Why We’re Running Out of Time

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We’ve been discussing how the future broke.

And today I want to reflect on a certain aspect of that topic.

We’re running out of time.

These days, I feel my mortality tight in my chest.

It’s not that I’m unwell. It’s not that kind of feeling.

It’s that I know we’re running out of time.

And I wonder. Where do we go from here?

What happens to a civilization that’s running out of time?

Let me explain what I mean by that.

Why This Decade Mattered

This decade. History will say it was one of the most crucial in the human story.

So many challenges come our way at once, and so many of them were existential, to use what’s now becoming an almost cliched phrase.

You might have imagined, then, that we’d have pulled together, and acted.

That we’d risen to the occasion.

But we didn’t.

All these Grand Challenges, Existential Threats, whatever you want to call them. The truth is that we’ve failed at them. All of them.

In not a single case have we made “progress,” and I suppose that’s a word I don’t like to use anymore, because these aren’t political points I’m making. I’m simply saying that we didn’t address any of these challenges, not one.

From climate change, where emissions still rise, to learning how to make the basics of our civilization, concrete, steel, glass, etcetera, without fossil fuels, to democracy, which is still in sharp decline, to inequality—by the end of this decade, we’ll see the world’s first trillionaires—to the striking loss of rising generational prosperity.

We didn’t solve a single problem. We didn’t even really address a single one.

I find that chilling.

It unsettles me, in a visceral way. If I think too hard about it, I begin to feel upset. My heart pounds. My skin prickles.

Because all this means something.

The World and Us

And as I much as I try not to care, I can’t escape that part of me. Not yet. I haven’t hardened myself in just that way. I’m not strong enough, in the way this age demands, indifferent, ruthless, narcissistic, I suppose, not to care.

So that leaves me in a place that I don’t want to be. I try not to think about it all. And yet there it is, just beneath the surface, lurking like a serpent.

Do you feel this way? I wonder.

If I could care less, I would.

But I’m not made that way. I’m my grandfathers’ grandson. One was a doctor, the other helped build a country. I’m my father’s and mother’s son. They aren’t the kind of people who could turn their backs.

So neither can I.

I long to, though. I want to walk away from it all, most days.

All of it. Why do I care? Should I? I’m not a young man anymore. I failed at becoming the kind of man I should have been, I think to myself sometimes.

Or did the world fail us?

I don’t know. I worry. I watch the people go by. The cafe busies, and then empties. There I am.

Wondering. Trying not to care.

Failing, in the way snow falls in winter.

Inevitably. I was made like this. And so was the world.

Here we are, watching each other, furtively.

We’re Running Out of Time

I don’t know what to do with all this. I suspect you don’t, either. The feelings I’m trying to describe. The grief, the longing, the hurt of it all. The future should have been different. But now we’re out of time. This was the time we should have done something, anything, about something, anything. But here we are. In America, is it 2024? Or 2016?

Time is paralyzed in our civilization. It’s back is broken. Who committed this crime?

I come back from the cafe. There I am, smoking a cigarette, outside. Snowy’s sitting there. The city rushes by.

My neighbor M arrives. She laughs, tosses her red hair. I quit, you know, she says.

Then you shouldn’t have one, I say, being a little wicked, taunting her.

Will you help me write a song, I ask.

She raises an eyebrow.

I mean that I write songs in French and English. You’re French. My French is rusty, broken. And I need to find a word for…

Of course! She says. Off we go. She’s excited, happy, curious. I’m thrilled to have a little partner.

This is the world, too.

We make these little connections.

In French, it’s easier to express this sense I have. Tristesse. Douleur.

Sadness, pain. The words don’t carry the same weight in English. They don’t sting you in the heart the same way, if they do at all.

I’m Running Out of Words, and We’re Running Out of Time

I struggle, now.

The words used to come so easily to me. I’d write manifestos that’d light fires.

But now I’m out of words. I don’t have many left. They don’t seem to express what I need them to, anymore. And so I try…new languages, new forms, new ways.

We’re out of time.

Nous n'avons plus de temps.

That’s closer, I think to myself. “We don’t have any more time.” But not quite.

We’re running out of time, forever.

Nous manquons de temps, pour toujours

No, not quite, either.

How about?

Nous sommes à court d’éternité.

We’re shortening, cutting, running out of eternity.

That’s what I mean, I think, in a truer way. I feel those words. They express what I mean, in a way I obsess over these days.

As I run out of words.

As we run out of time.

The Civilizational Price of This Lost Decade

You see, what we’ve done this decade will resound, and change the trajectory of our civilization. What we haven’t done, I mean.

Our inaction, inattention, indifference, to all these Great Challenges. And now we’re out of time, unless you imagine that suddenly, the next decade, two, three, will be anything but politicians trotting out the same old meaningless promises, the same incremental policies, the same barely there ideas.

All of that matters. It places us now on a radically different trajectory.

Maybe, I think to myself, we could have economies that delivered. Maybe we could have stopped what we’re doing to the planet. We could have tried to reinvent our social contracts. Averted violence, educated the young, invested in one another—doesn’t matter.

The point is that any of that, really, would have changed our trajectory, lifted it, strengthened it, fortified it.

Having done nothing at all, we are now approaching a trajectory of…

What word you like from me?

I think to myself, furiously. Ruin. No, neoliberals won’t like that. How about: self-destruction? No, sounds too Hollywood. What about: decline? Not quite, it’s not as if things are somehow going downhill at the pace of centuries. I need something more…

This is how I run out of words. Second-guessing myself. Trying to make them palatable. Trying to fit these uncomfortable ideas into failed paradigms. Shoehorning difficult conclusions into sugar coated candy. It’s impossible.

Nous nous ravageons.

We are ravaging ourselves.

In French, I can express this idea, perhaps, in the way it deserves to be said and understood. We ravage. We, we ravage.

Nous sommes à court d’éternité.

These are the only words I have now.

M says, I have to go to work now. We’ll have coffee, and write a song, OK? She walks away.

This is the world, and this is us. These are the words I write for a broken future.

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