awesome and successful, buddy, you’re wrong! Do I look depressed? Woohoo!! And my answer to that kind of guy always goes like this. Well, you appear to hate women, the LGBTQ, justice, the planet, animals, democracy, history, and the idea that anyone’s your equal, living a life that’s made of rage and vitriol and resentment. Does that sound like a happy person to you? I don’t know, broseph, think about it and tell me.

Of course, I kid, to soften the blow. That’s depression, too — just externalized as hate and rage. This kind of person is the most depressed of all, only they’ve found a scapegoat — or better yet, a world of them — to sublimate their despair and futility and nihilism onto, turning it into fury and violence and contempt. And yet it’s hardly…happiness.

So how do we do it? How do we survive the Age of Extinction — emotionally? By now, there’s more than a hint above, but let me first talk a little bit more about what depression tells us. About ourselves. There are a lot of theories of depression. It’s anger turned inwards, it’s the result of a traumatic childhood, attachments gone wrong, and so forth. All valid, helpful, and perfectly true. But again, I think there’s a truer truth, which binds and connects all of those.