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 terry 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.