On the relative eve of a birthday

I suppose I think this is the most important piece I’ve ever attempted to write, but then I suppose the reason I think that is what I’m attempting to explain within it. I expect, therefore, that this will be quite challenging to compose. That it will in many places appear to be esoteric musings presenting an aggregate of “huh?” for many or most.

I will begin with a speculation about why the above might arise.

I think people have varying degrees of intensity. That this is so is (to me) proven sufficiently by the persistent observation that sometimes people will “half ass” things even when they are important, and sometimes they will do things with extreme care and focus even when ostensibly trivial, for example, arranging cans in a cupboard. I realize there are many explanations for these same or similar series of events; this is not a place for a debate so much as for observations, however.

And with that sentence, I’ve asked you, as politely as I can, to dispense with the fraction of your attention aligned with arguing for every piece of literary ground I attempt to isolate in illustrating what I am here to illustrate. Please do not argue with me, not yet. Please just observe what I think.

I stopped right there to replace “explaining” and “explain” with “illustrating” and “illustrate” because I observe there isn’t just one obvious and consistent obstacle to communicating ideas, but several. Even, certainly, if I had your nearly undivided conscious cognitive attention on the things I’m about to say, I might lose it again by turning your emotional brain away from this operation or endeavor. I might annoy you by appearing to talk down to you, and in so doing marshal the arguably more powerful side of your brain against the side you’ve tentatively offered to align with what I’m trying to get at, and the whole attempt would still fail. I might make you ‘sore’ at me.

WE would still fail, and it would be a result of ME not putting into play among the most consistent observations of my life:

If you are respectful of people, they will give you a chance. Often even ‘against their better judgment’ they will do so if you can manage them sincere respect.

Well, I will certainly concede that point. The point is yours, it’s been amply won. I am generally terrible at doing thus — it is among the worst of my flaws. But, since we’re here, I would like to render you my version of why sincerely respecting others — by my definition of things — is, on occasion, a terribly difficult thing to do. I will tell you why I think so, and it won’t be sarcasm in any sense. Sarcasm, for me, is a thing best reserved for Sundays. It complexifies conversations which in my estimation don’t consistently communicate what we’d like them to even in the absence of it: It’s akin to Luke Skywalker putting the blast shield down (essentially a blindfold) prior to attempting to defend himself from the remote with a lightsaber, yet with poorer results to show from it.

It makes something harder which is already too hard to get precisely right.

Sincerely respecting others

Sincerely respecting others — under the terms I define such a thing — is one of the hardest things in the universe to do. And yes, I’ve offered that sentence as a bit of bait — it sounds like an exaggeration. Dare to say otherwise, is sort of what I’m saying. Why would I do that? Why make my point as hard as possible to prove rather than prevaricate in the fashion I’m writing this — which is the absolute WRONG assumption people consistently have regarding the things I try to describe rather than the simple and correct explanation they at least seem to believe it is?

I’d do that because I really believe it. I’d do that because TO ME, “sincerely respecting others” isn’t just a generic faucet with which we apply some lackadaisically determined quantity of our attention, it’s a

“How much precisely of *ALL THAT I HAVE* should this person be afforded”

calculation, and such was never said better than my friend Tom said it the other day:

“It’s an all out effort exertion if it is decided upon to be important.”

Yep. Yes, Tom, yes it is.

This guy. This guy that I too-frequently think of as “just a guy I happened across by accident.” This resonance we’ve established has been established because that’s the way HE thinks, too. It isn’t just me, so if the explanation you offered for “wow, that’s a crazy way of looking at it” is just that I’m simply crazy, then you can rest assured, I am not alone. Your two assumptions, if you had them, cancel each other out and leave you content albeit with an inaccurate explanation of what is transpiring there.

The next thought which follows, of course, is,

“Well, that’s a pretty stingy way of looking at it. I ‘always’ give my undivided attention to people when they need it.”

This is, I think, the way most people tend to view the efforts they put forth.

But such is a casual way of describing things which I do not use. I see the baked-in exaggerations and what I would call lies in a statement like that one. They are bits of sugar left on a floor for ants to inevitably discover. I could be an ant in that way. I could point out that the above sentence, if you silently offered it, is just a way of contenting yourself with the perhaps as much as you can individually tolerate efforts you are willing to exert. I’m not here to shame anyone, however. It isn’t my place to do it; I bring information, that’s all.

I think “sincerely respecting” people means aligning them the force of your consciousness as soon as you can reasonably determine they need it. And the example which presents is the humble line at the grocery store.

This I have written about previously, and I have my thoughts well considered. You may opt to consider them in other detail by looking at my piece “Beaches” also listed here on this site. The summary is that,

Not all of the time we spend on this planet is our time to do with as we will. Not all of it precisely.

When we are traveling about — that is, in the grocery store, at the toll booth, in the office, an elevator, the fast food joint, gas station, line at CostCo, Starbucks — our time is not all our own. We are sharing it, and we must accept the obligations and responsibilities associated with doing so. We cannot have access to our full and undivided attention in a sense as to do with it however we will.

Now this, again, is a chip of turf on which we could argue. Again, I’m not here for the arguments. I’m here to explain something, and that is — at least for this little section — what a good idea looks like versus a bad one. We certainly can *act as though* we are the only members of the universe while we’re in public. No one will exactly arrest a person who does so.

They’ll just metaphorically arrest them every single chance that admits itself.

They’ll be the guy who tells the lady — or the lady who tells the guy — that slapping his/her kid’s face in a grocery store isn’t going to happen on their watch. They’ll be the people in line behind you who know — even if you couldn’t put it together — that being at the head of the line does not simultaneously mean that 5:15pm on a Friday is the best time to ask the cashier to process the return of margarine you bought last week because you selected the salted version versus the unsalted.

It isn’t the time for a debate as to whether your mistake as to the expiration date of a $0.25 coupon on laundry detergent was an innocent mistake or not.

We need a different kind of consciousness at this point. A kind more befitting the brains we have all been given. That is what this piece is about, nothing else.

The problem regarding the ‘sincerely respecting’ component is not ‘low level’ public exchanges, exactly. It is exchanges which require much more from us, such as the one which took place for me at the offices of Gerber Kawasaki when I was able to grab — for thirty seconds, Ross Gerber’s ear.

I apologize for this, Ross. I think you man enough to accept this public lashing, lest I wouldn’t be using you as an example to illustrate the point.

I came into that situation knowing who Ross was. In point of fact, I had the rarest of opportunities: I’d just driven 5,600 miles in a single week to meet my friend who had offered me a once-in-a-lifetime chance to attend the Tesla Cybertruck unveiling. I also managed a rare invite to a party at the offices of Gerber-Kawasaki for a pre-reveal party, and there were countless very strong advocates for electrification at said party.

The main attraction of the event — a speaker panel — had just finished. I approached Ross as it was dispersing and made a quite simple and quite brief request: might I be allowed to plant a tree of his choice in his yard?

Now those who don’t have any of the background of my advocacy efforts — those who haven’t the foggiest idea what I do on a daily basis — might well consider that an absurd request out of the context of that necessary information. And those even closer to the situation might do the same, perhaps to think it’s just anyone who could find their way into a situation like that one — who could make THAT particular shot be the one shot they thoughtfully and quite deliberately took.

People who don’t think anywhere near as carefully as I do — perhaps as a result of lack of practice CAN’T even do so — seem to regularly resolve themselves to the notion that I haven’t thought things through very carefully when I do them.

Which is SOMETIMES but clearly not ALWAYS the case.

Ross offered me as close to zero respect as he could figure out in a moment how. He didn’t regard what the suggestion involved for even two seconds, didn’t consider for even the “thirty seconds of elevator” respecting me in the slightest, and, in another context, might have been playing with a fat lip in the sense of the scornful look he offered me.

This particular fat lip, Ross. This one, right here, which is more than sufficient to show what an intolerably selfish, anything-but-charitable person you can be in a moment of time in which you haven’t opted to use your copious powers of figuring things out.

You can do better and you absolutely know you can. You let me, you, and the rest of the world down in that moment, and I won’t even entertain the possibility that anything other than that is the case, because THAT IS the case.

I don’t dislike the man. In fact I like him just fine, however your mind may have shifted to an erroneous conclusion having read those last two paragraphs. Ross is a person who put his talents toward a useful end. He’s a good man and one who has aligned things in a definite fashion to act for what amounts to a moral good in the world. Certainly not a person I would publicly disparage for a “shortcoming” for the sake of a transient moment of ‘revenge.’ If you think that, you’re just plain not getting what I’m saying.

What I’m trying to illustrate is that each of us in our lives have some quantity of time and attention and focus/concentration with which to summon ourselves in the interest of our goals: Our innermost goals and aspirations, which guide and inform our behaviors even when we’re not expressly paying attention to them. Like when we’re walking in the neighborhood and greet a passerby pleasantly, without knowing the slightest bit about their politics or disposition. We have this time, attention, and focus, and to make matters simple, we can regard them all as a sort of soup — 100% of which lies just under the brim of the bowl of our lives.

We have moments and what to do with them, nothing more.

A long pause is needed here, please take it and reflect as long as you can tolerate on the above sentence. Below the margin break here I’ll continue the thought.

Elon Musk is a good example of a person who has taken this notion seriously. He no doubt derived the principle in a different fashion or ‘accidentally’ happened upon a mode of behavior which manifests as a nearly identical conclusion to the above, but it cannot be argued that he is effective.

When we think of what “effective” even means, it’s useful to think of ourselves as distinct in some fashion from the goals we’ve got our minds on accomplishing. It’s useful to regard those things as

things our heads told us could not be done just before we told our heads NO

Framed from this perspective, it should be observable that what we’re doing is raging against the way things are. It should be noticeable that we’re attempting in some way to define and establish for ourselves the value we have; the essence we bring. Effectiveness is life, perhaps.

The problem becomes how might we describe such a hard to pinpoint concept such that others can see it clearly and direct it toward worthwhile ends?

How can we make of this a positive feedback loop?

As I said above, we have time, attention, and focus. Yes we have other ingredients, too, but they are uniformly derived from the first three. Those are the core ingredients of accomplishing what we can accomplish. To use the example of Tiger Woods:

Tiger, essentially through no “fault” of his own learned golf at an absurdly young age. His parents compelled him to summon essentially all his time, attention, and focus for the purpose of learning the game and learning it well almost from birth. He became, arguably, the best golfer the world has ever known and did it very early in his life. He also suffered grossly from interpersonal problems no doubt as a consequence of having failed to develop life skills in anything like a typical fashion. He didn’t have access to socialization in anything like the fashion or the degree others typically do, and others experience this handicap to varying degrees.

Others experience it, as introverts, for example, by exclusion from the usual framework of interpersonal interaction. They deprive themselves of the practice they will need later in order to contribute things to others in a way which is easy for those others to understand, and they gain some benefits from doing so: They stay inexperienced at one skill in the interest of perfecting another. They become writers, sometimes. Writers who are perhaps hard to understand because the things they communicate, however true they might be, can be far beyond the level of complexity which is easy to grasp and therefore amounts to the simplest way of agreeing how concepts can be communicated. Yet simplest is not best. Not necessarily and not always. Occam’s razor is not always right. “Getting to the point” — while seemingly everyone argues it to be a first principle — is NOT a first principle. It is a SECOND principle.

The point here is that this “time/attention/focus” chemistry set is available to all of us, persistently. We don’t ever lose *all* of any of those components, though it is true that at times we fight against the limitations we have of them. This is one of the most persistent themes in life, in fact.

We take ten or twenty hours per week and allot them toward our success in triathlons, bodybuilding, piano, or golf.

We have a job, forty hours per week. It takes more than that from us, but we must have it.

We have children. They require focus and dedication. They “take” from us hours, and YES, we receive something in return…but we don’t get it back instantly or directly. There is no guarantee on it, and our hopes — in part — rest on their future success or lack thereof.

These things are tied together. They don’t appear to be separately analyze-able, yet they still are.

We have time, focus, and attention. What will we do with it?

It seems to me that the things with which we are most satisfied are the things which took the greatest fraction of all of us. The things which forced us — either voluntarily or grudgingly — to summon everything we have and were far from guaranteed from the outset. These things about which Musk has famously said,

‘When something is worth doing, you do it even when the chances of success are very slim.’

These are among the most worthwhile things.

They are the things we accomplished when we told ourselves there was hope but perhaps could not always actually believe our own story.

The things we had something like faith about, which is a word so many recoil from despite that it cannot injure you by reading it. A word which has been made guilty by association with religion, spirituality, fighting demons, soothsayers, and numerology. Forget about it for a moment and read for content, would you please? Forget the things you knew or thought you knew and the way people so consistently try to “sell” others on this or that and just hear me out.

We are most satisfied with results when they go the way we’d like AND we’ve given them our all. This cannot be other than the case. Conversely, we are frequently most dissatisfied with results when we’ve given our all and they still don’t turn out the way we’d like.

Please just stop. Stop and listen because this is something I’ve learned through the most terribly painful efforts of my life.

Learn this if nothing else:

Such are STORIES we tell ourselves. They are either useful stories or not useful stories. The core of our innermost beings yearn for an appropriate reward when we’ve given everything we have to accomplish it, and in the absence of a satisfactory external prize (which cannot exist because nothing could ever suffice), we give it to ourselves in the highest of spades. Ask any NFL player who participated in a winning Superbowl. Ask any NHL player who has won the Stanley Cup. Ask them where the essence of it lies.

Nothing is as sweet as the taste of vindication. Nothing so sweet as “I was right to believe in myself and my team.”

“I had good reason to believe in myself. This proves it. I have finally arrived at the proof.” The proof of who I am. The proof of what I’m made of. This proves what I wanted to believe. What I did believe.

Can’t you see it now? Isn’t it obvious?

We give ourselves everything we ever receive, and what’s equally important is we take away everything that is ever truly taken from us. Consider Nelson Mandela if you don’t believe this to be so.

Dissatisfaction — the deepest hue of it — can’t serve you in the same way. It is a weeding-out mechanism, and it can quite literally kill you. There’s a solution for it, in my estimation, but that solution is predicated on an awareness of the substance of the larger picture I’m trying to illustrate here. A part of which is you aren’t what you do. Not precisely and completely. You aren’t what you do or the places you’ve been or the things you know or own or can do, and more importantly, you aren’t defined by the things you don’t have and apparently never will.

Egos will probably prevent some people from wrapping their minds around the following, but:

We exist not into and of ourselves alone. We exist to provide an element of the success and the learning of others. We exist to bring joy and hope and some sort of limited understanding into the world which previously wasn’t there.

We can be okay playing a role. Even if that’s all we ever do, we can be okay with it. It can be a worthwhile accomplishment just to play a role in the way things go. However they may go. Even if they don’t appear to translate into the terribly misunderstood concept of ‘success.’

If we’re going to do that though — even something as seemingly ‘trivial’ as that, as ‘playing a role’ — we might as well do it properly. This observation, again, was first Tom’s:

It’s an all out effort exertion if it is decided upon to be important.

You aren’t saving anything up. There isn’t a ‘later.’ There is NOW, that’s all.

And this, then, is one piece which is necessary to understand the quite-difficult concept I’m trying to relate. This is the attention piece. The pay attention as though your life depends on it because it DOES depend on it piece.

In other places, this part has been referred to as “sometimes opportunity knocks but once.” Sometimes we see a leaf fall or in stories inadvertently step on a butterfly and everything changes permanently in a way we can’t even have the full satisfaction of comparing to what might have been. It is hard for the brain to grasp that these moments are strewn out before us like the tired old metaphor of grains of sand on a beach, so countless in number it makes us laugh to even consider counting a pailful of them.

Every single moment in every single direction is an opportunity for changing not merely the rest of your own life but the rest of everyone else’s as well.

And we casually go about it.

We keep right on reading.

We don’t realize, not in this moment, that stopping right here and reading not one bit further is exactly one of those grains of sand. One we can choose just as easily as any other, and ONLY ONE. Continuing similarly. It’s a choice we either make or don’t and we are the ones who will make it or not.

We can leave our houses messy. We can eat broccoli or pizza. We can start exercising — because something tells us to. We can think about that something good and hard.

And we can continue sitting here, typing away, hoping this missive reaches at least one person in at least some kind of way, and we can do it while our phone remains off and the locusts and wind through trees are the only things distracting us outside our window. Which draw at least my attention outward, to the sunshine and vitamin D and mask I’d be wearing and sneakers on my feet and whether I’m attired appropriately for whatever I might be doing and carrying or not carrying my keys, wallet, and phone which is off.

Which brings me right back here again. There was a reason I decided to do this, and there is generally also a reason to persevere in an effort. Even when the outcome looks bleak. Even if we all but know for a fact we will fail.

There is a scene in a movie…Chariots of Fire…the main character — in the process of trying to communicate to us the feeling and essence a real life runner had early on in the 20th century — is talking of why he runs. Perhaps it matters whether he’s correct in the subject of his communications about it, and perhaps he isn’t, but what he says is this:

“…and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

This was Eric Liddell’s life, and the way he chose to live it. He summoned his purpose — at least as it is related to us — in the fashion of an explanation which comported with the view that God, in his case a devoutly Scottish Christian version of the concept, must be honored.

I give myself up to him because he is the one who made me, and I do not exist in the absence of whatever he is. This is the best way I know to give thanks for my existence: It is to LIVE. To live as if life depends on me doing so. Irrespective of the pain. Allowing pleasure to have its place, but only its place.

You don’t have to believe in God, and I assure you of your inability to guess what I think on the matter much beyond the contents of what you’ll read here. While I won’t subscribe to the in-all-ways-literal-meaning to the following sentence

It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God as a definite entity somewhere beyond ourselves in a definite fashion which people can obviously and sensibly describe or not.

The conclusion in itself does not matter if for no other reason than there is a nonzero utility to believing as an independent and generic verb. There is utility to it as an exercise completely independent of whether anyone agrees on the form or character or substance that such an entity or phenomenon takes.

There is no way to both cursorily and accurately dismiss the utility of believing in something such as I describe here, Sam Harris. You are a smart man, of course, but you are also a rouser of rabbles. You cannot somehow conclude that all rabbles will go unroused if only people would uniformly accept the one you somehow convince yourself intellectually can make an end of all the rest, because such is not so.

There IS utility in beliefs, however widely or narrowly they might be held. There perhaps is not such a thing as ‘true’ beliefs other than to describe that we truly believe them. For example, it probably is not the case that a dragon with wings made of blue french toast flies about the neighborhood in which I live every night while no one is looking, but if I sincerely believed there were such a dragon, it would then be a true belief that I had, and I might well spend some time trying to contemplate how to catch sight of him. And it might be worthwhile to do so even if I never did come across him, but only learned the skill of trying just as hard as I could.

God is the same. Whoever he/she/it/they are, it’s the same.

And though you could — if you really wanted to — dispense with the rest of the things I’ve said here, considering that ‘all of them are predicated on a “patently fanciful notion”’ I would suggest that you’d be making the very same mistake that you think you’re avoiding should you take what amounts to nothing more than a convenient escape route:

You’re concluding that the only things you can know are the things you have experienced. You’re saying the only things which can or do make sense are the things which comport with the data you have already collected and the conclusions you’ve already drawn from it. Such as it was most assiduously collected and most carefully and thoroughly thought through.

It and they must have been, of course, and this not necessarily a Sunday!

All of which I shouldn’t need to remind a logician such as yourself amounts to reductio ad absurdum. You didn’t know anything until you experienced it, is that it? You didn’t flit your attention about quite ‘naturally’ even before you knew what was ‘important’ to pay attention to versus what wasn’t?

What guides your behavior, praytell? Is it you?

I’m not being ‘fresh’ and I’m not saying you’re ‘wicked.’ Nothing of the sort. What I’m saying is that almost everything is based on assumptions. In fact the primary (if not the only) things which I tentatively allow myself liberal freedom to believe are not assumptions are the notions of time, attention, and focus as we’re allowed the chance to apply them with our lives.

From there, this automatically follows: “What do we do? What’s worth it?”

I’ll offer my take on it, but explicitly grant that mine may well not be ‘the right one.’

My take is that life is in some sense sacred. Setting aside any religious or quasi-religious connotations of the word ‘sacred,’ it IS sacred. It is the thing we must respect beyond all other things, and there IS a reason why.

The reason, simply put, is that failing a generally accepted as true notion such as that one, life in the universe trends to zero rather than to infinity. I haven’t the foggiest idea why the latter is a better outcome than the former to be perfectly honest about it, but I know that’s the choice. I don’t know why, but my guess is as follows:

The open-ended, lots of unique things can come about results which follow “life is sacred” is somehow better than the closed-ended, everything becomes molecules dispersed over endless distances result. More potential = better somehow.

This brings me to the point, insofar as I have one:

My purpose is/was to drive the possibility of human beings having the above form of success on this planet. It is/was to ensure we optimize our chances of anything but total disaster. The way I perceive this happening is astonishingly simple:

We have what amounts to an existential threat to the existence of everything, and that existential threat exists in our time, that is, the time during which we who are currently alive have an opportunity to take action.

Some may reflect for a moment how the section on ‘grains of sand’ and choices seems to in some way conflict with the idea that WE, right now, are the masters of the larger framework of destiny — no one else but WE. This of course discounts the internal consistency of the parallel fact that the only ones who can observe grains in the now are the ones who have current consciousness to observe them:

That is, this fact was true throughout all of human existence, and we can’t casually conclude that simply because it is a current fact it wasn’t similarly a fact before.

It is certainly true that it takes us, in an individual sense, some time for things to occur to us now and then. Does it not take us collectively some time before the gravity of situations sinks in?

You can also dispense with the vaguely envious idea summarized by:

“Who the fuck is THIS guy to imagine he has what amounts to the only thing which matters all nicely and carefully figured out that he can speak to it in the span of ten pages? He ‘must be’ crazy.”

Largely because you don’t have any idea the roads I’ve walked, the help I’ve gotten, or the direction in which I’ve pointed my attention. You know as close to nothing as do I, it’s just that your version of ‘almost nothing’ isn’t quite the same as mine. This is the only thing in life about which I am pretty close to certain. The rest? The rest I hardly could be said to even care about at all. The only reason I even exist is to do this particular task, and if you think that overstates it then I’d say you haven’t looked quite so carefully enough at your own life and why you’re living it to have the slightest chance of looking at someone else’s life and the reasons for which they’re asserting they live it.

What I’m saying is that there is a nonzero (to be logically polite about it) or a looming (to put what I estimate to be a reasonable possibility on it) chance that we’re in the process of destroying all life that can ever be [at least in this particular section of the larger universe.] I’m not going to comment on whether there is life elsewhere anymore than I ought to be commenting on what transpires in a house down the street owned by people I don’t exactly know. I mean, I have a thought on it, but what difference does that make to THIS, right here? Not a whole lot.

All I really know is that we are playing with fire right now. I know we’re playing with fire and I’ve come with a message which I derived from I don’t have any idea whom or what or where exactly. I know we better pay attention and we better do it SOON. Like NOW would be the best time to do it.

We need to understand that what we already have in play, that is, the default, is disaster. We will die and not “we” as in merely everyone who is currently breathing will stop doing so in a hundred or so years kind of die but all of the people who ever might get a chance to breathe will probably not have an opportunity to do so if we do not make a fundamental alteration in the way we’re looking at things and do it very soon. And not just some of us. More than ‘just a few.’ More than a tiny percentage. Think of it like we’re all of a sudden trying to convince the whole world that the concept of gravity is actually real — that is has nothing to do with superstition. That, right there.

Everyone must be convinced of gravity, and it needs to happen right away.

I’ll describe this…I can describe this better…by way of referencing what the real possibilities are.

Think for a moment how limited a single person generally is. Think about how multiplicatively more powerful people become when acting toward a specific goal in concert. Think of an expert soloist versus an orchestra. It is probably reasonable to conclude that with the number of people behaving truly in concert, effectiveness goes up as at least a geometric function if not an exponential one. It’s certainly far more than linear, and this it seems could readily be proven. My assertion arises from that, and is as follows:

Ten…or perhaps twenty people who sincerely focused and worked to the limits of their ability could take over this planet within a single lifetime. Even now I think that’s a reasonable approximation of the case. Set that thought aside for a moment, because it is needed in describing the situation in which I think we find ourselves.

The existential situation in which we find ourselves requires that a group of this kind somehow finds within them the capacity to do it.

Now the first thing which presents is the “Not if I don’t want them to” notion. The idea of liberty and what it means, that the referenced group would have to violate the liberties of others in order to ‘take over the planet.’

NO! NO NO NO NO NO.

That is NOT what that means. The closest parallel is Elon Musk, again. This guy — if there were ten or twenty like him AND they worked in concert? Ha hah hahahah. You’d be picking your toothbrush from among the colors they offered you, and what’s more you’d be pleased as punch to do so.

What I’m saying is that such a group, carefully selected through some kind of means…that group could save us from the disaster which is on the horizon. They would need to believe they could do it, and they’d need to have special talents which don’t overlap except in a very particular kind of way.

What I’m saying is ONE PERSON ALONE CANNOT DO IT. This effort which I’m asserting is needed is far beyond the capacity of a single person. This effort which is needed breaks the models which arise naturally out of our socialization — at least in the Western world. ‘The indomitable spirit of man’ will not suffice except insofar as it might summon the courage of others indirectly.

We sincerely ought not to essentially kill one of the people who apparently should be on the team by asking them to give essentially their entire lives in a somewhat poorly coordinated desperation attempt to get done what needs getting done.

Meaning Elon. Give the guy a fucking break before he kills himself trying, because he most assuredly will. He’s already said he will and I for one absolutely believed it means that much to him. He’s arguably insane but he’s also the perfect patriot of the human species, and if you haven’t figured that much out yet I’m really surprised you’ve even gotten through this much relatively complex writing.

We need others to help him, and they can’t be doing it simply because the opportunity calls for it, i.e. “I can make a lot of money riding this train and it seems like a sorta good thing to do anyway. I mean, maybe climate change is a thing, I could kinda sorta get behind efforts to stop that. Seems like it’s probably going to make a person or two miserable.”

To finish the point, I don’t think such a team is in the process of forming, or if it is, it sure isn’t forming fast enough. I actually think the delay between what we can observe on a planetary scale and our reactions on an extremely agonizing takes-eons-to-change-public-opinion-and-actions scale taken together mean we’re dead in the water, and so is everything else. Everything dies if we don’t sort this out pronto. It really will, and even if it might not we

CANNOT AFFORD TO BE GUESSING ON SOMETHING OF THIS MAGNITUDE.

We can’t be guessing we might not ‘accidentally’ eradicate life from this section of the universe for all time. We can’t conclude that we need to understand precisely how we’re going to annihilate everything before we can really start to make sure we don’t. That’s what a moron does when faced with danger.

You know, perhaps things will change if we give them a bit more time.

Seems like things are sorta alright, let’s give it a minute or two to see if that piece of dynamite does what the rest of them do when the fuse reaches the base. I mean, it might be one of those spoof ones from birthday parties and such. Flowers and sparklers might come out. Could be a game.

Perhaps aliens will arrive to slap us on the metaphorical wrist and deploy a carbon vacuum cleaner which dispenses with the problem as readily as an eraser removes a misplaced №2 word.

Get real, people. You want to think I’m a nutcase, go right ahead but get real yourselves.

Paradoxically, I also think all of this means we’ll still have a chance the later the clock ticks, but that the chance will be slimmer and the solution will look grimmer if we keep on hitting the snooze button — like we keep right on doing. I think I’ve done everything I could in this piece to stress you/we ought not to hit the snooze button. Not even once more.

We have time, focus, and attention. We flip it around between fixing our hair, feeding the dog, groaning about politics, making love to our spouse, and hitting the gas as soon as we see the light turn green. My assertion is that we need to hold the brake and contemplate a lot more thoroughly about everything we do and stop being so reactive about things. Reactive will kill us, proactive is the way to get it done.

There might be another part, but for now consider this may be your birthday or it may not be.