I supposed I missed writing, but in the way you miss someone you used to love.

The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age, in which human have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. Nothing is more human than aggrandizing humans, but we are a hugely powerful force on Earth in the twenty-first century.

My brother, Hank, who started out his professional life as a biochemist, once explained it to me like this: As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.

...I reread the work of my friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who'd died a few months earlier. She'd once written, "For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That's pretty much all the info u need". My attention had become so fractured, and my world had become so loud, that I wasn't paying attention to what I was paying attention to.

...I tried to chart some of the contradictions of human life as I experience it—how we can be so compassionate and so cruel, so persistent and so quick to despair. Above all, I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth's climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet's atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.

When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

The lyrics of "You'll Never Walk Alone" contain only the most obvious imagery: The song tells us to "walk on through the wind and through the rain," which is not particularly clever evocation of a storm. We are also told to "walk on with hope in your heart," which feels aggressively trite. And it reports that "at the end of the storm, there's a golden sky and the sweet silver song of a lark." But in reality, at the end of the storm, there are tree branches strewn everywhere, and downed power lines, and flooded rivers.

I think two of the fundamental facts of being a person are 1. We must go on, and 2. None of us ever walks alone. We may feel alone (in fact, we will feel alone), but even in the crushing grind of isolation, we aren't alone. Like Louise at her graduation, those who are distant or even gone are still with us, still encouraging us to walk on.

The anthem of West Ham United is called "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and at the start of each game, you'll see thousands of grown adults blowing bubbles from the stands as they sing, "I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air / They fly so high, nearly reach the sky / Then like my dreams, they fade and die."

It's no wonder we worry about the end of the world. Worlds end all the time.

Humans are a threat to our own species and many others, but the planet will survive us. In fact, it may only take life on Earth a few million years to recover from us. Life has bounced back from far more serious shocks.

But we'll gone by then, as well our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs really won't make a sound anymore. We've caused a lot of suffering, but we've also caused much else.

There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don't. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth's greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.

We're the only part of the known universe that knows it's in a universe. We know we are circling a star that will one day engulf us. We're the only species that knows it has a temporal range.

We need to find a way to survive ourselves—to go on in a world where we are powerful enough to warm the entire planet but not powerful enough to stop warming it. We may even have to survive our own obsolescence as technology learns to do more of what we do better than we can do it. But we are better positioned to solve our biggest problems than we were on hundred or one thousand years ago. Humans have more collective brainpower than we've ever had, and more resources, and more knowledge collected by ancestors.

We. Just. Keep. Going. We spread across seven continents. including one that is entirely too cold for us. We sailed across oceans toward land we couldn't see and couldn't have known we would find. One of my favorite words is dogged. I love dogged pursuits, and dogged efforts, and dogged determination. Don't get me wrong—dogs are indeed very dogged. But they ought to call it humaned. Humaned determination.

It's the only periodic comet that can regularly be seen from Earth by the naked eye. Halley's comet takes between seventy-four and seventy-nine years to complete its highly elliptical orbit around the sun, and so once in a good human lifetime, Halley brightens the sky for several weeks. Or twice in a human lifetime, if you schedule things well.

I don't know how to explain to you how important that bench was to me, how much it mattered that my dad and I had made something together. But that night, we sat next to each other on our bench, which just barely fit the two of us, and we passed the binoculars back and forth, looking at Halley's comet, a white smudge in the blue-black sky.

That noted, Halley's comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986. It'll be brighter in the night sky than Jupiter, or any other star. I'll be eighty-three—if I'm lucky.

When you measure time in Helleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frakenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn't a country. The Halley before that, Louis XIV ruled France.

History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.

Of course, we still know almost nothing about what's coming—neither for us as individuals nor for us as species. Perhaps that's why I find it so comforting that we do know when Halley will return, and that it will return, whether we are here to see it or not.

Fitzgerald writes, "For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder". It's a hell of a sentence.

Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream. The only people who end up rich or successful in the novel are the ones who start out that way. Almost everyone else ends up dead or destitute. And it's a critique of the kind of vapid capitalism that can't find anything more interesting to do with money than try to make more of it.

I wanted to explain to him that you can see a brown oak leaf anywhere in the eastern of United States in November, that nothing in the forest was less interesting. But after watching him look at it, I began to look as well, and I soon realized it wasn't just a brown leaf. Its veins spidered out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize, and the more I looked at the leaf with Henry, the more I was compelled into an aesthetic contemplation I neither understood nor desired, face-to-face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder.

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

But the hand stencils also remind us that humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands were indistinguishable from ours. More than that, we know they were like us in other ways.

...and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn't optional for humans.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans became a danger to the cave’s beauty, we agreed to stop going.

The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the things itself, but the shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents.

The scent of Chanel No. 5. for instance, is not patented, and doesn't need to be, because no one can re-create it. But I think there's something else at play with smells that try to mimic nature, which is that nothing in the real world ever smells quite like we imagine it should. Actual spring rain, for instance, seems like it ought to smell at once moist and crisp, like the artificial scent does. But in fact, springtime rain smells earthy and acidic.

The last time anyone smells a banana, it might be via scratch 'n' sniff sticker, or some futuristic version of one.

Dr Pepper marks such an interesting and important moment in human history. It was an artificial drink that didn't taste like anything. It wasn't an orange but better, or like a lime but sweet. In an interview, Charles Alderton once said that he wanted to create a soda that tasted like the soda fountain in Waco smelled—all those artificial flavors swirling together in the air. Dr Pepper is, in its very conception, unnatural, The creation of a chemist.

Each time I drink Diet Dr Pepper, I am newly astonished, Look at what humans can do! They can make ice-cold, sugary-sweet, zero-calorie soda that tastes like everything and also like nothing.

And so our image of velociraptors says more about us than it does about them. Really, even what we do know, or think we know, about dinosaurs is endlessly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions, some of which will eventually prove incorrect.

The brontosaurus was real in the late nineteenth century, only to become a fiction for much of the twentieth, only to become real again in the last few years. History is new, Prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.

Knowing the facts doesn't help me picture the truth. That's the wonder and terror of computer-generated images for me: If they look real, my brain isn't nearly sophisticated enough to understand they are not. We've long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that "nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"—and yet I still can't help but believe them.

Like the velociraptor, I have a large brain for my geologic age, but maybe not large enough to survive effectively in the real world where I find myself. My eyes still believe what they see, long after visual information stops being reliable. Still, I'm fond of raptors—both the one's I've seen that never existed, and the one that existed but I've never seen.

With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.

In fact, the more you look, the more connections you find between Canada geese and people. Our population has also increased dramatically in the past several decades—there were just over two billion people on Earth in 1935, when live goose decoys were made illegal in the U.S. in 2021, there are more than seven billion people. Like humans, Canada geese usually mate for life, although sometimes unhappily. Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather. And like us, geese have few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always human violence. Just like us.

...Just before graduating from college, my girlfriend and I were on our way to pick up some groceries in her ancient blue sedan when she asked me what my biggest fear was. "Abandonment," I said. I was worried the end of college would spell the end of our relationship, and I wanted her to reassure me, to tell me that I need not fear being alone, because she would always be there, and etc. But she wasn't the sort of person to make false promises, and most promises featuring the word "always" are unkeepable. Everything ends, or at least everything humans have thus far observed ends. Anyway, after I said abandonment, she just nodded, and then I filled the awkward silence by asking her what her biggest fear was, "Geese," she answered.

You can do something about abandonment. You can construct a stronger independent self, for instance, or build a broader network of meaningful relationships so your psychological well-being isn't wholly reliant upon one person. But you, as an individual, can't do much about the Canada goose.

And that seems to me one of the great oddities of the Anthropocene. For better or worse, land has become ours. It is ours to cultivate, to shape, even ours to protect. We are so much the dominant creature on this planet that we essentially decide which species to live and which die, which grow in numbers like Canada goose, and which decline like its cousin spoon-billed sandpiper. But as an individual, I don't feel that power. I can't decide whether a species lives or dies. I can't even get my kids to eat breakfast.

In the daily grind of human life, there's a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way.

It would be inaccurate, then, to claim our dominion over bears is wholly recent phenomenon. Still, it's a bit odd that our children now commonly cuddle with a stuffed version of an animal we used to be afraid to call by name.

When I was a kid, a talking teddy bear named Teddy Ruxpin became popular, but what I loved about teddy bears was their silence. They didn't ask anything of me, or judge me for my emotional outbursts.

For many species of large animals in the twenty-first century, the single most important determinant of survival is whether their existence is useful to humans. But if you can't be of utility to people, the second best thing you can be is to be cute. You need an expressive face, ideally some large eyes. Your babies need to remind us of our babies. Something about you must make us feel guilty of eliminating you from the planet.

Can cuteness save a species? I'm dubious. The part of the teddyy bear origin story that often doesn't get told is that right after Roosevelt sportingly refused to kill the bear, he ordered a member of his hunting party to slit its throat, so as to put the bear out of its misery. No bears were saved that day. And now there are fewer than fifty bears left in Mississippi. Global sales of teddy bears, meanwhile, have never been higher.

But then I got older. As a teenager, I began to define myself primarily by what I disliked, and my loathes were legions. I hated children's books, the music of Mariah Carey, suburban architecture, and shopping malls. But most of all, I hated Disney World.

Two of the Anthropocene's major institutions are the nation-state and the limited liability corporation, both of which are real and powerful and on some level made-up. The United States isn't real the way a river is real, nor is the Walt Disney Company. They are both ideas we believe in. Yes, the United States has laws and treaties and a constitution and so on, but none of that prevents a country from splitting apart or even disappearing. From the neoclassical architecture that attempts to give the U.S. a sense of permanence to the faces on our money, America has to continually convince its citizens that it is real, and good, and worthy of allegiance.

As a teen, I liked to imagine what life might be like if we all stopped believing in these constructs. What would happen if we abandoned the idea of U.S. Constitution being the ruling document of our nation, or the idea of nation-states altogether? Perhaps it is a symptom of middle age that I now want to imagine better nation-states (and better regulated private corporations) rather than leaving behind these ideas. But we cannot do the hard work of imagining a better world into existence unless we reckon honestly with what governments and corporations want us to believe, and why they want us to believe it.

On of the reason for this huge shift in human geography is the miracle of air-conditioning, which allows people to control the temperature of their interior spaces. Air-conditioning has deeply reshaped human life in rich countries—from small things, like the declining percentage of time the windows are open in the buildings, to large things, like the availability of medication. Insulin, many antibiotics, nitroglycerin, and lots of other drugs are heat sensitive and can lose their efficacy if not stored at so-called "room temperature", which is defined at between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures that no rooms in summertime Phoenix could have hoped to achieve before air-confitioning.

But I think it is also hard for us to confront human-caused climate change because the most privileged among us, the people who consume most energy, can separate ourselves from the weather. I am certainly one such person. I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon

Air-conditioning, like so much else in the Anthropocene, was a kind of background hum that reshaped my life without me ever thinking about it. But writing to you from the early hours of 2021, entering a movie theater at all feels wildly unnatural. What's "natural" for humans is always changing.

I remember as a child hearing phrases like "Only the strong survive" and "survival of the fittest" and feeling terrified, because I knew I was neither strong nor fit. I didn't yet understand that when humanity protects the frail among us, and works to ensure their survival, the human project as a whole gets stronger.

A 1946 Saturday Evening Post article worried that antibiotic use would "unwittingly aid and speed up the subtle evolution forces which arrange for the survival of the fittest microbes." So it was to be. By 1950, 40 percent of Staphylococcus aureus samples in hospitals were resistant to penicillin; by 1960, 80 percent. Today, only around 2 percent of Staphylococcus aureus infections are sensitive to penicillin.

To me, one of the mysteries of life is why life wants to be. Life is so much more biochemical work than chemical equilibrium, but still staph desperately seeks that work. As do I, come to think of it. Staphylococcus doesn't want to harm people. It doesn't know about people. It just wants to be, like I want to go on, like that ivy wants to spread across the wall, occupying more and more of it. How much? As much as it can.

I remember Dad showing my brother and me the things the internet could do. "Look," he would say. "The internet can show you what the weather is like right now in Beijing." Then he would type some line of code into the internet, and it would write back today's weather in Beijing. "Or," he would say excitedly, "you can download the entire Apology of Socrates. For Free! And read it right here, in the house."

On the CompuServe Teen Forum, nobody knew anything about me. They didn't know that I was a miserable, cringingly awkward kid whose voice often creaked with nervousness. They didn't know I was late to puberty, and they didn't know the names people called me at school. And paradoxically, because they didn't know me, they knew me far better than anyone in my real life.

What does it say that I can't imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking. and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, have been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?

My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you're living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.

For days now, my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought, constantly interrupting with worries. Even my worries get interrupted—by new worries, or facets of old worries I had not adequately considered.

My thoughts are a river overflowing its banks, churning and muddy and ceaseless. I wish I wasn't so scared all the time—scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it

A good sunset always steals the words from me, renders all my thoughts as gauzy and soft as the light itself. I'll admit, though, that when I see the sun sink below a distant horizon as the yellows and oranges and pinks flood the sky, I usually think, "This looks photoshopped." When I see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake.

The thing about the sun, of course, is that you can't look directly at it—not when you're outside, and not when you're trying to describe its beauty. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, "We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk around carefully averting our faces this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever."

But every human who has lived more than a few years on this planet has seen a beautiful sunset and paused to spend one of the last moments of the day grateful for, and overwhelmed by, the light.

All I can say is that sometimes when the world is between day and night, I'm stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd smallness. You'd think that would be sad, but it isn't. It only makes me grateful. Toni Morrison once wrote, "At some point in life, the world's beauty become enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough." So what can we say of the clichéd beauty of sunsets? Perhaps only that they are enough.

It's hard to trust the world like that, to show it to your belly. There's something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. I'm scared to even write this down, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I'm hit where I'm earnest, I will never recover.

But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, "To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability." I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.

Penguins of Madagascar is an animated kids' movie about the Anthropocene: A villainous octopus named Dave has invented a special ray that makes cute animal ugly, so that humans will stop privileging the protection of adorable animals (like penguins) over less adorable ones (like Dave).

But every time I watch Penguins of Madagascar, I think of how almost all of us are invisible to penguins almost all of the time, and yet we are nonetheless their biggest threat—and also their best hope. In that respect, we are a kind of god—and not particularly a benevolent one.

But I also love it because it captures, and make the gentlest possible fun of, something about myself I find deeply troubling. Like the adult penguin who stays in line and announces "I question nothing," I mostly follow rules. I mostly try to act like everyone else is acting, even as we all approach the precipice.

I am thoughtful—full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless—acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine.

Introducing seventy-two-year-old Rich LeFevre, Shea said, "When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only, then we drank it black, then we drink it decaf, then we die. Our next eater is at decaf."

The hot dog eating contest is a monument to overindulgence, to the human urge to seek not just more than you need but also more than you actually want. But I think it's also about something else. The world's best competitive eater, the American Joey Chestnut, has said of Shea's introductions, "He convinces the audience these guys are athletes. He does such a good job, he convinces me I'm an athlete."

I love humans. We really would eat our way out of sixty cubic feet of popcorn to survive. And I'm grateful to anyone who helps us to see the grotesque absurdity of our situation. But the carnival barkers of the world must be careful which preposterous stories they tell us, because we will believe them.

The word news tells a secret on itself, though: What's news isn't primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new. So much of what actually changes in human life isn't driven by events, but instead by processes, which often aren't considered news. We don't see much about climate change on CNN, unless a new report is published, nor do we see regular coverage of other ongoing crises, like child mortality or poverty.

In 2003, I was living with my three best friends—Katie, Shannon, and Hassan—in an apartment on the northwest side of Chicago. We'd survived those early post-college years where life—for me at least—felt overwhelming and intensely unstable.

I know I am romanticizing this past—we also had a huge fights, we had our hearts broken, we got too drunk and fought over who would get to puke into the one toilet, etc.—but it was the first extended period of my adult life when I felt okay even some of the time, and so you'll forgive me if I recall it with such fondness.

A few days later, the owners of the building told us they were selling it. But even if they hadn't, the apartment would've split up eventually. The big forces of human life—marriage, careers, immigration policy—were pulling us in different directions. But our candle gave a lovely light.

Even though the war was covered twenty-four hours a day, very little background information ever entered the picture. The news talked a fair amount about the relationship between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq, for instance, but never paused to explain the theological differences between Shias and Sunnis, or the history of Iraq, or the political ideology of the Baathist movement. There was so much news—news that was forever breaking—that there was never time for context.

Susan Sontag wrote that "Depression is melancholy minus its charms." For me, living with depression was at once utterly boring and absolutely excruciating. Psychic pain overwhelmed me, consuming my thoughts so thoroughly that I no longer had any thoughts, only pain. In Darkness Visible, William Styron's wrenching memoir of depression, he wrote, "What makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there's mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul." I find hopelessness to be a kind of pain. One of the worst kinds. For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is prerequisite for my survival.

I remember coming home from work and lying on the peeling linoleum floor of what had been our kitchen, and looking through the Sprite bottle at the green parabolic rectangle of the kitchen window. I watched the bubbles inside the bottle clinging to the bottom, trying to hold on, but inevitably floating up to the top. I thought about how I couldn't think. I felt the pain pressing in on me, like it was an atmosphere. All I wanted was to be separated from the pain, to be free from it.

My thoughts whorled and swirled. I couldn't even think straight. I couldn't concentrate enough to read or write. I was in daily therapy, and taking new medication, but I felt certain it wouldn't work, because I didn't think the problem was chemical. I thought the problem was me, at my core. I was worthless, useless, helpless. I was less and less each day.

Although my recovery was halting and often precarious, I got better. It was probably the therapy and the medication, of course, but Elwood played his part. he showed me that you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved. Elwood offered me a kind of hope that wasn't bullshit, and in doing so helped me to see that hope is the correct response to the strange, often terrifying miracle of consciousness. Hope is not easy or cheap. It is true.

I hope you never find yourself on the floor of your kitchen. I hope you never cry in front of your boss desperate with pain. But if you do, I hope they will give you some time off and tell you what Bill told me: Now, more than ever, watch Harvey.

Ivanovic once said of the yips, "If you start thinking about how you come down the stairs and think about how each muscle is working, you can't go down the stairs." But if you've fallen down the stairs, it becomes impossible not to think about how you come down the stairs. "I'm a person who overthinks and overanalyzes everything," Ivanovic went on to say "so if you give me one thought, it creates a lot more."

Of course, just as anxiety can cause physiological problems, physiological problems can also cause anxiety. For professional athletes, the yips are a threat not just to their livelihood but also to their identity. The answer to the question "Who is Ana Ivanovic?" was invariably, "Ana Ivanovic is a tennis player." Rick Ankiel was a pitcher. Until the yips

But even after age or the yips steals away your control, you need not give up. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch defines courage by saying "It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway."

And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past—seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them—and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.

In her strange and beautiful interactive memoir Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal, published in 2016, she wrote, "If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many times then, really, do I get a look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let's just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory."

When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can't make it better. I'm reminded something of my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: "Don't just do something. Stand there."

We live in hope—that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.

It's horrifying, how much information can be accessed via Google about almost all of us. Of course, this loss of privacy has come with tremendous benefits—free storage of photos and video, chance to participate in large-scale discourse via social media, and the opportunity to easily keep in touch with friends from long ago.

But even though less of our lives belong to us and more of our lives belong to the companies that host and gather our browsing habits and hobbies and keystrokes, even though I am revolted by how easy it has become to scroll through the lives of the living and the dead, even though it all feels a bit too much like an Orwell novel . . . I can't outright condemn the googling of strangers.

During my training they told me that half of marriages end within a couple years of losing a child. Weakly, I asked the parents if they wanted to pray. The woman shook her head no. The doctor came in and said the kid was in critical condition. The parents only had one question, and it was one the doctor couldn't answer. "We'll do everything we can," She said, "but your kid may not survive." Both the parents collapsed, not against each other, but into themselves.

We are able to navigate the world knowing these things happen. My chaplaincy supervisor once told me "Children have always died. It is natural." That may be true but I can't accept it. I couldn't accept it sitting in my windowless family room, and I can't accept it now, as a father myself.

As an inveterate googler, I knew I could have just looked up his name, but I was too scared. To google would have been to know, one way or another. I'm reminded of that great line from Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: "The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him."

As with all the best sci-fi writers, Kurt Vonnegut was really good at seeing into the future. Way back in 1974, he wrote, "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

When people ask me why I live in Indianapolis when I could live anywhere, that's what I want to tell them. I am trying to create stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. And you gotta do that somewhere. When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after.

SOMETIMES I LIKE TO IMAGINE benevolent aliens visiting Earth. In my daydreams, these aliens are galactic anthropologists, seeking to understand the cultures, rituals, preoccupations, and divinities of various sentient species. They would conduct careful field research, observing us. They would ask open-ended questions, like "What, or whom, is in your view worthy of sacrifice?" and "What should be the collective goals of humanity?" I hope that these anthropologists would like us. We are, in spite of it all, a charismatic species.

We do get something in exchange, of course. Kentucky bluegrass provides a good surface for soccer and games of tag. Lawn grass cools the ground, and offers some protection from wind and water erosion. But there are better, if less conveniently beautiful, alternatives. One could, for instance, devote a front yard growing plants that humans can eat.

It strikes me as interesting that in contrast of proper gardening, lawn maintenance doesn't involve much physical contact with nature. You're mostly touching the machine that mow or edge the grass, not the plant itself. And if you've got the kind of Gatsby lawn we're all told to reach for, you can't even see the dirt beneath the thick mat of grass. And so mowing Kentucky bluegrass is an encounter with nature, but the kind where you don't get your hands dirty.

For more than a hundred years, the Indianapolis 500 has been examining a question that is of serious concern to people in the Anthropocene: What is the proper relationship between human and machine?

There's no escaping the uncomfortable fact that one of the thrills of racing is how close drivers get to the edge of disaster. As the legendary driver Mario Andretti put it, "If everything seems under control, you're not just going fast enough."

But I do think car racing accomplishes something—it takes both the person and the machine to the edge of possibility, and in the process, we get faster as a species. It took Ray Harroun six hours and forty-two minutes to drive the first five hundred miles at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; it took 2018 winner Will Power just under three hours.

But the Indy 500 isn't really about going fast; it's about going faster than everyone else, which reflects one of my top-level concerns about humanity: We cannot seem to resist the urge to win. Whether it's climbing El Capitan or going to space, we want to do it, but we also want to do it before anyone else. or faster than anyone else. This drive has pushed us forward as a species—but I worry it has also pushed us in the other directions.

WHEN MY FAMILY AND I PLAY MONOPOLY, a board game in which the goal is to bankrupt your fellow players, I sometimes think about Universal Paperclips, a 2017 video game created by Frank Lantz. In Universal Paperclips, you play the role of an artificial intelligence that has been programmed to create as many paperclips as possible. Over time, you produce more and more paperclips, until eventually you exhaust all of Earth's iron ore, whereupon you send probes to outer space to mine paperclip materials from other planets, and then eventually other solar systems. After many hours of play, you finally win the game: You've turned all the universe's available resources into paperclips. You did it. Congratulations. Everyone is dead.

There are many problems with Monopoly, but the reason the game has persisted for so long—it has been one of the world's bestselling board games for over eighty years—is that its problems are our problems: Like life, Monopoly unfolds very slowly at first, and then become distressingly fast at the end. Like life, people find meaning in its outcomes even though the game is rigged toward the rich and privileged, and insofar as it isn't rigged, it's random. And like life, your friends get mad if you take their money, and then no matter how rich you are, there's an ever-expanding void inside of you that money can never fill, but gripped by the madness of unregulated enterprise you nonetheless believe that if you just get a couple more hotels or take from your friends their few remaining dollars, you will at last feel complete.

I was in tenth grade when Super Mario Kart was released, and as far as my friends and I were concerned, it was the greatest video game ever. We spent hundreds of hours playing it. The game was interwoven into our high school experience that, even now, the soundtrack takes me back to a linoleum-floored dorm room that smelled like sweat and Gatorade. I can feel myself sitting on a golden microfiber couch that had been handed down through generations of students, trying to out-turn my friends Chip and Sean on the final race of the Mushroom Cup.

We almost never talked about the game while playing it—we were always talking over each other about our flailing attempts at romance or the ways we were oppressed by this or that teacher or the endless gossip that churns around insular communities like boarding schools. We didn't need to talk about Mario Kart, but we needed Mario Kart to have an excuse to be together—three or four of us squeezed on that couch, hip to hip. What I remember the most was the incredible—and for me, novel joy of being included.

The sort of things often happens in Mario Kart, because the question boxes know if you're in first place. If you are, you'll usually get a banana peel, or a coin, which are minimally useful. You'll never get one of those sweet bullets. But if you're in last place—because, say, you're an eight-year-old playing a grizzled Mario Kart veteran—you're much more likely to get lightning or Bullet Bill pr an infinite of speed-boost mushroom.