The End of Things

A few months ago, in some off-the-cuff remarks to some friends, I said I felt like my time on Earth was going to be summarized by “witnessing the end of things”.

I don’t think anyone understood what I was saying. I’m not sure I even understood at the time.

Once or twice a year, I come on-site for my employer. It’s nice to catch up with co-workers for a bit, and this time I think I may have found a couple new opportunities for collaboration that I probably wouldn’t have gotten without just being physically present. So it’s a worthwhile thing to do once or twice a year.

The Holiday Inn told me this time that breakfast was included. That’s new: usually, breakfast is included at Holiday Inn Express, but the Holiday Inn, being more “upscale”, has previously charged extra for it.¹ When I went in to the breakfast, there was no staff around, and the typical Holiday Inn Express breakfast offerings: bread, muffins, a waffle machine, scrambled eggs, sausage, biscuits, and potatoes. After standing around for a few minutes, waiting for staff to come back, I gave up, grabbed a plate, and treated it like the Holiday Inn Express breakfast buffet. At some point, a woman came by and asked for my room number, and that was the last time I saw her: she looked like she had a dozen other things to do.

When I was done with breakfast, I cleaned my own table, put the coffee and water glasses back in place, and brought my plate and fork into the back room to put with the dirty dishes. That poor woman looked like she could use all the help I could give her.

In 1992, when I graduated high school, the average retirement age for men was 62.^[2] In 2023, France raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. This month, Denmark raised the retimeremnt age to 70.

The investment advice I’ve gotten my whole life has been to put as much as possible into a retirement account, with an aggressive portfolio that becomes more conservative as I approach retirement age. But I always figured events would conspire to ensure that retirement was a concept that wouldn’t apply to me. Either my retirement fund would bottom out due to hyperinflation, there would be a government raid of my accounts, or I would just be forbidden to stop working.

At my high school, the high school Junior class always paid for the Senior prom. If we divide generation sizes by 100 million, this year’s Junior class (Generation X) has 650 people in it, the Senior class (Baby Boomers) has 730 people in it, and last year’s Seniors (Silent Generation) had 230 people. The Junior class this year is struggling to put on a nice prom for the Seniors, so for the first time, we asked last year’s Seniors to chip in to help. We’re going to have prom, and it will be pretty good, but it’s not going to be like last year’s prom, and the Seniors are probably going to complain.

Looking ahead, the Sophomore class (740 people) is gigantic, but they’re also broke. It was hard enough to get last year’s Seniors to fund a prom they don’t get to go to, but they did it, because they’re used to sacrifice. With everything in rough shape right now, it’s not looking like this year’s Seniors are going to be as open to helping put on next year’s prom.

At one point in time, it seemed like a good idea to grow lettuce in Arizona. By diverting the Colorado river, we were able to sufficiently irrigate, and add a growing season, making the land more productive.

There are currently seven states fighting over the Colorado River, because it turned out that while we could grow lettuce in the desert, we didn’t have enough water to grow entire cities. I don’t claim to know how this ends, but having grown up near a big abandoned city in the desert, I feel a little spooked.

Today, a fourth peer reached out to me for advice about switching jobs. My advice at this point is: don’t. This is not the ecological explosion where it’s easy to find interesting work that pays well. This is the part where people start to realize they have to fight just to hang on to a job they hate. It’s not going to feel fulfilling, you’re not going to make a positive impact on humanity. Your goal in the coming years is to continue having bread on the table, a roof over your head, and the ability to get medical care in some fashion.

Everybody has a list of reasons why they’re not feeling it at their current job. I have the same list. If I hadn’t already been through half a dozen career changes, I’d think this was a sign that I needed another change. But this feels like something new to me, a situation where everyone is anxious, not just everyone at my company or everyone in my field.

I can point at individual anxiety-inducing situations, like the ones above. But the only root cause I can spot is climate change. It’s almost as if, as a species, we’re self-culling to prepare for it. We wouldn’t be the only species that reduces its population as a result of environmental stresses, but we might be the only one to think we’re too intelligent to react this way.