Adam GreenfieldApr 9

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.

Show threadJ. R. DePriest    :EA DATA. SF:

@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.

Apr 11 at 1:41amWeb