Was it possible that the acts of a small group or even a single person, some kind of digital supervirus, a Captain Trips for the information age, had given the decaying global order the final swift push over the edge? In trying to answer the question of how we had gotten to this point so fast, I thought over and over about the events of the last few years: the grinding recession that had entered its fourth year; the worldwide decoupling of economies as protectionism spread to most of the globe; the breakdown of US leadership and the alliance system; the economic and political trainwreck brought on the UK by Brexit; new cold wars with Russia and China; mass uprisings in major cities which required violent suppression, the beginnings of race war invited by demagogue politicians ; the ever-worsening worst case of climate change and environmental destruction; the return of diseases once thought eradicated, and new ones for which there was no cure. The challenges had been huge, and growing, but we thought we had a few more decades, or at least a few more years, to fix them. I grew up with the sense that all the big problems had been solved, and that the world was on a constant upward slope of advancement. No one had put it to me quite that way, but it seemed a sensible and attainable goal. 

When the wall came tumbling down and communism collapsed, it had seemed that America was victorious over history, and that now things would just get better and better until… until what, exactly? Maybe technology would usher in a fundamentally new era of human existence, one in which our bodies and minds were enhanced with nearly Godlike abilities, and human lifespans would be extended indefinitely, and work would be unnecessary and we could simply exercise our vastly augmented creative abilities while robots did all the mundane labor, and all of this would be permanent because we would have established final dominion over nature and its limits through the application of our intelligence. And in the 90’s, to a ten-year old, that had seemed entirely reasonable. Sure, the climate had begun to change and the environment to degrade, but technology would find solutions to those problems, just like it had always found solutions. After centuries of suffering, we had solved most of the major problems and were headed up and ever up. Or at least that was the narrative we constructed for ourselves.

The idea of a scientific-technical utopia ushering in a new era of human existence wasn’t new, of course, but the collective memory of humanity is short. The communists had thought that Marxism offered a scientific understanding of history and the ability to channel its forces, but their new society had been an engine for suffering and debasement. Any why should we have expected things to turn out differently? There were no excuses – like Icarus, we had been warned not to fly too close to the sun. Only now, too late, did we catch sight of the feathers on the waves, and curse our inventions. 

In my mind, I tried to restore some order to the tangled web of causality. Everything connected to everything else, uncountably many connections, a maddening complexity. But at the root, the causes were very simple. There were too many of us, and we wanted too much, too fast. We forgot lessons learned at such great cost by those who came before us. We failed to recognize the value of all that we already had. None of this mattered now, I guessed, but then I corrected myself. No, I guessed that maybe it mattered more than ever, that if there was to be any kind of meaningful future, preserving the memory and understanding of these world-shattering events was of the highest importance. The thought came to me: maybe I could do something about that. At least it would give me something to do to occupy my mind. I fell asleep trying, once again in vain, to think of something other than all the ways in which the world was ending.

In the daytime and with sheltered, things seemed much better. For few days, we were almost able to forget that the world had come unglued, and pretend that we were simply on a getaway to the coast. Aaron and Sarah discovered that they had both grown up in Memphis, and in fact lived just a few blocks of each other for about a year. Daniel and I drank whatever we could find in the house and made our best culinary efforts with what was available in the pantry. The ocean provided us with ample shellfish, and we feasted on oysters cooked every way we knew how. By the third day, when we had seen no sign of anyone else around, we made armed raids on a couple of nearby houses, and found some root vegetables, pickles, and a chicken coop. We managed to carve out an idyllic temporary existence, knowing that it soon must end but doing our best to enjoy every moment.