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.

What follows are some disjointed thoughts I’ve had around the theme of “things ending”.

In 1992, when I graduated high school, the average retirement age for men was 62.¹ In 2023, France raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. This month, Denmark raised the retirement 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 one million, this year’s Junior class (Generation X) has 55 people in it, the Senior class (Baby Boomers) has 76 people in it, and last year’s Seniors (Silent Generation) had 47 people ². 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 (75 people) is gigantic ², 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.

The rate of human population growth is declining right now. I can name a few times when global population went down (the plague, world wars), but those are all one-time blips in an overall growth. What we’re seeing now is an unprecedented change in the trajectory of human population growth: it has no clear traumatic cause like previous declines.

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.

I am optimistic about the future, though! I think we are an intelligent and adaptable species, and the desire among a subset of us to somehow fix all these problems points to a latent capacity to simultaneously accept the future as it’s unfolding, adapt to changing conditions, dream of a better world, and work to achieve that. While I’m not optimistic that I’ll see anything other than decline in my lifetime, I am highly optimistic that I’ll see the seeds planted for a real, sustainable improvement in the human condition, taking into account many of the complexities that we’ve been able to ignore in the past.

I feel like we’re right on the cusp of finally figuring out difficult problems like how many people we can put in one place, so that there is enough water to keep that city for hundreds of years; or an agreement about when is the right time for a person to die, and under what conditions. These are not easy questions, and finding the answers will not be easy, but I’m optimistic that we are up to the challenge, and we will prevail.