Why Become An Activist When The World Is Already Collapsing?

How much time do I have left? This is the very first question which pops into a terminal patient’s head when they first hear their diagnosis. They simply want to know how much life they have left, down to the number of days, if possible. Every single day remaining has now gained a new significance, new value. There is no time for regrets, literally. They need to wrap up their unfinished business, say their goodbyes to loved ones, contemplate, look back on their life, spend hours staring at the sea, find peace and say their own goodbye to a world that they will never see again. Say goodbye to existence.

Our civilisation is a terminal patient who refuses to have any of the self-reflections that a typical terminal patient would have. It is a self-destructive chain smoker continuing to smoke as the cancer metastasises all over their body. This patient is ignorant of their own existence, of time, space, and of the existence of the children they are leaving behind in this collapsing world. This patient is unable to even ask the question “how much time do I have left”. They don’t want to know the answer.

But the metaphor of patient vs. disease vs. existence is incomplete. Because when a patient dies, the world remains. In this case, the world is collapsing along with the patient. This civilisation may be leaving this world, but the world is leaving us as well. Even if humans had the choice to come back to this world one day, it wouldn’t be there. Because we are taking with us, to our toxic cemetery, a very big portion of Earth’s 10 million species, along with the planet’s weather machinery. The state of the planet that we leave behind is highly questionable, and left to anyone’s imagination. What is happening here is much bigger than a terminal disease: the patient, the doctor, the hospital and what is outside the hospital will all be gone, or at least replaced by an uninhabitable, most likely unrecognizable version of the current world.

So my advice is: surrender to the collapse, but do not give up on existence, like a patient who knows that every moment left still counts for something. An alternative question to the myopic, lazy question of “how much time do we have left” could be: how much can we preserve or even repair? How much can we delay the onset of this disease? And how do we make the best of the time we have left?

For many victims of the climate crisis and necrocapitalistic overshoot who have already paid the price, it is too late. And for the children, the next generation, a shockingly reduced life expectancy is a certainty. We owe it both to those who have already departed and those who will pay for the excesses of this civilisation, to stop thinking about how many more years, days and seconds we have left, and start focusing on what we can do right now. We owe it to the planet.

My other advice is stop preparing. Stop hoarding stuff for the impending Apocalypse, because it won’t help you. We live in organised societies, so unless you manage to isolate yourself completely and sustainably (at your own risk), it is most certain that you will become a target for attack if you are perceived as privileged. While preparations may give you the illusion that you have achieved some level of peace of mind, in reality you have made yourself a target. The more you plan, the more you will feel inadequate in a new world which will be largely devoid of healthcare, reliable food supply, clean water, electricity and most of all compassion and understanding from the people whose country you have emigrated to, because yours was either too hot, too fascist or too nuked by another nation to continue to live in. The more you panic right now, the more you are forgetting that we are all in this together and that our strength lies not in individualistic preparations, but collective resilience.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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