A slow death

It's better to burn out than fade away - Kurt Cobain

In the wake of Covid-19 and ever looming climate change, I just realized we are headed towards times of uncertainty in a way that we might fade away than burning out.

People of our times*, barring exceptions, have had a somewhat predictable lives. It's like you plan your studies, job, family and even retirement. If not 100%, one can fairly materialize their plans if they work towards it. There's comfort in predictability. Now talking about predictability, there's comfort in predictability (certainty of death) even if we are headed towards apocalypse like say in next few months. In fact people have partied thinking planet will come to an end. Though dying is hard, there's no pain of unpredictability in an apocalypse situation. People can let go of all their attachments and prepare to accept the eventuality. However, the situation in between the predictability of stable lives and predictability of apocalypse is deeply problematic. And I think that's where we are headed to. 

Leading epidemiologists are saying pandemics will become more common. Climate experts are predicting drought, famine, floods will become common. By 2040, these catastrophes will become more common than our elections. But each one of this by itself (like corona for example) doesn't give a feel of apocalypse. Therefore, we try to see them as inconveniences and strive to get back to our predictable lives and that's where the real problem lies. Let us try to understand this in the context of the Covid-19 outbreak. It does not appear (at least not yet) like an impending doom but a grave inconvenience. Possible infection and hospitalization, work from home, loss of revenue, etc would trouble us but does not provide enough to look for an apocalypse kind of situation. Therefore, we want to fight this to get our predictable lives back. In times of apocalypse, we could have let go. But now we hold on and thereby setting up ourselves for major disappointments because the frequency and intensity of these inconveniences is only going to increase with time. 

It might be better to burn out than fade away but the chances of that appear slim.

* Only referring to people from my immediate surroundings with similar socieconomic backgrounds and maybe the privileged class. Highly disadvantaged people are outside the scope of this post.