Adam Greenfield

In mid-2023, my editor Leo, arguably correctly, urged me to eliminate a long section on terror management theory and what I called “nihility salience” from the book that was becoming “Lifehouse.”

Nihility salience is a guess about why the end of the world seems to weigh so much more heavily on us than even the thought of our own individual extinction: that it’s while we all understand on some level that we have to die, we tacitly count on the persistence of a civilization beyond our death to carry our works and the meaning we endow them with past that point. And it’s the prospect that it might involve an irrevocable writing down to zero of the value of everything to which we set our hand in life that most threatens us about the apocalypse.

Apocalypse means no armature of collective meaning-making will survive to carry the memory of our deeds, our name or our being down to the future. It will be as if we never were. I think that’s why people find the thought so unbearable.

Apr 9 at 9:36amWeb
Show threadAdam Greenfield2d ago
Sometimes I wonder, though, how the book would have landed had I overruled Leo and insisted on finding a place for that material in the book. Because it seems to me that folks might find a theory of nihility salience helpful in moments like the one we’re in now.
Show threadDoug Webb1d ago
@adamgreenfield a bit of a shame... Collapse is now "in" and while I never heard of nihility salience (bit of a mouthful), TMT was useful to learn about.
Show threadPatrick Hadfield1d ago

@douginamug @adamgreenfield have you come across "collapsonomics"?

I had many interesting conversations with these guys, around 2010.

I've no idea what they're up to now!

https://collapsonomics.org/

The Institute for Collapsonomics

Show threadSimon Brooke2d ago

@adamgreenfield That kind of implies that we believe that we have works which others value enough to remember after we are dead. And for some people, of course, that's true.

But for most, I think, it's at best an enormous vanity.

I shall not leave much ripple on the water.

Show threadJ. R. DePriest    :EA DATA. SF:8h ago

@adamgreenfield

It can also lead to peace as your mistakes and regrets, those things that hurt you the most, the cruelty of the culture in which you lived toward your existence, all of it will also fade away. There will be no record of how much you were hated, just the smooth, steady influx of the natural world burying and reclaiming everything we leave behind. There is calmness knowing that our willful ignorance is causing a mass extinction, but the planet itself will roll on for millions of more years just fine. There will even still be life and it will continue to evolve to fill the niches our careless greed leaves on our wake. Maybe a type of intelligence like ours will arise again and future archaeologists will diligently study all that remains of us, a thin layer of pulverized plastic in the strata and a half dozen fossils, and wonder what our ancient life may have been like.