The Inevitable End
As a kid, I worried about completing my homework in time, scoring good grades, getting my parents’ permission to get together with friends or go on trips, and so on. These worries lasted for only a short time - days, maybe weeks. Long-term stressors included ensuring I graduate high school with flying colors so that I could get into a good college. Ah…those were the days! Our worries were small because we never planned for what was to come 10 or 20 years down the line. We were, in essence, not in control of our lives.
Now people my age are frantically working on their career goals, developing a family, building a house, sustaining…these worries last for years resulting in making plans for the distant future. The biggest shock is perhaps the unprecedented energy that goes into maintaining relationships and comprehending the intricacies of existing in an imagined society we never asked for. We don’t even know if we’ll be alive for the long run. Health issues can kick in - both physical and mental. We might change plans overnight, but we still make plans - for the daunting future whose uncertainty we deny.
As we grow older, things change and we go back to where we started - not worrying about what’s going to happen 5 or 10 years down the line. We become incapacitated. Irrespective of how much we try to fight it by caring for our health, we will all gradually atrophy. The more mortifying reason is that we might not have the 5 or 10 years left to most decidedly plan for. It is spine-chilling. At that point, the guidelines we had so far lived by won’t make sense anymore. We will be defeated, tied down with nothing else to do…other than wait for the unknown, the inescapable certainty. The inevitable end.
Is this where humanity is headed? Can we draw parallels?
300,000 years ago, a day in the life of Homo Sapiens involved gathering berries, hunting meat, feeding babes, protecting territories, and settling disputes. Our ancestors never gave a second thought about where they wanted their kids to be 20 years later. They did not take any insurance plans, invest in the future, or save up for their retired life. They planned for the day, at the most for the next day as well. They did not have much control over their lives as they lived in constant fear of predators.
Today, the world is frantically working to achieve unbridled goals for a glossy future. These goals range from creating personalized medicines that match human DNA to manufacturing 3D-printed homes to be laid on Mars when we finally colonize it. These newfound technologies we never asked for will change the fabric of our society as we know it. Figuring out the intricacies to ethically and legally integrate them into our reality is a conundrum on its own. For all the climate change mitigation efforts we fail to undertake, humans are scared of “not making it” - both at an individual and collective level. We are worriedly investing in a future we fake confidence in because it is a future whose uncertainty we deny.
But what will the future look like? Yuval Noah Harari talks about a singularity in his much-revered book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - “Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity…a point at which all the known laws of nature did not exist…We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world…will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.” Did a familiar chill go down your spine? Harari is talking about a point in time, beyond which the guidelines we lived by won’t make sense anymore. We will be defeated, tied down with nothing else to do…other than wait for the unknown, the inescapable certainty. The inevitable end.
