Claustrophobia of a Species

The Way Forward Is Up

Having an existential crisis is a bit of a luxury. The conditions that lead to one are not always luxurious, however. What’s worse, having one can be a self-reinforcing process that leads to an abundance of navel-gazing and little action. That’s why I’ve been stuck on this post for a while, and why I haven’t published for a while, for which I apologize to my readers. There’s a reason I’m going to give you some backstory, which will start right now.

Here’s what happened: Towards the end of January, I suffered a pulmonary embolism in both lungs. The doctors didn’t tell me at the time, but the right ventricle of my heart was close to failure. I spent time in the hospital, got treatment, and am ok now. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t throw me for a loop.

For one thing, it came unexpectedly. What I thought was a bad cramp in my calf lasted just a few days before I felt something dislodge and move up my back like a worm while I was walking upstairs. That something turned out to be a blood clot. My vision darkened in the periphery, I couldn’t breathe, and my heart rate shot through the roof. Luckily, I remained conscious and got to the hospital posthaste since I had an idea what had occurred. Had my son not been there, I may have just laid down for a nap and not woken up.

If you’re curious, a blood clot dislodging and moving is a very strange feeling. In many ways, it’s the polar opposite of an orgasm: Things are moving in your body but entirely in the wrong way, it’s panic-inducing and claustrophobic, extremely uncomfortable, and can take life rather than create it. That’s an elegant metaphor if I do say so myself.

The cause of the blood clot remains unknown. I know where some readers’ minds just went: No, I didn’t get the COVID jab. Rather, my hunch leans to another near-death experience. I got hit by a truck and nearly flattened last May while on my motorbike and am lucky to be alive. I was largely immobile for at least a month and suffered damage to…well, everywhere. So, the clot could have formed as a result of broad-spectrum blunt force trauma from hitting pavement at high speeds. If I were a cat, that’d be two of my nine lives this last year alone.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to thank those who went out of their way to help me. So, thank you, truly. You bought me some vital time.

From Personal to Planetary

Near-death experiences bring life into sharp focus — the bullshit is shunted to the periphery while the most important parts become impossible to ignore.

For me, two impossible-to-ignore questions bubbled to the surface:

1. What am I for?

2. What are we for?

In other words, where can I find meaning in the world?

These could sound like basic-bitch campfire stoner questions. But they’re really not: These are the core fundamental questions each person and each society has had to grapple with since time immemorial. What I, personally, am for, is for me to know. But what we are for is a question that our increasingly globalized society is failing to address on any non-superficial level, and I think it’s eating away at us.

When I ask, “What are we for?” the word “we” can carry a lot of meanings. It can mean, for example:

• Our families and extended families

• Our towns

• Our nations

• Humans as a species

• Living beings in general

Historically, answers scaled up seamlessly from family to species. Every religion and every society in history has provided an answer for all of those categories, most often unequivocally.

Mind you, meaning doesn’t have to be complicated to be fulfilling. Some prehistoric society could have satisfied their people by arguing that all life existed for the amusement of a turtle god. In more modern terms, the Spanish Carlists’ “God, Country, King” is simple enough to get people where they need to go.

His methods were obviously insane, but Ted Kaczynski was dead right when he argued that, for most of humanity’s lifetime, survival itself was meaningful. However, he further argued, when survival is guaranteed, people will seek out a simulacrum of meaning to replace the struggle that defined our species’ survival since time immemorial.

But when you search for meaning in the current post-war liberal urban monoculture — when you ask what we’re for — you’ll find a combination of confusion and silence.

That freaks people out, and it should. Because it’s not accidental — it’s what happens when a culture stops offering any unequivocal answer to “what are we for?” Bread and circuses only go so far.

To illustrate this point, let’s conduct a thought experiment. Pick a country. You can ask, “What is the purpose of ______?”

I’ll take my own country as an example here. What is the purpose of the United States of America?

In the past, these answers were readily available: To provide opportunity, to provide for religious freedom, to grow wealthy by one’s own merit, without the oppressive governance and religious wars of Europe. It was a frontier society that was optimistic — a way to escape the claustrophobia of a crowded Europe.

But what purpose does the United States serve in a full world? Is its task, as Woodrow Wilson argued, to make the world “safe for democracy?” Does the nation exist to enforce intangible ideals? Does it exist just so some people can get really rich?

The intangible concepts ring hollow when you examine the country’s history. We overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh in Iran. We prevented the 1962 election in Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh would have won. I could go on, but readers will get the point: At best, the country applies its high-minded concepts selectively. This rings hollow as hypocrisy — democracy, but only when we like it.

That hollowness is deafening, ringing like a bell, and we all feel it whether we know it or not.

I’d invite readers to ask the similar question of their own country: What is it for?

Failures of Meaning

The most popular answer to the question of “What am I for?” is simply to get really rich. Billionaires are lionized, wealth is tracked like a scoreboard, and the idolatry of money seems to be a core value for many.

But we’re far from the first people to worship money. Consider Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome in the 1st century BC. His wealth, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars today, came from ruthless real estate plays, political connections, and slave-run silver mines. He could buy armies, influence politics, and bankroll Julius Caesar.

But Crassus is no one’s favorite Roman. He died in ignominy in an incredibly stupid invasion of Parthia (Persia). As the story goes, he died having molten gold poured down his throat to mock his wealth following his capture after defeat at the disastrous Battle of Carrhae (53 BC). Yes, it is relevant to write now that fighting Persia was stupid then, and it is now, too.

Comfort and safety fare no better as core purposes. They’re pleasant accompaniments to life, but when they become the central goal, societies lose the edge that survival once demanded. I’m looking at you, Europe.

Every empire that has made its material well-being and personal safety its core ethos has failed, most often to rougher, hungrier people with ambition and drive. That is, to people who have a clearer sense of their own purpose. In the very first post on this publication, I called the growth, stalling, and contraction of empires the Hobbesian Dilemma. The purpose of an empire is to expand, and when it loses that impetus, it begins to rot.

Money, comfort, and safety aren’t paths to meaning. They’re comfortable distractions from the inevitable void we all face. That void shouts at all of us: “What are you for?” Those who have an acceptable answer thrive, while those without one wither.

And the clearest sign the fire has gone out in a society? When it stops having children.

What Are We For?

Fertility rates have crashed worldwide, to records never seen before. It’s not just in wealthy countries — it’s everywhere. Developed countries average 1.4-1.5 children per woman, way below replacement rates. Economics are part of the birthrate crash, yes. But far more importantly than that, I believe a pervasive nihilism is the main driver of crashing birthrates worldwide. We face a spiritual vacuum unlike any other seen. Ironically, it’s because we understand more than we ever have.

This is because we lack a positive, forward-looking answer for what our purpose is. Our current political systems don’t answer it. Our religions fail to take into account the massive strides we’ve made in understanding our place in the cosmos and how things work. Consider: We didn’t even know there was more than one galaxy until the 1920s. Religions forged in earlier eras struggle to incorporate this vastness, or just how much weirder physics works than anything we thought we understood before, to the point where it all just seems absurd.

But that very absurdity is what we alone can confront and turn into meaning. It may be daunting to consider our place in such vastness and complexity, but we alone can do it. It’s what makes us human, after all.

The real question is this: What makes humans different from other species? Lichen and bacteria and rabbits are excellent at surviving and reproducing, but they’ve never written a symphony, built a telescope, intentionally sailed across an ocean, or asked themselves what they’re for.

Every branch of our family tree traces back to ancestors who refused contentment — who looked beyond the horizon and moved. If they had settled for the status quo, we’d still simply be a curious species of apes, never straying far from our species’ cradle.

Indeed, I think the main driver of our current nihilism is this: There is no more Earth to colonize. Nowhere worthwhile on land, at least. We as a species are starting to feel claustrophobic, and we never have before in recorded history.

We’ve colonized every corner of this planet because discontent and relentless curiosity drove us outward. Now, this same drive turns us inward and curdles into nihilism. But the frontier isn’t gone — it’s above us, where it’s always been. Just like always, that same discontent and curiosity that makes us human will drive us there, too. It must, or we’re not human.

A society that aims for the stars would invigorate exploration, internal drive, and the Faustian spirit that Oswald Spengler described: constantly striving, never relenting.

You may, at this point, ask, “How is this relevant to us now if future generations will be the ones to actually get to the stars?” Simple: Make those new generations. For the overwhelming majority of people, having children will be their most meaningful contribution to a species-wide project, and not a minor one, either.

Make no mistake: The process of us aiming for the stars will be a mess. Earth will never be perfect. Humans will never be perfect. New beliefs will come and go. But the stars represent the endless expansion our species has always sought — this time, with actual boundless limits. Above all, it puts front and center the fight to survive we’re built for.

And hey, even if we fail catastrophically and die trying: At least it’s better than merely being the boot-loader program for machine intelligence.