Living at the end of the world

 Short one, but I think one that I'll revisit again and again here.


There is no shortage of suffering in this world. Indeed, unless we're very lucky, almost every one of us will experience extreme suffering and loss through our lives, if only at the end where we lose everything, including our-selves (whatever that may be). Think of the latter as the extreme of personal suffering.


In the other direction, call it collective suffering, we are also on the precipice of, potentially, major global destabilization due to a number of things, not least climate change, which threatens to cause unimaginable suffering on a mass scale. This collective kind of unimaginable suffering is always almost with us, whether it be from war, weather, disease, or ideology, among a host of others.


We tend to fear this kind of collective suffering more than personal suffering, but if you zoom out a little and pay attention, you'll see that the scale of personal suffering is really just a slow moving and mostly invisible, but constant, kind of mass suffering.


Collective suffering itself seems to come in degrees - the collapse of industries that plunge a whole class of workers into poverty, authoritarian regimes, crushing poverty. People suffering, constantly, with no escape. These kinds of suffering, too, are often as invisible to us as the kind of personal suffering you see at the individual or familial level.


So what?

Well, I guess my first point about this stuff is that when we think of the end of the world, we only really consider scenarios of collective suffering. We fear these kinds of things terribly. The end of the world is coming and we're all going to suffer.

I think this is really only so scary for us because we realize that in that scenario there is no escape for us. If everyone suffers the end of the world, then it follows that I am going to suffer too.

The more local kinds of suffering always give us a little distance so we don't feel the full force of it.

I think that it's entirely natural for us to look away from human suffering. And I believe that end-of-the-world scenarios cause us so much grief because of this lack of escape.

But we're always already at the end of the world, aren't we?

 

All these pockets of individual suffering, and local collective suffering. The bodies and the pain and the tears that accompany every moment. Death, death, and death.


My question is something like, is it possible to learn to live authentically at the end of the world that already is?

I don't believe looking away is the answer. Neither can I believe that simply giving up is our only response (nihilism, depression, dejection, loss of hope, all of these are giving-up, in some way, and I believe all of them are natural, but perhaps not inevitable).


So yeah, this is a big question that I'll occasionally write about, because I think about it a lot. No real answers just yet, except that I don't think that looking away is the answer.


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