How I Feel Watching My Predictions Come True

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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I want to speak with you openly. In a genuine way. About what it’s like.

The cycle goes like this.

We warn of catastrophe. Here, “we” means people like me, and you can include you if you want, or extend it to scientists, scholars, writers, whomever you want.

The warnings are ignored, dismissed, mocked, minimized, etcetera. That’s by the “good” side. The side that purports to be interested and concerned.

The other one, I suppose, has descended into a kind of madness, so it’s unfair to expect much from them.

Disaster strikes. Catastrophe arrives. Right on cue. Just as…predicted.

Leaders grope for words. Institutions fumble for action. A feeble attempt is made at sweeping up the mess. A pall of surprise and disbelief hangs over it all.

Lived are ruined, futures destroyed, human possibility shattered.

And then it starts all over again.

The Existential Horror of an Age of Collapse

I watch all this with a sense of horror.

I want to emphasize that. A sense of horror.

I’m often asked how I feel. The truth is: I feel horror. It makes me feel ill some days. It’s cold and jagged and wrong, like touching your own bones.

I feel that I’m in a horror movie. You know the kind. Don’t go in the basement, you’re shouting.

They walk down the stairs.

In a horror movie, it’s a little delicious, though, because the point is to watch someone tempted by the devil. And to, in the end, take pity on their poor soul.

But life shouldn’t resemble this.

I shouldn’t wake up with this sense of horror.

Over and over again.

If you want to know the truth, it cripples me. I lose my tongue. I struggle for words. I don’t know what to say to people anymore, when they ask me. I’ve gone numb from the horror.

Something inside me shouts: tell them! Just keep telling them! But another one says: hush. Better to stay quiet. The time for warnings is over.

There is no warning left we can give anymore, people like us. Those who watch with this sense of horror.

It’s not as I’m the real victim, as we say these days, here, in all this.

Of course I’m not. Those whose lives are ravaged by all these catastrophes are.

But we intersect in this place of horror, I think.

And life? It shouldn’t feel like this.

The Echoes of Suffering in the Human Universe

So what is this sense of horror I feel?

It’s an echo of what they’re going through.

I think about what it must be like to lose your home, your future, your belongings. To watch your family suffer.

I can’t help it. Some part of this pain resonates in me. Its frequency hits my soul and sets it alight, ringing like a great silver bell of grief.

This is what makes those of us who warn different, I suppose. I think many of you are like me. You can’t help being the way you are. The way the world feels just pours into you, like a river, like a tide.

And so feeling an echo of this terrible pain, we learn, we listen, we watch, we warn.

Our goal, as it ever was, is to find some limit to human suffering. To existential suffering. To take the universe in our arms and soothe its pain away. An impossible task.

But some of us are built like this. Its the way being made our souls.

As much as we wish we could tune it out, like I said, our souls resonate at this frequency. They are attuned in a certain way, perhaps because we’ve suffered ourselves, in special and strange ways. You know the story by now of how the light can kill me. I know what it is to exist right at the edge of life and death.

This sense of horror I feel comes from there, I muse, sometimes. I don’t want anyone to have to live at that edge.

The horror, for me, is real.

Why I Dread Every Day

I predict these disasters, these catastrophes. I’m hardly alone in this. Many do, by now, scientists, scholars, artists, and so on.

They come true.

And the horror just grows, day by day. A horror movie ends. This…thing…this wretched thing doesn’t.

The horror isn’t just about watching people suffer. It’s subtler than that. It’s watching them suffer needlessly, to put it in a crude way.

The cycle. We warn. They ignore us, the ones that keep on telling us how wonderful and noble and “joyful” they are, putting forth the least effort possible at fixing things, all of which led us here, to this Minimum Viable Future.

Disaster strikes, they cry out with surprise, express shock, send condolences, lift a finger or two to try and aid those who are hurt, and go right back to…

Sleep, child, sleep.

And it goes on and on.

So by now, the horror isn’t just that all this happening. It’s that it’s happening the way it is.

Horror is a kind of dread.

I dread every day now. Genuinely. Something in my soul, I think, broke, and you don’t have to cry for me, I’d bet that many climate scientists or social thinkers etc share that sentiment. We are in a kind of despair deeper than the seeds not even yet stirring in the soil. You see us choking up on the airwaves, pouring our hearts out in posts, trying to preach, teach, educate, change something, anything.

And we do that, I think, to fight the dread.

The dread doesn’t just come from us knowing these things will happen. It comes from knowing they’ll happen, and this bizarre ritual will just go on repeating itself. Surprise, it’s the End of the World! Hey, look, guys, who could’ve expected any of this! Go ahead and insert whatever form of taunting or mockery you want, that’s sort of the point, which is about dread.

We know that no matter what we say, it will make no difference.

What Nothing Feels Like

We’ve spent lifetimes. Learning. Understanding. Comprehending. How does this work, this thing called a planet, a society, an economy, a world, a civilization? How does it cohere, hang together, how does it fall apart and disintegrate?

All of our collective wisdom counts for nothing. It means less than nothing. To our leaders, we’re the dangerous ones, even more so than Trump, because, hey, at least they listen to him.

We’re the real enemy. The ones to be silenced, ignored, minimized, painted as fools, dismissed scornfully. Hey, look, those guys think the planet’s on fire. LOL! Ha-ha. Look over there! Those idiots think that economies which’ve been stagnant for decades fuel fascism! Chuckle. Hey, check those guys out! They think science and knowledge matter!

Am I being too acerbic? Maybe. I relent. Let me try to express why.

That’s what the dread’s made of. Not that we’re going to get called stupid names, but that we’ve wasted our lives.

We’ve wasted our lives, learning these lessons, about how to fix things, solve problems, make systems work. Maybe in another age, another civilization, another time, they might’ve mattered. In this one? We’re the idiots. We’re the fools, the morons, the ones who’ve…wasted our lives…learning lessons we can’t teach…absorbing wisdom that can’t be shared…soaking up knowledge that our leaders, societies, institutions all reject, flatly, in the way that churches once…

You know.

The Scarecrow and the Harvest

All of this sounds petty. Like a grievance, mixed with a jeremiad. I know that.

What do you want from me?

Do you want me to…warn?

Look guys, he says that it’s an Age of Catastrophe. LOL!

How many times have I said that? And…never mind. How many times have maybe even you complained?

I don’t know what people want from me anymore, I complain to myself, like a petulant child. But the adult in me knows the answer.

They don’t want anything. Meaning: there’s nothing we have to teach, say, explain, discuss, observe, speak, that can be learned. Not now, not anymore. Or at least me, or at least that’s how it feels.

Before we entered this era, perhaps. But you can hardly warn of a house on fire when it already is, but everyone’s decided that it isn’t. Then you’re just the boy who cried wolf, and never mind if Little Red Riding Hood really does get eaten. It’s bad for the brand.

So I ask myself every day, but I know the answer. Nothing. There’s nothing people want from you and me. They just want decent lives again, and that’s perfectly understandable, even if it’s not going to happen, because, well, here’s the part where I point out I won’t warn of the Bad Stuff anymore.

We’ve wasted our lives. I don’t mean to include you. But I do think many like me might well share that sentiment. There was no point to learning, knowing, understanding. It was a futile task. A noble one, perhaps, in the eyes of a bygone age, that valued science, literature, art, truth, knowledge.

But now? We’re in a different place, a different time, one where we’re all just grasping and gasping for survival. In times like those, when the harvest is desperate, the only kind of figure who warns anymore?

A scarecrow.

I’m tired of being one, so I won’t warn you anymore. I watch the city, learning my last lesson. I’ve wasted my life. There’s nothing left for me to teach or say, unless I want to be the scarecrow in a ritual where the fields are set on fire. No thanks. Midnight falls. I smoke a cigarette. Lovers stroll by. They grin at Snowy. I smile. What else do you do when you’ve wasted your life on nothing?

I don’t know where that leaves us.

With nothing, I suppose. I can handle that. At least that’s a beginning.

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