Prayers for the Guillotine

I eat and think “enjoy it well, do savour the bliss”
I drink and I think that I may not always have this.
I’ll miss, when oceans fully rise from the ice melting,
The halcyon years we denied the climate dying.

I frequently experience a prescient nostalgia wherein I find myself longing for simple pleasures that I presently have. I do so, anticipating how they may become luxuries instead of commonplace. I steel myself for scarcity. It’s not that I’m borrowing trouble, I’m just practicing my sorrow.

*~~**~~*

During the French Revolution, people used to fight to be first in line to be beheaded. This is because the guillotine would become duller with use. By the time the unfortunate ones at the end of the line got their turn to die, it would often take several agonizing tries before they could successfully shuffle off their mortal coil.

One could choose to see the planet’s rising tides as Mother Nature having an insurgent fit and removing from rule the race of people responsible for making her so decrepit. Envisioning this, I often find myself wondering where I am in the lineup to extinction.

When will nature’s blade lose its edge? With luck, I might perish before the worst happens. I might be part of the last generation able to pretend there’s still time to heal the climate. Without luck, I won’t see the gallows before the planet does. I’ll instead be part of the first generation that will cease talking of climate reparation and will focus on finding ways to outlast Armageddon.

None escape suffering nor the last kiss that is death
Mortal, we learn to accept expiring with each breath
There’s grief to get over loss, in this way, life equips
For our common woes – but not for the Apocalypse.

As a spiritual abstract, I understand death to be the existential agony of something unknowable. As a physical reality, it is a deeply intimate bleakness. As a mental exercise, it is the relieving promise that all things end – the wonders of life and the helplessness of strife alike. Thus, my trinity of dying is composed of ineffable tragedy, inevitable bereavement, and intricate mercy.

That said, mortality is something no one truly understands. Still, we are necessarily outfitted to cope with its prevalence. We grieve… unless the scope of the loss is one that just confounds.

It’s said that ten deaths are a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths are a statistic. The human mind is ill-suited for conceptualizing the sheer scale of large numbers. This is a researched phenomenon called Dunbar’s number or, more informally, the monkeysphere.

We have the wherewithal to care genuinely and actively for the limited amount of people in the first few rings of our circles of acquaintances – estimated at roughly 150. Past a few degrees of connection however, folk become faceless masses, one-dimensional, more of a concept than individuals.

In the context of the moribund, this means that if half of a continent floods, the world will hold a minute of silence, declare a day of remembrance… then continue spinning on, unimpeded.

When nations are the unit of devastation’s scale
When the efforts to relocate refugees all fail
In that zeroth hour, states will allow decimation
And people will be lined up for extermination.

When a large number of people urgently require a limited quantity of resources, we use triage to determine whose needs will be met first, last and not at all. I can only imagine the logistical nightmare of needing to give care to more refugees than anyone can afford to shelter from natural disasters.

The word decimation historically refers to a practice in Ancient Rome of killing one in every tenth person of a group as punishment. When our resources will have been decimated, will we do the same to our people?

I imagine the outrage and despair when international aid starts being denied to some because there are red alerts blaring everywhere, catastrophes all over the globe and simply not enough of anything to go around.

I wonder what humanity’s prioritization process will look like as time goes on and the surface of safe land shrinks while the swathe of sea increases. When the news announces not a number of lives injured, lost, missing, and roaming due to cataclysm but instead the names of nations.

They’ll summarize the pain of millions at a time, saying simply: “Malaysia has drowned. Haiti is down to rubble. Meanwhile, Australia is still on fire.”

I predict that we’ll hold strange lotteries come doomsday
Folk will illegally trade rations for stubs to play
The Russian Roulette wherein being culled is the prize
For crowds of volunteers who’d hasten their own demise.

Speaking to others of my generation, I hear a rising resignation at the idea that we will have calamity-stricken dotages. I hear malcontent mumblings that perishing sooner rather than later is the better part of common sense, if not valour. I, myself, am strongly in favour of the institution of medical assistance in dying.

If we’re heading towards an inescapable dead-end, it makes sense to volunteer to be amongst the first to crash so that at least we needn’t trouble ourselves to bury all of the bodies.

In this way, we’re not so different from generations past – we too would pass the baton of problem-solving onto others. But while our current elders let their children fret, we would leave the chore of being the remnants of the human race to those who would rather face the ecological eschaton than eternal rest.

At the zenith of ecological collapse, there will inevitably be recession and, I confess, I have no desire whatsoever to live through Mark II of the Great Depression. On my darkest days, I muse on how people would undeniably misuse the system of rationing should one be implemented.

I think of what is valuable enough to convince someone to trade their portion of food or clean water in the midst of climatic disaster. Peace, most likely. Safety. Security. The promise of an end to misery. Long-term stability. Things no one will be able to guarantee and actually deliver except, perhaps, the Grim Reaper.

The gig economy will soon be gone, in its place
We’ll have the grave economy, wherein the rat race
Won’t have money but euthanasia as goalpost
And beauty will be having the youngest-looking ghost.

I live in what psychologists call a W.E.I.R.D country – one that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. In my corner of Canada, there is a gig economy. Earnings often come from freelance jobs and temporary contracts. It makes for flexible schedules, but also for fiscally unstable individuals.

For now, gigs survive because – while money motivates – so does having the free time to enjoy the quality of life banknotes buy. Yet, I’m counting the days before we start purchasing quality of death.

Inevitably, the climate crisis will culminate and cause the quality of day-to-day existence on this planet to plummet even for the W.E.I.R.D. Come then, I fully expect that we’ll labour to end our pain rather than to have the power to purchase pleasure.

I foresee the day when status won’t be the size of a paycheque. The priority will shift to working for someone who offers the possibility to quickly see a physician. Companies will keep MDs on call so they can prescribe palliative antidepressants to staff. Meanwhile, employees will save up meds rather than money just in case they’re denied a professionally applied gentle ending.

Depression will touch us ever younger till death seems a reward for emerging from the womb. I anticipate a whole new market will materialize for those seeking kinder dooms.

When costs of surviving become so prohibitive
The populace would rather perish than toil to live
The rich will buy suicide, the poor will work until
They can afford the luxury of a mercy kill.

Across the world, the costs of living are rising at an alarming rate while salaries tend to be stuck at meagre amounts. It’s already debatable if workers will be able to afford things that used to be taken for granted like owning a home, raising a family, or retiring. So, when ecological devastation inevitably drives everything’s prices into the stratosphere, why will we labour?

Of course, the coercive menace of a slow and painful death by homelessness or starvation will still exist. That is the stick; I speak of the carrot. Classically, there should be such a reward dangled just out of reach to encourage a donkey to plod forth, as well as the stick with which to beat the ass who still won’t run.

What will be the tantalizing prize for our taking on the Sisyphean task of keeping the economy afloat? By the time this is a common question, I believe people will live in states of desperation. Even those who don’t believe in paradise will be holding out just for the luxury of returning to blissful nonexistence.

Perhaps then our governments will borrow a page from olden times. They’ll call us climate champions, promise posthumous commemoration and gratification in the afterlife. There will even be state-sponsored means to get there in an expediently painless way… For those deemed to have earned it, the ones who can pay.