Getting Over the End of the World

A fascinating conversation between Canadian archeologist Dave Pollard,
and himself…

RS:Dave, you say you don’t have the patience to do knowledge
consulting work anymore.
Why
is that?

Me: Well, I’ve recently been doing a lot of research and reading on the
state of the world and on human nature, and I’ve come to the conclusion
that
we are living in the last century of human civilization. So I’ve become
a little impatient with projects I don’t think are that important in the
larger scheme of things.

RS:(strange look) Wow, that’s a depressing thought. It must be tough to
do anything with that negative a perspective on life and the future.

Me: Actually, it’s very liberating, and I’m more at peace than I have
been at any time in my life. Because I’ve come to believe that the end
of civilization
is something we can’t do anything about, nor is it anybody’s ‘fault’,
or even necessarily a bad thing. As Canadian archaeologist Ronald Wright
says,
if we destroy the ecosystem that sustains us "nature will merely shrug
and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but
in the end a bad idea".

Here, here.  The Dowbrigade has been a believer in the essentially
doomed nature of human civilization all his life.  We even started
a religion, The Doomed, based on that basic tenet. We also agree with
Pollard’s conclusion, expressed later in his little auto-interview, that
we should all just relax and enjoy the show, because there is nothing
we can do about our fate. "We are nothing more or less than six billion
creatures individually doing what we are driven to do moment by moment.
We have been driven to overpopulate and despoil the planet and exhaust
its resources by our DNA, and in so doing we are merely following Darwin’s
law."

from How to Save the World