Our Existential juncture

You can’t get over it, round it or under it. Whatever your opinion, there’s no escaping the overriding truth that we – and I mean every single one of us in the world – are faced with an unprecedented existential moment. Such a moment has never occurred before in all the 200,000 years or so of homo sapiens existence. 

Whether you rail against it or deny it, this is our lot, this is our lives. And we have to deal with it in some way, like it or not, for the laws of physics carry on regardless of our opinions or beliefs. Climate chaos is out of control, the Sixth Mass Extinction of life on earth is in free fall, and ecological and hence societal collapse is accelerating rapidly in many parts of the developing world. The latest UN report of October 2022 says that there is “no credible pathway” to keep the rise in global temperatures below the key threshold of 1.5C. It says that with the current policies in place, the world will warm by around a catastrophic 2.8C this century.

This is our existential moment in time. 

I wish it weren’t like this, but it doesn’t help to try to wish it away or bemoan what we have ourselves created. You may not be particularly interested in green issues, environmentalism, or even be too bothered about the fate of the natural world. But that’s not the point I’m making. Whatever your interest or concerns, be it stamp collecting, investing, software development, politics or music, you can’t avoid our existential moment. You have to deal with it somehow or you’re living in illusion, living in a fantasy. This is way past being the exclusive province of environmentalists. It is impacting us and will impact all our lives. It’s the background context for being alive in 2022. You can try to avoid it of course, as many of us attempt to, but the reality of its effects are seeping into our lives anyway, and continued denial starts to warp and distort our values.

No one can be on top of this; we’ve never been here before. Whatever your religion (or none), whatever your philosophy, this has to be somehow incorporated in our outlook. What makes sense for us to do now based on knowing about our predicament? 

How should I live knowing this? Does what I’m currently doing make sense in this light? How do I plan for my future, my children’s future? Is there even a liveable future for them? What should I do? What about careers, pensions? You can try and dive under the covers with easy cynicism of the, “We’re all screwed anyway, so what’s the point!?” type, but it’s an increasingly untenable stance and it’s hard to maintain that brittle avoidance.

I’m not attempting here to offer any answers but rather to just focus on the extreme fact of this unique moment in human history. Yes, I know you can say that there have always been great societal catastrophes and apocalyptic millenarian scares in the past, but this is of a totally different order. We’re talking about something way beyond even genocide: namely ecocide – the human induced destruction of the conditions for life on earth.

Though we would never wish for all this to be happening, being faced with this profound existential dilemma, can give us one upside. I feel that it provides a rare moment to question all our certainties as never before. Everything Is shaken and thrown up in the air for questioning: our ideas of progress and development, of increasing prosperity, ideas of what ‘the good life’ looks like; questions about what we should now believe? In light of all this, what should we eat? How should we plan for the future, for our children, for our retirement?

Although these are profoundly difficult questions, the icy cold freshness can shock us awake. I know that this continues to be my experience. This is a matter of huge uncertainty and great complexities and there are no simple answers. Even indigenous peoples, whose wisdom about mother earth we have long discarded to our peril, can offer no answer to the scale of our predicament.

Can we let in these very difficult questions and also allow ourselves to feel our conflicting feelings about them? Letting this in can bring up all manner of grief, anxiety, anger, hopelessness, denial and the whole gamut of emotions. Yet a resilience can be found in not flinching from the stark truth and its implications. For example, I’ve found that being willing to experience eco grief is not actually disempowering; rather it opens my heart to a deeper connection to and care for the sacredness of life. And of course, if we refuse to face reality, how will we be able to come up with appropriate solutions?

I find the Greek notion of Kairos to be helpful: it being defined as a rare moment in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift; a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles. And most importantly, a rare moment when real change is possible. We are in such a time now and only by facing our unique predicament can we best come up with mitigating solutions. For while widespread system collapse is already well underway, it is our duty to do what we can to ensure a liveable future. 

As the late great David Graeber said,

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”