A credo for tough times ahead.

Over the last forty years, after attaining the finest Classical education America had to offer, and many years given over entirely to reading and travels and journals, free from work or other worldly distractions, I’m now comfortably retired and pondering what the next few decades might bring to humankind before I’m gone. I see a whole spectrum of possibilities, from extinction to new levels of empowerment beyond our wildest dreams. They beguile my mind.

For all I’ve been given I think I owe something in return. So I write essays about our world. Most of all I wonder how such huge questions and insecurities affect my son and our younger generations.

I know it must bother him, either subconsciously of with daily concerns, because it disturbs me also, though to a lesser degree because a large part of my life is already lived, and I have far less to lose.

I’m happy and just sticking around as a curious observer to see what fate befalls us and to help him in whatever comes. I write this now to try to help others with some crumbs of advice and maybe a stray point that may prove useful to someone for whatever comes.

I’ve read a great deal of history and, like a chemist, distilled that mass of information down to a few essential ingredients, of what makes a life worthwhile, full existence, not in other peoples opinions but in one’s own.

It’s the consciousness of a life well-lived, given your circumstances. It has nothing to do with money or fame. Those are in other peoples eyes. It comes out on your death-bed, the truth, if you have the time to review yourself.

Joseph Addison’s last words were: “See with what peace a Christian can die”. He had a clean conscience. But let’s forget religions. It has to do with one’s self-esteem, which is built upon deeds well done, accomplishments, acts of kindness to others that were generous and uncalled for, the doorway to the ‘human club’, making you a good standing member of it.

Loners die alone and that can’t be pleasant. People who’ve hurt others or cheated them die with regrets and sins, not happy. I don’t want to preach but everyone knows good and evil.

We are living in critical times. Jim Morrison would call them “Strange Days”. For anyone who follows the news and thinks about it, the human race and planet Earth are facing some serious hurdles right now, with many more to come in the near future.

My advice to each of you who may not enjoy a long life is to enjoy a good one, rich by enjoying each day to the fullest you can, with time and talk with friends, social occasions, fun with children. I’d forget concerns over thirty year mortgages and long pension plans, or working double shifts to make it happen. It’s not going to. This society is not going to last that long.

The world is changing too rapidly, too radically. I’m not predicting Armageddon, a few ragged survivors scraping by, all dignity and civilization lost, our planet a grey wasteland, the air unbreathable, a victim to our climate follies.

Some suggest that our technological advances in A.I. may displace and remove us as useless impediments to its own advance, we being mere stepping stones to that progress and soon no more than an uncomfortable rock underfoot, as it climbs to the mountain top.

But something has got to give, to fail, from the evidences in our daily news, with the ever increasing depletion of all our natural resources and the concomitant migrations, wars, religious fanaticism, the rising brutality and chaos, disregard for life and dignity, wealth inequality, the splits in governments and the ever more blatant lies of politicians, eroding civilized society.

Science may save us, reverse global warming, stop pandemics, reverse A.I. with breakthroughs to better us, body and soul, destroy the ubiquitous internet, our phones recording us and WI-Fi controlling every device in our homes, all connected to supercomputer arrays. One script or virus might reverse all that and restore our privacy and dignity.

No one knows. I ply all my wits trying to imagine a better possible outcome, where Homo Sapiens continue on, probably much changed, but still human in mind, cognizant of the past and true to it, thankful to our ancestors for all their sufferings and pains that gave us birth. Remembrance of our for-bearers is the core of what we are. Without that we are nothing, leaves in the wind.

Our timeline and collective experience puts the best computers with their trillion, nanosecond blips to shame. And ‘love’ and ‘honor’, ‘forgiveness’ and 'pity' are concepts they’ll never understand. That puts them, supercomputers, about twenty levels below us. They’ve had a thirty year history and we’ve had a million year tradition. And time matters in defining what has value and what’s fleeting. It adds depth to consciousness.

I’m not a romantic, just a pragmatist looking at how things stand. But I do believe our ingenuity and humanity just might prevail. It got us through the cold war and many other near-disasters.

We might proceed by degrees and perfect our immune systems, replace our organs with better ones. Medicine is working in that direction, to improve health, to sharpen our minds and all sensory perceptions so we can be more human, live longer and happier than ever before.

Nature too is a miracle of rejuvenation and variety. There isn’t a poison we can devise in our deepest labs that some organism can’t eat, and a larger one that can digest it and another that can thrive on it, right up the food chain.

I feel a deep empathy towards all the life on this Earth, as it has contributed to supporting us however much we mutilated everything in our course, or muddied the oceans. I know this good planet will restore itself to its full glory if we die and perhaps create some wiser and even more beautiful creature than ourselves a million years hence, crawling from the swamps.

But for now, I suggest we live for the day, plant trees and try to reverse obvious wrongs. But when evening comes, enjoy what you can by candlelight, with your partner. So on these slender and shadowy prognostications I can honestly say that I am still optimistic and wish all of you younger folks good luck.

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