Good morning Hank, it’s Tuesday. But it’s not just any Tuesday,
it’s my birthday. And for my birthday I am giving myself
an old fashioned parts video. That’s right Hank, today’s video is
like Bosch’s garden of earthly delights, it comes to you in
3 semi-connected parts. Part 1, the final, maybe
episode of my podcast the Anthropocene Reviewed
comes out on Thursday. It is about this drawing which
was sketched by the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov
in March 1965 shortly after he very narrowly survived the
first space walks. There is a video of this first space walk on
Youtube and I like to watch it whenever my palms are really
dry and in need of some sweat. Leonov’s life was fascinating
but mostly the podcast is about why we make art and what we
give up to make it. It’s been 3 months now since the Anthropocene
Reviewed Book was first published and it has been
strange and lovely and terrifying to share something so
personal and I didn’t know how to write about that directly
so I wrote about space art. Working on the Anthropocene
Reviewed has been an incredible experience but I think I’m ready
to go back to writing fiction. Maybe? That was a long pause
before I said ‘writing fiction.’ Part 2, good news from the Hank
and John chat bot. Hank, in your last video you had an AI based
on us answer questions from our viewers and that was
only like moderately dystopian so I decided to try it out for myself.
So I said, “hey it’s John.” And it responded, “Beth and Mom and
Dad have said, because we don’t know yet, that I’m probably
going to live more than.” And I was like wait, I’m probably going
to live more than what? Because you know, mortality is always on
my mind Hank, but especially on my birthdays. And it responded,
“I’m guessing 1 million years but I could be off by quite a bit.” Now
initially Hank, I thought this was unambiguously good news.
Assuming the chat bot knows more than I do, a million year life
expectancy ain’t bad. But then I was thrown into a new existential
quandary. Do I really want to live for a million years? I mean
modern humans have only been a thing for 250,000 years and
just living through all of human history so far would be extremely
exhausting and even after all of that I would only be to one quarter
of my life span. Anyway, it all got me thinking about what my
preferred lifespan would be, and today on my 44th birthday
I would like to announce that my preferred lifespan is officially 97.
It’s a nice solid, prime number. And I feel like rooting for triple
digits would be a little bit gauche. So there we have it, I would like
to live to be 97. Nothing happens if you don’t make goals in this world.
Part 3, adulthood. When I was younger I thought of adulthood
as a kind of zombie apocalypse like my job was to stave off adulthood
for as long as possible, running from it, fighting it off at every corner, knowing
all the while that I would inevitably succumb to adulthood and become
part of the zombie hoard. It seemed to me that people who
had contracted adulthood devoted their lives to thinking about excruciatingly
boring stuff like lawn maintenance and life insurance and whether the
Chrysler Pacifica mini van is superior to the Honda Odyssey
mini van. And I was horrified by all of it and did not want to become
a proper adult. I think deep down what terrified me about proper
adulthood was that it seemed like changelessness to me.
Like I remember being a kid and looking at my dad’s shoes
and thinking, those shoes are like 10 years old and they still fit.
But it turns out that, 1, a change in shoe size is not the most important
or interesting change that humans go through, and 2, there is a comfort
and pleasure to 10 year old shoes that literally cannot be imagined by
people whose shoe size changes every year. And more importantly, 3,
adulthood turns out to be full of change. Like yeah, I have a lot of the same
relationships I had 20 years ago but those relationships have dramatically
changed and deepened across the decades. And personalities change too.
Like as a 30 year old I hated gardening and exercise, and being
outside. And I didn’t care one whit about third tier English football and
now I love all that stuff. And 15 years from now, hopefully,
I will be different again. So here’s to that hope, and to life, just not a
million years of it. Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.