Time is overwhelming (the teaser)
Reflections of a math science prodigy history major climate artist in an overwhelming civilizational moment
Author’s note: This missive was started as thoughts on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration. A lot has happened since, of course. But in keeping with the original intent, I’ve refrained from including commenting on any events since the Trump has taken office. Which is why I’m calling this a “teaser”
On the eve of the 2016 election, I wrote a short missive titled “Election Eve for a Climate Artist,” in which I reflected that although I was wishing for some “cathartic relief,” that was obviously not realistic.
Given the circumstances, the near future looked like “less rest than ever.”
I was noticing that even if Hillary won,
all the divisions between camps, all the struggles to defend critical thinking, all the infuriating frustration of a post-fact reality remain. The mistrust and cynical rejection of the institutions of government remain. The conditions for the demagogue, or the mob, remain.
Which is why I go to sleep remembering there is no rest after tomorrow.
Less rest than ever.
As we’ve experienced, there was no cathartic relief.
Our “post-fact” reality has only become more entrenched and relentless. The lack of critical thinking that leaves us rudderless is not going to get mopped up easily. There is an overt and obvious effort to destroy the institutional capacity of this country, which has obvious and grave implications for civilization’s—if not humanity’s—capacity to confront the challenges we all face together.
It’s overwhelming.
It’s an overwhelming moment.
It’s an overwhelming time to be alive.
There was a time in my memory that people hoped that increasing economic interdependence would prevent another grand global conflagration such as the two major world wars in our elders’ memory. This is seriously in question at the moment. Many who have studied history have noted that the conditions economically, politically and otherwise are an unsettling parallel to the conditions in the 1930s that led to world war. I myself have said that I think World War III has already started, but it’s just that few have noticed. And the chances of a quorum of humanity noticing it are slim, because those who lived through the last one are, well, mostly dead. The oldest survivor of Pearl Harbor recently passed at age 105—only 16 survivors remain. Most people alive today can only barely imagine a great powers conflict, because a fleeting number of humans alive actually lived through the last one.
The same dynamic is fueling the anti-vaccine hysteria. Most people don’t remember the diseases that vaccines have eradicated and so are more afraid of any side effects of the vaccines than the diseases themselves, or they just see them as a big pharma scam, the effect of a tunnel vision view that every problem can be explained by capitalism gone wrong.
These trends were all even less obvious in 2016. At that time we weren’t quite recognizing that Trump and MAGA was a slow walk to fascism, which by 2024 had literally become a political talking point and an unfortunate recognition about our political discourse. Even more surreal, the distorting influence and manipulation of the richest men in the world is like a Hollywood fever dream. It feels like a bad James Bond movie watching Elon Musk buy up and corrupt a previously functional and sometimes useful social media platform, and then waltz into a positions of unprecedentedly overt and immediate influence in the executive branch of our government. It’s downright surreal.
Even more surreal is watching a classic pattern of history unfold—that of an authoritarian exploiting global societal stresses to grab power.
The effects of climate change are not just in the weather.
Donald Meyer pointed this out prophetically and insightfully in his 2016 essay “Donald Trump is the first Demagogue of the Anthropocene.”
A large body of scholarship suggests that climate change could exert grave effects on international politics this century. Planet-wide warming will dry out regions of the world already riven with ethnic and political strife, all the while impoverishing and destabilizing the Western powers that backstop global order. A recent study even argues that climate-triggered environmental shocks will exacerbate the very divisions that authoritarians have historically sought to exploit.
While many of us are baffled watching a zombie walk towards fascism accelerate into high speed zombies flying over the wall, to me it is an example of the relentless pressures of climate change. It is like a tsunami which you can’t just push back against. It is overwhelming.
From North Carolina to Los Angeles, more and more people are experiencing the overwhelming physical effects of climate change in the form of devastating natural disaster events, whose increasing frequency and intensity we are largely unprepared for.
In North Carolina last year, hurricane rains didn’t just flood communities, but literally scoured many of them away, roads and all. (Ironically, scientists had modeled this sort of event as a possible scenario in those very mountains, though that wasn’t enough to prepare for it.)
The most recent overwhelming tragedy is the complex of firestorms in Los Angeles. California in general, and Los Angeles specifically, is no stranger to catastrophic wildfires. We have a fire “season” after all. The most deadly and destructive fire in California history remains the Camp fire in 2018 which killed an astounding 86 people, mostly those trapped in Paradise with no escape route. A year before that, the Tubbs fire devastated much of Sonoma and Napa. To get to the next most destructive fire, though, one has to go back to 1991, to the East Bay fire storm, which clear cut an impressive swath of the Berkeley and Oakland hills in the course of a day. I remember the day, vividly.
The current fires in Los Angeles are still unprecedented, however. Unlike all the other fires on California’s list of most destructive fires, these fires are happening after the fire season, in January, not only when it is less expected, but when most seasonal fire firefighters had already been released for the year. It may well be the most expensive fire in the history of the United States. Looking just at dense urban areas burned, the Palisades and Eaton fires are about equivalent to the great Chicago fire of 1871 or the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake fire that burned down the whole city, which at the time only occupied 2,830 acres. (Modern day San Francisco is about 30,000 acres.) So the Los Angeles fires urban damage is equivalent to burning about 1/10 of San Francisco, (though the total area burned would be equivalent to burning 3/4 of the present day San Francisco, and the Eaton fire is equivalent to burning half.) 1
It’s also appropriate that the fires have been compared to war zones. Because most of the other fires that have erased whole cities have occurred during wartime. The list is long, but starts at least with Toyko, Dresden, and there is a long list I haven’t compiled, nor have all been recorded.
It’s hard enough when historic treasures burn—there is a long history of grand buildings being lost to fire as far back as the Library of Alexandria—but loosing whole communities is even more difficult. It’s also true that it is numbing and surreal to loose familiar landscapes, particularly when it strips multiple generations of familiarity with a place in the flash of a moment, whether it is Los Angeles, North Carolina, Maui, Paradise or Santa Rosa. It’s overwhelming, especially if it was your place.
In the middle of it all, the infuriating post-fact reality mentioned above and the uninformed takes from the incoming administration further complicate matters. Trump and other Republicans in the stupidest way assert the fires could have been stopped but for a lack of water allocation from Northern California to Los Angeles, or that they are the fault of “woke” policies, which is absurd. They have the audacity to float conditioning relief aid on policy changes that have nothing to do with the causes and circumstances of the fires.
The fact of the matter is that no municipal water systems are designed to deal with catastrophes of the scale of these fires. They simply aren’t designed for such events. Nor would it be feasible to do so. Not to mention there is only so much you can do to fight a fire whipped up by 100 mile an hour winds. That is not much consolation, however, if one has just lost the multi-generational family home one grew up in, shared extended family gatherings in, or the whole city that represents one’s childhood memories. It’s truly disorienting. It’s overwhelming.
To be fair, it’s not just the post-reality right that is saying infuriating things in the moment. Many a pithy social media post seeks to exploit the moment to chastise us for not taking climate change more seriously. Some of these indulge in a “serves us right” kind of tone. This sort of “I told you so” subtext is unhelpful, yet we’ve trained a whole generation on this attitude. Yes, it is important to recognize the way climate change is central to the potential for and the increasing scale of these disasters, but it is also naive to think that even best case mitigation efforts could have prevented such disasters. The fact of the matter is that civilization is a complex emergent system, and so even armed with the best theory of what to do, in practice the odds that the best case will unfold are always slim. And we clearly don’t have a best case scenario, just look at Trump’s reelection.
Civilization is not prepared for climate change, in the same way that municipal water systems aren’t designed or prepared for events like the Palisades fire. While many whine and complain that our politicians aren’t doing enough, in fact the governments of the world don’t currently have the capacity to work together towards mutual benefit at this kind of planetary scale. We’ve really never had to do so. The international COP meetings have been a disappointing failure, but not an unexpected one.
Similarly, the climate activist movement itself has also failed to prepare us, largely by focusing almost exclusively in the mainstream conversation on efforts to reduce emissions, and especially by individual action and consumer choice. Such a strategy has come at the expense of preparing and bracing us for what is predictably coming. For fear of giving people an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels, climate activists have been reluctant to have conversations about adaptation.
Worse, the conviction that “action” is most important, coupled with a belief that people require “hope” to have have agency, has lead to a reluctance to discuss how bad the situation will get. This, in turn, has lead to a lack of recognition that, in practice, climate change mitigation strategies were never likely to succeed as well as hoped, but also were never going to be enough to avoid the serious impacts in the first place. The result is that we have NOT been preparing for the predictably large calamities coming our way, physically, emotionally, or even conceptually.
For me, it’s like being on the Titanic with one team discouraging people from getting into life boats, because that would sap the hopefulness of those bailing with teacups, pots and pans, while the other team is marching around pulling out the rivets of the ship because rivets were designed by scientists.
One thing is clear, no matter how much we may think people can’t handle being overwhelmed, not facing how overwhelming things are likely to become robs us all of the opportunity to build the capacity to be better prepared when the inevitable arrives—whether it is climate change, Trumpism, a post-fact reality, or catastrophic wildfires.
This is why I’ve spent years upset that most presentations about climate change are pressured to end with “solutions.” The belief that people can’t handle knowing about a problem without being soothed by a solution, robs us of the opportunity to practice being comfortable with uncertainty, to take in the scale and magnitude of all, or to think outside the box about what “action” looks like. The zen master doesn’t give you a koan to contemplate, and then an answer sheet before you have had a chance to walk out of the zendo, but we do this all time with conversations about climate change.
I can’t tell you how many times people have tried to lecture me that I can’t talk about climate change the way I do, because “if you overwhelm people, they will just shut down, and we need people to have hope to take action.”
“We have to have hope” doesn’t help if what you are hoping for doesn’t arrive. Even if you’ve lowered the expectation bar to achieve that hope, nature hasn’t. When faced with the consequences of reality, one quickly realizes efforts to “be hopeful” is mostly a distraction from facing the overwhelm.
Now, it may be true that when people get overwhelmed with information or the implications of it all, they tune out or shut down. If that’s the current reality, then that implies there is new human quality we must desperately seek to develop. How can we be comfortable being overwhelmed and effective at the same time? How do we prevent the emotional drain of the latest outrage, and instead see it clearly as something that is just a distraction?
This is the challenge of the moment. The future is likely to continue to be overwhelmingly exhausting. The immediate future, for sure. Investing in the capacity to stay balanced, present and curious in this cosmic moment is worth developing both personally and collectively.
How we build that capacity is not entirely clear—which is the point. That’s one reason it’s been hard for us to collectively develop. For individuals, as the cliche goes, it likely will be different for everyone. My first impulse is to suggest not rushing to demand an answer to “how” too quickly. Take the opportunity to practice sitting in the uncertainty, and being ok with not knowing yet “what” to do. Where we are now is the unfolding of many trends over time, and over intersecting lifetimes. Some short. Some long. Some cosmic.
I’ve found cultivating this quality of being ok being overwhelmed is mostly about reframing things. For example, reframing the purpose of meditation from an effort to calm the world down, to instead cultivating enough experience of stillness to be able to stay centered in the chaotic moments. One can also put oneself into more chaotic situations intentionally, to build capacity to endure them, which is why going to Burning Man is not just hedonistic fucking off, but can also be an important collective muscle building for the anticipated future unfolding. For Trump’s reelection the challenge is to stay focused and manage the consequences without getting thrown off by the cruel intent and the flaunting of asshole politics.
One of my personal favorites is to cultivate the paradox of situating oneself in a long term view of history and time, while staying fiercely present in the moment. With climate change, for example, how does one hold the feeling of being part of a story millions of years in the making while being present with one’s daughter while playing in the park. For our current political moment, it is possible to see the intersection of climate change history, and also a continuation of stories we may have thought were over, like World War II, while also rolling up our sleeves up to deal with the latest executive order.
Lots of people have enough of a sense of history to see what is afoot, facing a cycle their ancestors did.
Which bring us back to why Time is Overwhelming…
In some senses, some things really do never really change. For example, politics are often polarized. In other ways, the world is even more overwhelming. World population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Civilization as a whole has scaled dramatically. Global carbon emissions during my lifetime account for roughly 90% of the cumulative emissions driving our accelerating climate change. And now we are getting first hand experience on how a demagogue, who it is hard to take seriously, can overwhelm even the most powerful nation on the planet. This is not to mention what it is like to live in a society that seems to live in a bifurcated reality.
A classmate of mine recently posted a reminder, that those of us coming on 60, are now double the time we were alive since WWII. Those of us coming on 60, were mostly born just 20 years after the last great powers war. We graduated college about 40 years after WWII, and we are now about another 40 years out, watching another wave come in. 2
It’s overwhelming, and yet is also living history. So staying present, balanced and engaged remains important. We’ve all been part of the story for our lifetimes.
We are all on an organic marble, wobbling and processing through time, in a vast void of space. Our marble in the last millions of years wobbles on a geological cycle that has induced ice ages. We alive today are living in an interglacial cycle, in which civilization has taken hold enough to disrupt not only the globe’s geological cycle’s geo-physicality, but also perhaps even its wobble.
It’s overwhelming, just fucking overwhelming.
It’s an exciting time to be alive.
https://apnews.com/article/california-los-angeles-wildfires-eaton-palisides-urban-area-a162c86589b9102a85c510246539ab72
In my first year of college at Yale, though math and science was my analytical gift, just by asking around what were classes not to miss, I got steered toward towards history when I took the very popular “US Foreign Policy from 1945 to the present,” taught by the legendary Gaddis Smith. That is, US foreign policy after the last great world war. A story I love telling and reflecting upon was how at the end of the semester, the professor noted that our feedback surveys reported it felt like there was too much material to cover in a semester. “I started teaching this class in the mid 1960’s,” he said, “and in the 20 years I’ve been teaching it, I realize the content has literally doubled.” It was bit of an insight into how history unfolds in one’s lifetime. This was 1984. So, all the extra material that had accumulated represented the lifetimes of most of us in the class, as we had all been born around when he started teaching. Though WWII felt like the distant past, we were only born 20 years after it ended. I became a history major, and wrote my senior essay not about the post-war period, but about debates in congress over the revolutionary Augustus Sandino in Nicaragua during the early 1930s. The extreme polarization, vitriolic debate, and differing opinions about the same facts not only resembled what we see today, but, truth be told, wasn’t much different than the political discourse when I was writing in the late 1980s, in the Reagan-Bush era, complete with the Iran/Contra scandal related to fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the namesakes of the same Augustus Sandino I’d written about in college.