To those fellow human beings (1) who also long to escape the drudgery of our modern lives—the wheel and woe of the 9 to 5 workday, the toil of any meaningful human connection amidst the ceaseless movement of capital and information, and the general tedium of existing in a society—I present this: my plan of escape. It is quite simple really; humanity has clearly grown too perverse, too distant, too greedy, for it to be worth any of our efforts to try and fix anything.
Give it up already, eh?
Even from the human pursuit of love—romantic, familial, platonic, or otherwise—it is now, in this eleventh hour of our species, time to retire. Who gives a damn about anyone anymore anyways? Those of us cognizant enough to see the end know it in our hearts; while we have life remaining, we ought to abandon ourselves and each other, and run off into the woods, the mountains, the deserts—whatever wild places still remain. It is time to return to nature.
It’s just too hard to be a good person. I don’t want to try anymore. Go to school, learn the things, remember to do laundry, get a job, try to make enough money to survive, try to find a person you can actually tolerate so you don’t die miserable and alone—but you can’t just survive. You need to do good: give back to the community, cook a nice meal for your housemates occasionally, plant a tree, deinstitutionalize systemic violence maybe, and calculate and minimize your own personal freaking carbon footprint down to the third damn decimal with math you need another three degrees to actually understand. And your grandmother will still compare you at Thanksgiving to the cousin who got into Harvard (2). And, just to really screw with you, acne doesn’t magically disappear when you turn 18.
It’s pointless, right? Being part of a society is just too damn complicated. We’re never going to be perfect, we’re always going to be making mistakes, and the grand sum-total of those mistakes rippling out into the universe with their bad karma is going to be the only miserable legacy of the mewling human race when we inevitably kill ourselves off. But I have good news. If you just stop caring, and run off into the woods—return to nature—then none of that has to matter anymore. The escape lies in giving up.
You may be saying to yourself: “Well, Eli, you are in a foul mood this afternoon (3). Isn’t that all just a bit too pessimistic (4)? You look a bit peaky, perhaps you forgot to have a good breakfast? Here, sit down and have a nice cup of tea and a little scone. We can talk this out and you’ll feel better about it (5). Perhaps tomorrow we can see about the doctors getting you some little green pills (6). In a few years you’ll have consumed enough television to forget most of this (7). There, there, you haven’t had a revelation, you’ve just stumbled into the existential dread we all have to learn to live with eventually (8). Have you considered joining a religion? Some people find the belief in an afterlife quite helpful (10).”
And all of your suggestions might be perfectly reasonable if you were consoling anyone who had any interest in continuing to be a part of a society. I do not. My plan, as was aforementioned, largely consists of abandoning the human project. That is a ship that is terribly off course and headed straight for the iceberg.
You might also say that it’s quite unsympathetic of me, or even immoral, to grab one of the limited lifeboats aboard the Titanic instead of trying to help people in some final good samaritan act (11). Perhaps if this were the Titanic, and any help was on the way for the people that made it out in the lifeboats, you might have a point. But this isn’t the Titanic, and we aren’t sinking in the Atlantic; this is Humanity, and we’re sinking in the literal void of space (12).
There is no one coming to help us (13). We will not be saved. At this point, making it out is as empty of meaning as living out the rest of my existence in this societal cage; one is just more personally enjoyable. If there is any hope for any joy to be felt in the remainder of the years of my life, before the societal collapse of humanity, ecological collapse of Earth (14), and eventual heat death of the universe (15), it lies amongst the trees.
So, I’m going to return to nature. “Okay…” You may be saying, with a narrowed gaze. “Does that mean you’re going to go lie in the grass for a bit or go…feral?” And the answer, to your question, is yes. I’m going to lay in the grass until I go feral. Absolutely nuts. Completely maladjusted. Totally deranged! Crazy.
This will surely dissolve the agony of my life problems (16).
And lizard folk among us.
For legal reasons I am referring to a hypothetical comment by a hypothetical grandmother about a hypothetical cousin at a hypothetical familial thanksgiving gathering. I can neither confirm nor deny whether either side of my family was involved in such an incident.
Gee, I can’t believe you noticed.
Aren’t you a bit too optimistic?
No, thank you.
Is that really the best we’ve come up with?
Well that’s bleak, isn’t it?
You’re in a place in Egypt the locals call The Nile.
Yes.
Results unclear.
I encourage you to really think. What would you do, if this weren’t abstract, but you were really facing the loss of your life? Yeah that’s right, you coward. We both know exactly what you would do.
But, for legal reasons, all six of the women who technically have the title grandmother or great-grandmother to me have never said such a thing. (And, to the best of my knowledge, none of my cousins have gone to Harvard).
There is a non-zero chance I’m wrong about this actually, but isn’t that just stats talk for functionally impossible?
Seriously, did y’all even read the last IPCC report?
An event that has immense personal significance to me, a homosapien who will likely die within the next century.
But the idea that because things are messy and complicated we should just fuck off into the woods doesn’t make any sense at all, now does it?
by Eli White
