All the Myriad Reasons Why We're Doomed

Yeah, that's the face of a guy who smells his own farts and likes what he smells.

I don't know if you have heard, but the planet is warming at an alarming rate. Nobody really talks much about climate change in American politics, because we're worried more about important things like the economy and to what degree attempted rape disqualifies someone from being a Supreme Court Justice. Most of us have the attention span of a drunken toddler, and our focus will fall from one crisis to the next, deftly steered by our honorable news media. I'm going to make a bold prediction and say that in twenty years, we'll all being talking about climate change a lot more. Twenty more years of record temperatures and the discord that such weather sows will demand a response. Unfortunately, by that time, we're probably going to need a scientific miracle to stop or slow planetary warming, and the GOP will be telling us that prayer, not science, will save us. Hell, they might even be right.

It's also possible that twenty years from now, humanity will be so enveloped in a digital world of their creation that nobody will give much of a shit what happens in the real world. Maybe this is a future coming in forty or fifties years, but I think it's inevitable that our species descends into a fiction of their own making. Young people especially are expected to maintain dual identities, carefully curating a Facebook/Instagram/Youtube persona that sometimes only tangentially resembles their flesh and blood. We're edging toward the Matrix, bro. Our descendants will be flying around cities with flapping trench coats and an alternative rock score in accompaniment. Or not. I don't know.

There's also the fact that we're more or less in charge of our own evolution. Instead of the natural world we evolved to live in, we're roaming around in a bizarre concrete jungle that daily assaults our senses and alienates us further from our past. What sort of creature will human civilization ultimately produce? Who knows, but I have a hard time believing we will do a better job at engineering a survivor than nature.

So yes, times aren't great, especially if you happen not to be a rich white dude. The further dissolution of our political system is a harbinger for future horrors, to be sure. Just keep in mind that everybody dies and every species goes extinct, to give some perspective. I realize that this is a really shitty argument, but shitty arguments are all that I have at the moment.