The End Isn't Nigh⁠↗

it’s incredibly hard, and maybe impossible, to escape the distorted perspective that’s been labelled “temporal chauvinism”: the feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.

Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet.

in my life in general, I’m much better at making a useful impact in areas that feel tractable, where I’m not paralysed by horror at the prospect of losing everything that matters.

human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others.

doing good things for each other in conditions of insecurity is just what we do. Look back at your life to date, and you might even conclude that, so far, you’re handling it all rather brilliantly.