At first I was angry with God. I felt betrayed. He promised once that he would never again destroy all life on earth to punish mankind. But, then I realized, God wasn't doing the destroying, we were.
I have since altered my idea of God.
I spent a year or so in mourning. I still go there once in a while.
I have thought a lot about what the point of it all is, the point of all the suffering. I have some tentative ideas, nothing others haven't thought about. Nothing new to smooth out the loss with an explanation of humanity's cycle of relinquishing power to the ruthless and depraved, waiting out destruction only to start the process over again.
What I feel is sadness for the wolves men seek to kill, the blue whales starving for lack of krill to eat, the loss of the Amazon rain forest, 2 million years in the making, the loss of the reefs in the ocean due to bleaching.
I feel rage for a class of people who seem like black holes for power that have pushed us to ruin. Anger at the millions who persist in living in an illusion.
I am not by any measure a success at anything. I have been treading water against a persistent riptide of self-defeat since childhood. I want to live the few years I've left with a little integrity. I'm at the end of my life watching the end of ecosystems that have sustained life for eons, acknowledging the evil of mankind and doing my best to find enough gratitude to give me peace.
Hi Eliot, I’ve sort of got past the sadness stage, although it’s not easy to put into words. Here are some threads of thought on this.
I’m thinking of calling it the Beauty of Impermanence.
We get to it via an indirect methodolgy.
One of the problems of our species since the dawn of civilisation is the obsession with control. Once we developed the question “what happens after we die?” we learned to dread death, and this has been played upon by those in charge ever since hierarchies were established. No other species does this.
And so, we attempt, at both an individual and species level, to avoid death, to outrun it, to outsmart it, and to profit from avoiding it. In other words, we are attempting to control outcomes. Societal interdicts promote this, from birth. We’re educated in a certain way, expected to pick a life-long career at 15, then when we suffer the illnesses of old age are expected to fight it through regardless of the pain, or until at least your health insurance lasts out.
At the same time we hide our collective guilt and shame about all those we kill with Othering, eg bombing browner peoples in the southern hemisphere, or enslaving them; industrial animal farming; collective poisoning that doesn’t affect the profit margin, and so on.
What we have forgotten is that nothing in nature is permanent. It is a vast highly efficient recycling scheme, or was before humans wrecked it. As Carl Sagan told us, extinction is the norm, survival is the exception. In other words, for anyone, any creature, to live beyond just now is a remarkable random event. You weren’t eaten by a sabre toothed cat this week, or crushed in a stampeded herd in a hunt gone wrong, or didn’t die of an infected tooth. This week.
In nature, other species witness death all the time. The herbivore that eats the grass, the leopard that eats the herbivore, the worm eaten by the robin, the tree blown down in a storm, the krill eaten by the whale, and so on. It’s all part of the way and web of life.
In our exceptionalism and hubris, we have tried to outlive dying. Religion is clearly an example of this, with its “afterlife” and heavens and hells. Just planting crops for next year’s harvest, or mass incarceration of lifestock are other examples.
All the other creatures on Earth ‘merely’ rely on the bounties of nature for survival. But not us, we have to attempt to control the outcome.
And this blinds us to what I’m calling the beauty of impermanance.
If you go nature watching, you’ll notice quite often birds and animals will just sit, and watch. Not do anything, not hunting for food, not engaged in prayer, not babbling incoherently. Just, practising the noble art of doing nothing, Niksen as the Dutch call it. But they are, noticing. Observing. Making a mental map of their surroundings. Humans should do more of that.
But I’ve somehow taken that further to a point, where walking past a hedge and the chattering of the sparrows brings great joy. Or seeing artistic impression of the moon through the silhouette of the bare tree branches on cold clear winter night; stopping to watch the starlings mass overhead. The sadness is there, knowing what I see now is a mere fraction of their numbers compared to 30 years ago, 100 years ago, 10,000 years ago. But, that those species are still there is sufficient now for me.
Bird flu ripped through the swans on our local canal this winter, killed 5 out of a family of 6, plus others further up the county. It was extremely upsetting, especially this one pair that had an exceptional brood of 4 cygnets. But now, swans are back, the same one? Dunno, but there are others. So that’s good.
The beauty of impermanence is not just knowing that all good things go away at some point. Also, lest we forget, all the bad things go away as well.
Am still trying to make sense of this in words, sometimes I think the English language is insufficient to explain our mental models. Indeed, writing itself is an aberration, no other species does it. Feel free to extrapolate.
Exactly. They only thing I imagine that comes close to this sadness is losing a child. Waking every morning and remembering your child is gone and never coming back and carrying around that grief with you all day, every day. You distract yourself by helping others, as a parent distracts themselves with their other kids, but the sadness under pins everything and every moment. That's it.
So beautifully said Eliot, I am sad all the time too. I don’t remember which activist said something to the effect “I used to try and get over my despair. Then I realized it was pointless. You can’t get over despair like ours. Now I just pick it up and carry it with me wherever I go.”
Eliot, glad to see you here, followed you on Twitter until I left after Musk.
I’ve spent the last four years educating myself about climate change and overshoot deeply. Most still have no clue of our predicaments. While this is isolating I have learned to accept my personal circle can’t see or won’t see the truth. I use my time with them for fleeting moments of “normalcy” and know as things worsen I have explanations, if they want them.
I concluded years ago, this: If I can’t have happiness, I can still create meaning. Looking forward to your presence here.
Grief seems like the 'moving through,' depression is the 'holding on to grief,' and sadness may be the 'letting go of the grief while holding on to the memory in tribute and moving on.'
Your plain speech pierced my heart. I am “living” in a dying world, doing all l can every day to support the lives of birds and insects in a wild garden.
To those of us born and raised in an age of plenty, the disillusionment has been traumatic, but the knowledge that our “plenty” was stolen has intensified the grief. We are all to blame. “Ignorance of the law is no defence,” and that goes for the law of sustainability too.
I rarely say this on here, but this work feels so important. How many obstacles to working to mitigate this total loss are we facing specifically because humans—and AMERICANS, above all—don’t like to feel sad? How much are we making it worse through common coping mechanisms of over-consumption, trying to avoid the pain our over-consuming is causing? This feels so important to factor into leading people through this time. Thank you!
A few more days and a Good News story.
I love you Elliot.
Schopenhauer, Emily Cioran, Peter Lappfe, a derivative of Émile Durkheim’s commentary on anomie and deaths of despair
ALL provided COMFORT, however paradoxically.
No, I'm not depressed.
Horrified,
Terrified. I'm 77, I can't run anymore!
At first I was angry with God. I felt betrayed. He promised once that he would never again destroy all life on earth to punish mankind. But, then I realized, God wasn't doing the destroying, we were.
I have since altered my idea of God.
I spent a year or so in mourning. I still go there once in a while.
I have thought a lot about what the point of it all is, the point of all the suffering. I have some tentative ideas, nothing others haven't thought about. Nothing new to smooth out the loss with an explanation of humanity's cycle of relinquishing power to the ruthless and depraved, waiting out destruction only to start the process over again.
What I feel is sadness for the wolves men seek to kill, the blue whales starving for lack of krill to eat, the loss of the Amazon rain forest, 2 million years in the making, the loss of the reefs in the ocean due to bleaching.
I feel rage for a class of people who seem like black holes for power that have pushed us to ruin. Anger at the millions who persist in living in an illusion.
I am not by any measure a success at anything. I have been treading water against a persistent riptide of self-defeat since childhood. I want to live the few years I've left with a little integrity. I'm at the end of my life watching the end of ecosystems that have sustained life for eons, acknowledging the evil of mankind and doing my best to find enough gratitude to give me peace.
I’ve felt that sadness too. It’s so massive and ancient we have no choice but to honor it.
Hi Eliot, I’ve sort of got past the sadness stage, although it’s not easy to put into words. Here are some threads of thought on this.
I’m thinking of calling it the Beauty of Impermanence.
We get to it via an indirect methodolgy.
One of the problems of our species since the dawn of civilisation is the obsession with control. Once we developed the question “what happens after we die?” we learned to dread death, and this has been played upon by those in charge ever since hierarchies were established. No other species does this.
And so, we attempt, at both an individual and species level, to avoid death, to outrun it, to outsmart it, and to profit from avoiding it. In other words, we are attempting to control outcomes. Societal interdicts promote this, from birth. We’re educated in a certain way, expected to pick a life-long career at 15, then when we suffer the illnesses of old age are expected to fight it through regardless of the pain, or until at least your health insurance lasts out.
At the same time we hide our collective guilt and shame about all those we kill with Othering, eg bombing browner peoples in the southern hemisphere, or enslaving them; industrial animal farming; collective poisoning that doesn’t affect the profit margin, and so on.
What we have forgotten is that nothing in nature is permanent. It is a vast highly efficient recycling scheme, or was before humans wrecked it. As Carl Sagan told us, extinction is the norm, survival is the exception. In other words, for anyone, any creature, to live beyond just now is a remarkable random event. You weren’t eaten by a sabre toothed cat this week, or crushed in a stampeded herd in a hunt gone wrong, or didn’t die of an infected tooth. This week.
In nature, other species witness death all the time. The herbivore that eats the grass, the leopard that eats the herbivore, the worm eaten by the robin, the tree blown down in a storm, the krill eaten by the whale, and so on. It’s all part of the way and web of life.
In our exceptionalism and hubris, we have tried to outlive dying. Religion is clearly an example of this, with its “afterlife” and heavens and hells. Just planting crops for next year’s harvest, or mass incarceration of lifestock are other examples.
All the other creatures on Earth ‘merely’ rely on the bounties of nature for survival. But not us, we have to attempt to control the outcome.
And this blinds us to what I’m calling the beauty of impermanance.
If you go nature watching, you’ll notice quite often birds and animals will just sit, and watch. Not do anything, not hunting for food, not engaged in prayer, not babbling incoherently. Just, practising the noble art of doing nothing, Niksen as the Dutch call it. But they are, noticing. Observing. Making a mental map of their surroundings. Humans should do more of that.
But I’ve somehow taken that further to a point, where walking past a hedge and the chattering of the sparrows brings great joy. Or seeing artistic impression of the moon through the silhouette of the bare tree branches on cold clear winter night; stopping to watch the starlings mass overhead. The sadness is there, knowing what I see now is a mere fraction of their numbers compared to 30 years ago, 100 years ago, 10,000 years ago. But, that those species are still there is sufficient now for me.
Bird flu ripped through the swans on our local canal this winter, killed 5 out of a family of 6, plus others further up the county. It was extremely upsetting, especially this one pair that had an exceptional brood of 4 cygnets. But now, swans are back, the same one? Dunno, but there are others. So that’s good.
The beauty of impermanence is not just knowing that all good things go away at some point. Also, lest we forget, all the bad things go away as well.
Am still trying to make sense of this in words, sometimes I think the English language is insufficient to explain our mental models. Indeed, writing itself is an aberration, no other species does it. Feel free to extrapolate.
Exactly. They only thing I imagine that comes close to this sadness is losing a child. Waking every morning and remembering your child is gone and never coming back and carrying around that grief with you all day, every day. You distract yourself by helping others, as a parent distracts themselves with their other kids, but the sadness under pins everything and every moment. That's it.
So beautifully said Eliot, I am sad all the time too. I don’t remember which activist said something to the effect “I used to try and get over my despair. Then I realized it was pointless. You can’t get over despair like ours. Now I just pick it up and carry it with me wherever I go.”
Eliot, glad to see you here, followed you on Twitter until I left after Musk.
I’ve spent the last four years educating myself about climate change and overshoot deeply. Most still have no clue of our predicaments. While this is isolating I have learned to accept my personal circle can’t see or won’t see the truth. I use my time with them for fleeting moments of “normalcy” and know as things worsen I have explanations, if they want them.
I concluded years ago, this: If I can’t have happiness, I can still create meaning. Looking forward to your presence here.
Grief seems like the 'moving through,' depression is the 'holding on to grief,' and sadness may be the 'letting go of the grief while holding on to the memory in tribute and moving on.'
Your plain speech pierced my heart. I am “living” in a dying world, doing all l can every day to support the lives of birds and insects in a wild garden.
To those of us born and raised in an age of plenty, the disillusionment has been traumatic, but the knowledge that our “plenty” was stolen has intensified the grief. We are all to blame. “Ignorance of the law is no defence,” and that goes for the law of sustainability too.
Solidarity, the shared mourning.
Thank you
I rarely say this on here, but this work feels so important. How many obstacles to working to mitigate this total loss are we facing specifically because humans—and AMERICANS, above all—don’t like to feel sad? How much are we making it worse through common coping mechanisms of over-consumption, trying to avoid the pain our over-consuming is causing? This feels so important to factor into leading people through this time. Thank you!
And, me too. I’m sad all the time.
And determined.
Thank you.
Brilliant. Thank you.
You're a conduit for what, I surmise, so many of us feel, Eliot. Thank you for expressing us.
Loneliness, homesick
Let's call em "modes" of grief since there is no normal order.
Fantasise with me: our biome is backed up, off site, by enlightened advanced intelligences who will forever confine our despoilment 🙏
i hope not; our biome is poison