Perhaps

Perhaps it has always been this way. A thought like this can stop your thoughts like a rock going through a glass window. When I look at the insanity of the world in which we all live my first instinct is to consider it the curtain call on a truly glorious nightmare, but it could also have always been this way.

It occurs to me often that all that has really changed is that people now have the means to broadcast their perspective into the abyss, like Hitler’s radio waves into space. There is nothing holding many back anymore, no more reasons for rationality and its sidekick, plans. The raw fact that we have probably damaged the world so badly that it will cease to support us and that the social system we have erected is little more than an entertaining suicide pact must surely gnaw on the nerves of us all. Just as the atomic bomb surely psychologically altered all those who could fathom its existence in our world, so too does the doomed twilight in which we now live. Still I must suppose that it could have always been this way.

Surely the miracle of life and its startling brevity has always occupied the minds of us humans, at least when we weren’t preoccupied with dodging death for another day. I find myself wondering if perhaps we humans can’t actually care about the extinction of our species, or the end of what we confusingly categorize as civilization. It would be interesting to see what people would do if they were told having another 5 years of this modern world was possible, but after that all human life would cease; would it change anything? Has it always been this way?