good morning Hank it's Tuesday I
recently found myself at an airport as I
often do sitting at the gate waiting for
my flight to board and I couldn't stop
thinking about how everyone in the
airport would within a century or so be
dead which in and of itself isn't that
worrisome to me like I think about that
a lot when I'm in a room full of
strangers look at all of these people
gathered together at gate a7 by a shared
desire to go to Detroit on a Wednesday
afternoon and I think about how one day
soon this moment will feel distant and
we'll find it odd that in 2019 people
worried about X or believed Y or wore
clothing item Z and this present moment
will feel fixed and distant like an old
picture does like history and then
eventually this moment will be entirely
forgotten because all of the people who
shared it will be gone and isn't it kind
of absurd how temporary we are despite
all our efforts to feel permanent the
pictures we save the emails we archive
the luggage we buy with a lifetime
guarantee as if a lifetime is a long
time all of which I would argue is
totally normal and healthy stuff to
think about when you are alone in an
airport and the Wi-Fi is very slow but
then I started to think some more and I
started to feel really nihilistic and
angry and kind of disgusted by
everything like in a century we'll all
be dead including this guy sitting three
seats away from me talking on his
Bluetooth headset about supply chains
and I cannot believe how loudly that guy
is talking and also just how much stuff
everyone has phones and luggage and
highly stylized clothing and then I
start thinking about how this is the
Hunger Games and I am a resident of the
capital and how all this stuff we've
acquired and cared about will end up in
landfills and how our air travel is
adding so much carbon to the atmosphere
and not for any good reason in the end
because we'll all be corpses soon and
I've become disgusted by the
meaninglessness of it all and how
blithely all these people are walking
around pretending that human effort
matters when our species itself will be
gone in a geologic nanosecond we will be
nothing but an odd brief blip on the
radar of this planet story which itself
is an odd brief blip in the larger
cosmic story and nothing matters and
people who believe otherwise are
mindless idiots it is astonishing to me
how quickly my mind can journey from I
bet people of the future will feel like
our clothes looked weird to all effort
is meaningless because nothing matters
like I'm never more than a couple
minutes of thinking away from abject
nihilistic despair but then when I go to
the airport with a friend or something
I'll eat a soft pretzel and chat amiably
about the travails of AFC Wimbledon and
feel like the human enterprise is good
and noble and beautiful brains are so
weird the thing is I think both these
worldviews are correct like human life
is beautiful and also we are all going
to die and much of what we cared about
will be rendered irrelevant by the in
rushing tide of time the question for me
is not so much which of these ways of
looking at the world is true it's which
of these ways of looking at the world is
productive and if despair actually
decreased my carbon emissions I'd be all
for it but mostly it just kind of
renders me empty and inert I work when I
feel hope when I am able as f scott
Fitzgerald once put it to hold in
balance the sense of the futility of
effort and the sense of the necessity to
struggle ultimately I believe that
effort is never futile so long as there
are people to share in that effort and
people who might benefit from it in the
grand scheme of things maybe nothing
will matter but we don't live in the
grand scheme of things we live here in
the day to day at gate a7 on an early
Wednesday afternoon and we struggle on
together not because humans are great
and eternal but because we are
vulnerable and weak
we need each other we struggle on in the
hopes of the lives to come and of the
world's to come but also in the hope of
the lives we are sharing now Hank I'll
see you on Friday