High Hopes and Deep Fears

I didn’t get a lot out of my local community college’s philosophy class. The professor was a friendly and elfish man with the demeanor of a wisened toddler and the voice of an apprehensive librarian. For a man so uncertain, his lectures were impressively droning. While I didn’t learn a lot from the class, there was one bit that really lingered.

There was one philosopher who would take a step back and look at everything as honestly as he could. For example, he likened a steak dinner with his partner to a night spent at a wooden table consuming a slab of meat served on a circular piece of ceramic across from a creature with whom he sometimes performs sexual acts. It’s a crass way of looking at things, I’ll admit it. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable to look so literally at the unusual things we as humans do. It’s a type of thinking that I apply annoyingly often, even if not so literally.

To look objectively at so many of the realities that have emerged around us is unnerving, and it’s easy to ignore the odd times we’re in when getting here was a day-by-day process. There was no sudden moment when this began feeling like the future, but to explain the world we’re living in now to our younger selves would surely be both thrilling and terrifying for them.

We live in a digital world. The social media accounts we thoughtlessly signed up for as kids have grown exponentially. The iPhones, which didn’t even have selfie cameras (a world before selfies?!), now unlock with our faces. They used to have fingerprint scanners built right into the home button, but those stopped impressing us. Through our collective sacrifices, our phones have connected us in ways that could never have been conceived. They’ve become part of who we are and the thought of losing the digital personas we’ve spent our lives cultivating is so scary that they’re worth offering up our privacy on a silver platter.

Surrendering all that we are to the all-knowing ‘cloud’ above us is a right of passage unique to this millennium. Our conversations, contacts and camera rolls define us so much that surrender is a sacrifice worth making. It’s a self-sabotaging act of self-preservation.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by this future we’re diving head first into. Most days, I vacillate between the highest of hopes and the deepest of fears.

We get to carry the weight of the entire internet in the palm of our hands. Given a charge and a little service or wi-fi, we can learn just about all that there is to know.

Global inequality is the worst that it’s ever been. The world’s richest men are launching themselves into space while so much of the world beneath them is still suffering.

As of just this month, we’ve mapped the entire human genome. We’ve decoded each of the roughly 25,000 genes that explain what make human beings different from one another.

We’ve amassed enough nuclear weaponry to destroy ourselves and most life on earth one hundred times over.

We’ve written enough literature on enough subjects to fill entire stadiums to the brim with written word.

We’ve erected entire mountains of landfill trash and played futile waiting games.

We’ve created artificial limbs that interact with the brain and give paraplegics the ability to walk again.

We may fight wars over water in our lifetimes.

We’ve used MRIs to compile our dreams into images.

We kill each other with drone strikes.

We launched the James Webb telescope into space and within the next few months it will show us the very beginnings of the universe — the very first stars and the very first galaxies.

We depend so much on technology that a well-orchestrated cyber attack could spell the downfall of our entire species.

We’ve constructed intricate virtual worlds. With each day that goes by, the prospect of a life lived entirely within virtual reality grows nearer and nearer.

We’ve allowed climate change to win. There’s consensus among much of the scientific community that the time to act has passed; our sea levels will continue to rise, our natural disasters will continue to worsen, our famines and droughts will grow more severe and the best we can hope to do is mitigate some of this — through critical, evasive measures.

But… massive stars collapse into blackholes that suck up matter itself.

The subatomic universe behaves differently depending on whether or not it’s being observed. Light itself appears to make decisions.

Planet earth is not a permanent fixture in the sky. The most fundamental realities of the universe can be stated, but their gravity can never be understood.

Lifetimes worth of dreams and accomplishments, nations worth of books and sacred texts, our languages, our electronics, our architecture, our collective achievements and failures, our nuclear weaponry and our poetry, our worst cruelties and our most beautiful pieces of music, our art, poems and movies, our tv shows, cultures and foods — all that we are eventually crumbles.

But more and more of our world’s brightest minds are starting to believe that… none of this is even real. We’re all just unwitting participants in a grand, grand simulation — or if any of it is real, we exist in just one trivial, inconsequential reality among an infinite multitude of other ones.

But in this universe, I get to share these speculations on this strange app called Medium. At least that’s how it seems.

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