T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶t̶e̶n̶ ̶M̶o̶n̶.̶,̶ ̶M̶a̶y̶ ̶2̶4̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶1̶.̶ ̶I̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶o̶r̶t̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶s̶e̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶w̶a̶y̶s̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶r̶a̶p̶i̶d̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶.̶ ̶W̶e̶’̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶e̶r̶a̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶a̶p̶p̶e̶n̶s̶ ̶f̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶.̶
It’s now June 17, 2021. A full month since I started writing this one. It’s not out of procrastination or laziness or anything like that, but there are times when I feel like I have to take long breaks from what I’m writing about. This topic required a month of walking around and riding my bike aimlessly and thinking about life before I sat down and returned to write it apparently. I was working on other things the whole time, but this stressed me out a little bit every time I tried to return to it so I just gave it a rest for awhile.
What I was getting at almost a month ago when I began this was the discussion of the new era we’re in, and why it’s so difficult to talk about. Things are changing so fast that it’s tough to really wrap one’s head around entirely. As soon as you write about something it feels like it becomes irrelevant immediately in this world. One week there’s a protest or some kind of violent act in the news, another week there’s a new virus variant to worry about. The nature of this news cycle is such that everything constantly dwarfs the previous thing, and as a result you never really know what the fuck to pay attention to because it’s all so overwhelming.
So what I wanted to do (and the reason why I wanted to date the piece at the very beginning) was to discuss what is going on. Not everything, I just want to give a brief snapshot of a couple things that are happening currently. They are a few important things not really being talked about right now that much in mainstream media. It feels like the climate emergency is still kind of in this weird, cultish place similar to the odd, alternative area conversations about extraterrestrial life were in the 90s. It’s real, yet many people don’t take you seriously if you talk about it. They’ll stare at you blankly; you look at their eyes and you can see these clowns are still envisioning a world where they’ll somehow become rich one day and ride off into the sunset or whatever.
Talking about this stuff is almost like some kind of cult movie with only a few truly in the know; you have to kind of seek out this information yourself to learn about anything. I doubt the news really wants to bum everyone out and discuss the fact that we are running out of fish, and they could be extinct by as early as 2048. Or for another example, why isn’t the news discussing how harmful the plastic industry has been to this world and ocean life? It seems like these concerns rarely get covered, and the few sources that do address them feel like they’re exposing a secret we’re not supposed to know about. A common sentiment made on comment sections for YouTube videos covering climate issues is usually disbelief that the creator in question isn’t being censored, because the information we’re getting from them is so awful it actually feels unreal and immoral.
Right now, we are in the final stages of a certain era in human history. 2020 marked the beginning of this shift, and it will get worse. We are now ultimately reaching the culmination of decades of recklessly experimenting with what we can do to the Earth and testing its limits. The planet is now sick, and we’re witnessing the beginning of its immune system compromising slowly. It is now in the process of attempting to shake us off politely, giving early warning signs of what’s to come on a regular basis. Every week there are new, disturbing trends in weather patterns somewhere around the world. We’re breaking records constantly now, and despite how certain news anchors depict these records as fun and lighthearted (if at all), these insane weather patterns that have become regular are actually abnormal and should not be happening at all. They should not be treated as minor hiccups or irregularities. They are all echoes of the apocalypse, signs of what’s coming.
When I say the word, “apocalypse,” it is important to make the distinction on what that is: it’s not one big and intense event that happens all at once. There is not a singular event like the movies have conditioned us for, where biblical acts of nature start to happen and things get crazy one weekend and it changes everything immediately. Certain things might stand out as being particularly big in our lives, like covid for example, but the apocalypse and collapse of civilization as we know it currently is something that happens very slowly. It’s like putting something in the oven on a really low temperature for a really long time. At first the Earth looks like it can handle it, but eventually the burnt, messy truth presents itself. That’s what is happening now with every report of a new disease, acts of violence, mass unemployment, wealth inequality, species going extinct, etc. That is just the planet trying to tell us that it’s a little sick, and it’s not going to be coming back anytime soon. The Earth has an epidemic to deal with as well, and the strain it has is called “humanity.” Every person infected with covid and dying is really just the earth sneezing and trying to get rid of us in the only way it knows how. There are too many of us on the planet and the earth is simply trying to clear a path that’ll make its survival manageable for the short-term at least. (For those of you that have contracted covid or lost loved ones to it, I don’t intend that to sound insensitive, I’m just saying that’s how the Earth is reacting to us collectively).
Like I said, to attempt to break all of this down would be too much, but the biggest contributor of this situation would easily be the system of capitalism we’ve chosen for ourselves. I don’t care if I sound cringe with the usage of the word capitalism, it’s true. The thing about capitalism is that it’s cool as shit, so to disparage it in any manner automatically makes the critic look lame. Everyone wants to have a mansion filled with bent over Scandinavian prostitutes already lined up and waiting for them. I know I do. Or a yacht, and 900 properties and sports cars I don’t need. I would absolutely love that. I was raised by boomers, so I understand that capitalism can be awesome, but where it has to be pointed out and gets undeniably bad is the area generally known as “unfettered” capitalism, which is closer to what we have right now than simple plain old “capitalism.”
Capitalism is great if it’s working for the most part and things are good for most people. Things used to be like that: you can see it in sitcoms from previous decades and shows like The Simpsons, for example, in which they were able to live fairly well. The average American family can’t do that now. Unfettered capitalism has caused things like that; greed leading to job losses on a large scale, people struggling to keep up in this society financially, etc. We have clearly failed on some level when you really look around at the state of things, and it’s been declining for years. Most people hadn’t recovered from 2008, and then 2020 came to destroy whatever was left of them.
The whole problem of unfettered capitalism is how unregulated it is. That is the glaring loophole of this whole situation: a person can legally acquire as much money as they possibly can, get more powerful over time, and do whatever they want with their wealth. Just the other day I was reading an article about a corporation that is spending billions for homes in residential areas all over Canada that they later intend to use as rentals. Thanks to the system we live under, there is no law or anything stopping anyone rich enough to do things like that. Houses that were built for the intention of families to start a life in Canada are now ridiculously inaccessible for most of the population. There will be no more home ownership in the future because the rich are taking everything for themselves. They’re doing this shit right in front of us, and we can’t do anything about it because it’s perfectly legal: the Canadian dream is now practically dead. The world my parents knew and raised me in no longer exists. We have traded everything to the wealthy and we will have nothing to show for it. Housing is just one huge concern on a planet with a population that keeps getting bigger.
Another big concern: there will be water and food shortages in the future. We’ve already seen how supplies were limited last year with morons rushing to stores to hoard toilet paper, but there will be more industries affected over the years. Meat will become harder and harder to acquire as we move forward, for example. And if you’re vegetarian, don’t worry: you’ll be affected too when we can’t grow shit anymore. As time goes on we will keep seeing regions all over the world suffering from various shortages, and decisions will have to be made regarding what will happen to them (or if there will be any human intervention at all — as we’ve already seen in places like Flint, Michigan, there probably won’t be). There could easily be a famine in my lifetime, and I wouldn’t be surprised. At the time of this writing, there are already places in the world experiencing droughts, and it will only continue to get worse.
The most obvious concern I haven’t discussed too much yet: the increasingly crazy weather patterns. I mentioned the records being broken briefly, but in the future we will start to see more insanity in the form of power outages due to heat, and more deaths because of how crazy the heat waves are going to be for some people. Anyone without access to some kind of air conditioned environment in the future will be straight up dead after a couple minutes outside. None of this is scientific, by the way, I’m just telling you what I imagine will happen. Haha. That means you’ll be forced to live in one of the many rentals rich people are working on right now, handing over your paycheque from whatever shitty job you have working for the rich right back to them. “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” as they say, because you won’t have a choice if you want to survive.
Crazier weather patterns will also lead to the thawing out of certain areas in the world. This will lead to more pandemics, as various diseases and random shit is thawed out from soil that has survived for years. I know that sounds crazy, but it has literally happened in the news (as recently as 2016 in Siberia), and it’s not that crazy to imagine it could happen again. On a planet getting hotter and hotter, it’s easy to see how some new bacteria could emerge from beneath us one day, and start spreading like wildfire. Imagine how disastrous things would be if there were not just one, but several covid-like diseases flying around. What if the average life expectancy went down to like 30? I don’t see any of that as unrealistic.
The other big thing to consider with all of these changes is the mental health aspect, and the safety of the future overall. Because of the ramping up of crazier conditions, people will continue to react in crazy ways. The future will probably have all kinds of violent acts, in the manner of Mad Max-esque gangs popping up all over the place. That movie gets used as an example so much it is a cliche now, but it’s realistic to think that our society would mimic things seen in movies and pop culture to cope with being in a new world we can’t control (as seen in Adam Curtis’ work: we already have done this cultural feedback loop to a certain extent). In addition to all the violence against each other there will probably be high suicide rates, lots of depression, more scammers/people trying to rip you off in general, etc. Mental health in a society where everything is broken is going to be a tough issue to deal with.
The main reason I wanted to discuss all of that is to finally conclude with my thoughts at this specific point in time. It will be interesting to read in a few years because of how different everything will be. It’s surreal to know that life as I know it now will never be the same in the future. I know what is coming, so many others do, and lots of people can feel the change in the air. Yet nothing is being done about any of the problems listed. In fact, like I mentioned: in some cases like the rich buying up land and homes in droves, it is perfectly legal to do what certain people are doing, effectively turning our entire society into a feudalist shithole. As a species we have collectively allowed what is happening to happen due to our rules and loopholes that make no sense. (As a quick example of what I mean by a capitalist loophole that makes no real sense: consider the fact that the world’s wealthiest people don’t pay taxes. There is no justifiable reason why this should be the case, but it is and it’s legal).
So how am I supposed to feel about all this? I guess I’m sad on one level, and at the same time I can’t really do anything to stop it as a single person. All I can do is tell people that I’m aware of what is going on and that I’m not happy with any of it. I guess that’s why I wanted to write this one, so it’s confirmed in history that I wasn’t cool with the changes, and so I have a document of what life was like at this very strange juncture right before it all got worse. Society right now is like a broken rollercoaster run by a teenaged drug addict who hasn’t slept in weeks: we’re about to start heading down and things are gonna get really interesting. Good luck to those of you that don’t happen to be rich. And if you are, please consider giving me some of your resources. Cheers.