The Apocalypse (Set up the Question)

Uncertainty

After years of thought and much study, I have come to a definitive and disappointing conclusion … I have no idea what’s going on. 

I must have missed something when I arrived here on Earth. Maybe I was just late. After all, by the time I got here everything had already started and there was no one there to tell me the rules. I never even got an instruction booklet. Now, after 46 years of bumbling around, things don’t make much more sense than when I got here. 

Apocalypse (The Public One) 

One thing, however, is clear. The world is both literally and figuratively on fire. Rainforests are burning. We are no more ready for the next pandemic than we were for the last one. Democracies are faltering. We can’t seem to stop ourselves from making terrifying technologies. And we’ve built our entire lives on things that destroy the very life-support systems of our spaceship Earth. 

It is a real-life apocalypse, but it is a strange, slow-moving one. In some ways, zombies might have been easier. Everyone has a plan for that one. I mean, can we sign up for a different apocalypse please? At least with the zombies someone might have an idea about what to do. 

My Desire (Be Good)

Zombies or no, I did not sign up for this apocalypse. But I can’t shake this cloying sense that I ought to be doing something about it. Truth is, I want to be doing something about it. I don’t want democracies to falter or for the world to unravel in climate chaos. Lots of people are in great pain. Things that I love are being destroyed forever. And I want to save them all. 

Backman (Status Quo, Personal)

But with so many things going wrong all at once, I don’t know where to start. It doesn’t help that, even without an apocalypse, everyday life is hard enough. The Swedish author, Fredrik Backman, captured it perfectly. He writes …

 … there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. … Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.

Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. 

Apocalypse (The Personal One) 

So there are global catastrophes and the ongoing catastrophe of just making it day-to-day. But there is another apocalypse, a personal one. Because, yes, civilization as we know it may be ending, But there is also the end of me. Eventually and unavoidably, I am going to lose everything I have and everything and everyone I love. 

And it’s not just me. 

Somewhere else,  a husband watches the only woman he will ever love shut the trunk on an old blue Volkswagan … the one that belongs to the lawyer she met while he was too often away on business. 

Somewhere else, a mother holds the smooth round head of her child, cleared of its soft blonde hair by the chemo, against the hollow place in her chest where her heart used to be. 

We are all in this same boat together. The apocalypse is happening now and it has been happening from the beginning. 

What are we supposed to do? 

That is what I want to talk about today. I cannot think of a question that matters more. 

My Desire (Be Happy) 

 Other than being a human being, I don’t have any particular expertise in this area. I am a science teacher and essayist who writes a podcast about gratitude for nerds. We’ve already established that I have no idea what’s going on. 

But I can tell you what I want. I want to be a good person. Or at least I want to not be a bad person. And in light of all that existential calamity, it feels selfish to say so, but sometimes  … I just want to be happy. And it turns out that I am no better prepared to deal with that than I am for dealing with nuclear proliferation or the fact that someday my beloved wife will die. Maybe that was in the instruction booklet that I didn’t get. 

Status quo

So, most days, this is what I do: I try to get my kids to school on time. I put my dreams on hold just a little longer to pay the bills and clean the house. I try to not screw up my taxes, try to make time to exercise, and fruitlessly worry about whether my kids will have friends. Some nights I tell myself that, even during the apocalypse, it’s okay to occasionally watch TV. But my “self” is often not convinced. Worlds explode around me and I drive to work, same as always. And most days I forget that one day I will grow old and be unable to unbuckle my own overalls without help. 

What are we supposed to do? Maybe to find out, we need to break the status quo. 

Old Age, Sickness, and Death (Inciting Incident)

Story of the Buddha

According to Buddhist legend, Siddhartha Gautama, prince of the Shakyas and the man who would later become the Buddha, was a spoiled child. He wore the finest silks, ate the most decadent foods, and was constantly entertained. Servants waited on his every need. His father built him three palaces, one for the hot season, one for the cold, and one for the rainy, so that he would never have to leave … never even have to set his eyes on anything ugly or uncomfortable. 

But one day, at the age of 29, Siddhartha did leave his luxurious palaces. You get the sense that it was the clandestine trip of a sheltered kid who wants to see the world that his father doesn’t want him to see. He took no one with him but his charioteer, Chandaka.

Outside the gate, Siddhartha met a gray-haired man with missing teeth, and wrinkled skin. who squinted  because he couldn’t see and cupped his hand over his ear because he couldn’t hear. Siddhartha asked Chandaka what was wrong with the man. “Why, he is old, my lord. All people are fated to age like this.” Siddhartha, who had never seen any aged person, looked at his own unwrinked hands in horror.

Further along, Siddhartha passed another person, lying in the grass, writhing and crying out, his skin covered with sores. Siddhartha asked Chandaka what was wrong, and Chandaka answered, “My Lord, he is sick. All living things are subject to illness and pain.” Siddhartha had never been sick and had never seen anyone sick like this. The prince recoiled. 

Finally, they passed a corpse rotting in the ditch, twisted and covered with flies. And Siddhartha was afraid to ask, but he did anyway. “Chandaka, what is this?” And Chandka replied, “This is death, my lord. Death is inevitable for us all.” 

Maybe for you and I who have lived our whole lives within the apocalypse, taking a walk like Siddhartha’s would just be an unsettling reminder of the brevity and fragility of life. But to Siddhartha, who learned about all of this suffering at once, it hit like a punch to the gut. 

How can we just go to work and carry on? We are going to lose everything! The asteroid of our own personal extinction is already on its way. Are we really going to spend our energy catching up on the bills and taking the refrigerator to the dump? Hell, no! 

So Siddhartha decided to do something drastic. He ran away. He left the life of ultimate comfort to commit himself wholly to the problem. 

The Plan

What if we did the same? What would that even look like? 

After Siddhartha encountered old age, sickness, and death, he set out to find teachers. And so might we. A trip to the library makes them easy to find. For well over 2,000 years philosophers have considered the questions of how best to go about living. 

In biology there used to be a saying, now defunct, that “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” (Rolls right off the tongue doesn’t it? … Yeah, that kids mom was like, “So, Ernst, have you considered that you may not be cut out for communications.”) 

Basically, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was the idea that our individual development sometimes repeats the same patterns as our broader evolution. And when I think about the history of philosophy, that rings true for me. So I’d like to tell you about how both my thinking and the thinking of philosophers in the Western world went through a series of similar stages on these questions. Here goes. 

The Conversation (The Western Philosophical Tradition Takes on the Apocalypse)

Stage #1: Trust in Authority 

I grew up Catholic. And one of the great things about Catholicism is clarity. As a Catholic, the way to address an apocalypse was straightforward. Put your faith in God and in the Church. Somebody else has got this–someone eminently more qualified than me. I may not understand the plan, but that doesn’t really matter. The plan is perfect and my role in it is clear. Follow the commandments. Confess my sins. Trust that a higher power has me covered. 

Are you worried about death? Don’t. Your soul is eternal. Do you mourn for loved ones you have lost? You needn’t. All of us will be reunited in God’s kingdom. Is the world rife with cruelty and injustice and pain? That’s okay. God will build a new one where the first shall be last, the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the Earth, and all shall be set to right. 

What a profound comfort. When I struggled to make friends, I knew that God, and my parents loved me. When my grandfather died, I knew that he was in heaven and that I would see him again. 

It is easy to see why Christianity so captured the hearts of the people.

The great project of medieval Christian philosophy was assimilation. Philosophers like Thomas Aquinas looked at the writings of Plato and Aristotle and tried to weave them together with scripture into a single, coherent worldview. 

Stage#2: Figure it Out Yourself

But in the late middle ages, an influx of texts and translations from the Islamic world made their way into book-poor Europe. The sheer volume of ideas was overwhelming. The Greeks, it turned out, had thought of all kinds of things. Not all of it could be resolved with Church doctrine, and  confidence in the authority of the Church began to erode. 

And as a wide-reading teenager who virtually lived in the library, something like that happened to me. Just like Renaissance Europe, being exposed to so many ideas made it hard to buy Catholicism. With so many different religions and philosophies out there, why was this one the right one? Changing my beliefs wasn’t really a choice. I thought it strange to exhort people to “Believe,” There can be miracles, if you believe. as if somehow all believing took was effort. I remember one time a childhood friend putting this to the test by trying to walk on water by believing really hard. Needless to say, it didn’t work. 

I could no more believe that Catholicism was the one true catechism than I could believe that my pencil would float in the air when I dropped it instead of fall. 

I tried one ideology after another, looking for something that felt like the one true way. For many years, I was a fanatical follower of a new age survivalist from New Jersey and was convinced that the proper response to the apocalypse was to learn to start friction fires and eat wild edible plants. In college, I walked into a life-changing yoga class and began reading Sanskrit scriptures. 

Siddhartha and I were not so different in this. After leaving his palace, he sought out the most accomplished gurus, sat at their feet, and earnestly mastered everything they taught. Then, when he still hadn’t found the freedom he sought, he’d go find another. 

For me, all of these ideas felt great for a time, they all had their moments of inspiration and insight, even the New Jersey survivalist. 

But, eventually, something wouldn’t seem right. Then, in my mid-twenties, I entered graduate school for environmental science. 

Stage #3: Reason and Experiment

In high school, they spoon-fed science to me. It was a catechism revealed to mysterious, lab-coated scientists as the scriptures had been revealed to the prophets. I took their pronouncements about black holes, and mitochondria, and electron transport chains the same way I accepted the gospels, or later, the Yoga Sutras. 

But in graduate school, science wasn’t scripture. There were no prophets. Credentials and nobel prizes conferred no authority if you didn’t have evidence. In church, we chanted, “The word of God. Amen.” In the lab, we said, “Okay, show me.” And, “If you’re right, when I poke it, it should do this.” In science we systematically shot down any idea that didn’t fit what we observed until the only ideas that were left were the ones that worked. And work they did–precisely and consistently. I couldn’t help but put a kind of faith in it. 

But all this testing disrupted some of my most cherished beliefs. I remember one moment in particular, standing in the university parking lot one sunny afternoon. One of my friends was talking about getting a reiki treatment or homeopathy or some such thing. And I asked her how she thought energy healing worked scientifically. And I leaned in, because I really wanted to know. Because I had been frantically trying to reconcile science with my ideas about yoga. And she told me, “Well, I just think about them with a separate part of my brain. I think about these things scientifically and these things not.” 

And I realized that I didn’t have separate sections in my brain. Something was real or it wasn’t. And I watched Yoga crumble like sand between my fingers. 

In the 1600s European culture experienced the same thing when the evidence showed, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around. This not only undermined the infallible authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy, but also of the Church which had incorporated geocentrism into doctrine. However much people wanted to think that the Church could not be wrong. It was hard to disbelieve the evidence right before their eyes. 

Science didn’t just move the Earth from the center of the universe, it changed the grounds of truth itself.

For his part, Siddhartha eventually gave up on teachers and ideologies altogether. Siddhartha lived centuries before the birth of modern science, but in some ways his attitudes were prescient of scientific thinking. He valued clear reasoning and relied on his own experimentation. Eventually, he found himself deep in the forest with like-minded colleagues, pushing the boundaries of consciousness, seeing how far they could take it. 

In my life, after I recovered from the vertigo, this all felt like progress, like I had grown up. And I flexed my new science muscles with zeal. If I wanted to know the right way to exercise, I researched kinesiology. If I wanted to learn how to be more productive, I read studies on optimizing pomodoro technique. I went from being someone who describe himself to his friends as “a very spiritual person” to a hardcore materialist. Want to be happy? Check out positive psychology. 

Rationalism and Empiricism 

After some initial growing pains, Europe embraced science with a similar enthusiasm. The world was a machine. All we needed to do is take it apart, figure out how it works. With enough predictive power, we could dismantle the apocalypse altogether. 

Some, like Rene Descartes, took inspiration from physics and set about seeking unshakable, unquestionable philosophical laws. He asked, “What can I know for certain?” and answered, “I know that I exist. I must! Otherwise how could I think at all. “I think therefore I am.” 

Others like John Locke and David Hume looked not for abstract law but for concrete observations, testing hypotheses about cause and effect, and encouraging a robust and tolerant public sphere to encourage the free exchange of ideas. 

But despite the confidence that everything would somehow be figure-out-able, neither reason nor experiment could answer the fundamental question of what to live for. Which was more important–how I felt about my life on my deathbed or how I felt now? Do I have a purpose? And, if so, which one? What’s more important–being good or being happy? There were hard limits to science. 

For his part, Siddhartha eventually gave up on teachers and ideologies altogether. Siddhartha lived centuries before the birth of modern science, but in some ways his attitudes were prescient of scientific thinking. He valued clear reasoning and relied on his own experimentation. Eventually, he found himself deep in the forest with like-minded colleagues, pushing the boundaries of consciousness, seeing how far they could take it. 

But like the Europeans of the Enlightenment, Siddhartha found there was only so far that the methods of his day could take him. One day, nearly starved to death, he realized that his asceticism wasn’t going to free him any more than his life of comfort was. It is said he accepted a bowl of rice from a little girl. His companions, thinking that he had given up his quest, abandoned him. And so, alone, Siddhartha sat under a tree and resolved to follow his own uncharted way to enlightenment.  

Stage #4: Everything Breaks Down (The Disaster)

I don’t remember exactly when I gave up on enlightenment, when I finally admitted to myself that I had no idea what was going on. You’d think that as you get older, you’d gradually feel more and more like you had a handle on things. But the more I learned, the less I seemed to know for sure. 

In the early twentieth century, physics was going through its own strange trials and with it the whole intellectual tradition of the West. Starting with Einstein’s papers on relativity, physics was getting progressively more strange. Whereas Newton’s laws, could be explained to schoolchildren, this new physics was unintelligible to all but a frazzle-haired conclave of theorist. 

The details of their arguments are beyond the scope of this talk. Suffice to say that the evidence could not seem to agree with itself. In some experiments, elementary particles acted like physical objects. In others, they acted as if they were unsubstantial waves. The fights about which perspective was true were heated and bitter. 

In October of 1927, about 30 physicists gathered in Brussels to hash out, once and for all, what all of this meant. It may have been the greatest gathering of scientific genius the world has ever seen. Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Neils Bohr, Marie Curie, Max Plank, Albert Einstein. Eighteen Nobel prizes between them. In it, Heisenberg and Neils Bohr put forth the proposition that there was no way to resolve the paradoxical results, that the only way to explain them was to concede that there was no objective reality and that there was no detached observer. That reality only happens in the act of observing. It was a crazy idea. One that undermined the very principles that science was built on. But the math lined up. Einstein, the idea’s most dogged critic, launched example after example that seemed to violate the growing consensus. But each one was explained. In the end, even Einstein had to concede.  

The world was not a machine. Take it apart all you want. You will never uncover its true workings. 

In his book, When we Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut (Ben Hah Meen Lab uh toot) says it like this. “In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrodinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.” 

But what’s this got to do with us? I mean, really? What does all that mathematically dithering have to do with living a good life? Or with human suffering? But I think the echoes of that meeting echo through to this day. The uncertainty principle that they talked about wasn’t just symbolic. It wasn’t just a philosophic musing. The one human endeavor that had reliably delivered incontrovertible reality could not resolve the very paradox upon which its whole edifice stood. What hope did we have for resolving our other more paradoxes. In some ways this was the true apocalypse. It is poignant that the first thing we did with this new knowledge was to make a bomb that could melt an entire city with the heat of the sun. 

God is Dead (The Dark Night) 

And so, the quest was over. Our hopes of a sensible world crumbled. If there even is an answer out there, if there even is a secret key that would tell us how we might live, or be a parent who doesn’t screw up their kids, or how to make popcorn on the stove without burning half of it … we have no hope of ever finding it. At least not in my lifetime. 

As Carlos Castaneda said in the Teachings of Don Juan, “All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

–William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming” 

After 2,500 years. we are back in the agora of Athens, and Socrates is looking at us. And he asks, “so what you have you found out?” But we are empty-handed. We are doomed to just muddle through. The apocalypse has won. Certainty is impossible. 

We stand on the bridge looking at the dark waters below. 

There is no escape from the apocalypse. There is no hope. 

When Siddhartha finally sat under the Bodhi Tree, determined to finally either find an escape from suffering or die trying, he was accosted by Mara, the master of illusion. 

First Mara sent his three beautiful daughters who tempted Siddhartha with intoxicating pleasure. But despite his desires, Siddhartha continued to meditate. Then Mara set upon him with the terrifying and monstrous hordes of hell. But despite his fear, Siddhartha continued to meditate. Finally, Mara, the master of illusion, beset Siddhartha with doubt. He made it so that Siddhartha couldn’t tell truth from fantasy, wave from particle, until the world made no sense at all. And then, Mara challenge him, “You have no right to that seat, Prince Siddhartha. All is illusion. Even that seat upon which you sit belongs to me. What voice can you find that will speak for you.”

Otherwise (Realization)

And, the legend says that at the moment of enlightenment, Siddhartha reached his two fingers down  and touched the ground and said, “The Earth is my witness.” 

Maybe we don’t need certainty. Maybe we don’t even need hope. 

Risk Delight (Climax)

We could despair. That wouldn’t be unreasonable. 

Radical Acceptance

But hope and despair are not the only choices. Finally defeated, we could accept the meaninglessness of it all. What if we completely embraced it?  What if, in an act of optimistic nihilism, we radically accepted our uncertainty, our pain, and the impending apocalypse. 

Appreciate

We will lose everything. There will be a last time you drive your kid to school. There will be a last time you wash dishes or shovel your driveway.  But instead of despair, we could take Don Juan’s advice, “The thing to do when you are impatient is turn to your left and ask advice from your death.” What better way to vivify the days we have.

When we remember that we were never owed meaning or clarity in the first place, then everything we have is a gift. 

The poet, Jane Kenyon, said it like this. 

I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise. I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach. It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

Explore

So too, the universe might be meaningless. But that does nothing to diminish its strange beauty. And it liberates us to make whatever meaning of it that we can. Let us explore it with the curiosity and wonder it deserves. Let us continue to turn our reason and experiments toward understanding, even if we never do “get it right.” 

One time, I was teaching a high school chemistry class about how electrons don’t orbit atoms; that instead they exist in a cloud of possible locations. And a girl named Katie raised her hand and asked why her previous teachers had lied to her. But the orbiting electron wasn’t a lie. It was a useful idea. You can do a lot of chemistry with orbiting electrons. It’s a worthwhile idea, even if it is wrong. 

Our ideas, whether about electrons or about how to live a good life, are not perfect. They are not the truth. But look how far they have brought us. We’ve stopped smoking. We banned CFCs. We stopped putting lead in the gasoline. Ptolemy’s geocentric universe was not a failure. For 1,000 years it kept time and guided ships to shore.  

Dance

Finally, if we are insignificant, that also means we are free, beholden to no one. No vows of chastity or silence for us! If there are no steps to this dance, we can flail our limbs however we want. We can’t mess up. 

Even if the world is groundless there are things that we can know. Like Waymond Wang in the film, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.” We may be confused and often scared. But we can still know with unshakable certainty and with no need for justification that we’ve got to be kind. 

Or, as Jack Gilbert says: 

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. 

Squirrels (Victory) 

Former NASA roboticist, Randall Munroe, writes the web comic, XKCD. In one, two stick figures are walking side-by-side discussing the human condition. 

One says, “There is no god. Our existence is without purpose.”  

And his companion responds, “Oh, definitely. We are adrift in an uncaring void indifferent to all our mortal toil.” 

“Exactly,” says the first, “In the end, nothing we do matters.”

“Totally.” his companion agrees. 

“We just … why are you climbing that tree?”

“Because the future is an adventure! Come on!”

“But–”

“Hey! I found squirrels!” 

Even in a world where nothing matters, there are squirrels! Even in an indifferent world we can be playful and kind and appreciative. How much more beautiful when that playfulness and kindness and gratitude happens without hope or reason. 

Agora (Resolution) 

In one sense, this whole philosophical rigamarole hasn’t changed my life at all. I still muddle through one day after another. I still worry about my kids. Every action I take to alleviate the woes of the world is a futile attempt to hold back the waves with my hands. I still drive to work while worlds explode around me. 

But in another sense, perspective changes everything. I am so grateful that this is the crooked, imperfect life I get to muddle through. I get to do it with these kids, even when I seem fated to screw them up. I get to do it with a woman who, astoundingly, loves me back the way that I love her. Even if the world is ending, it is so beautiful. How lucky I am to see it before the end. 

In modern English, apocalypse is synonymous with catastrophe. But that is not its original meaning. Apocalypse was a literary genre. The biblical book was part of a literary movement that lasted for centuries. An apocalypse was a mystical, dream-like story in which God revealed profound secrets couched in allegory and symbolism, so that only the initiated would understand them. Like our daily lives, they made no rational sense. 

The Greek words from which apocalypse derived were apo- (ah poh) meaning  ‘from’ or ‘un-’  and  kaluptein (CAH lip teen) ‘to cover’. It turns out that an apocalypse isn’t a disaster at all. It is an uncovering. For one brief lifetime, the world is revealed to us. The central mystery of this is not that the dance will end. The central mystery is that we have legs to dance at all. 

This apocalypse is ours. It’s the best we’re going to get. And there are squirrels! It could have been otherwise.