The End of Humanity

When you’re a Wanderer like me, the older you get, the more difficult it becomes to relate to your peers, because you slowly move more and more outside their sphere of understanding. The normal gameplay loop for the Human Sim involves realizing somewhere in adolescence that life is not all about you and what you want and more about living just for the sake of it. Most people realize this because it practically punches them in the face shortly after they mature, and they calm down and get busy putting in the work to find a mate, start a family, and help grind the species forward. For whatever reason, cognitive, genetic, or environmental, I have been cut out of this process somewhere in the realization stage. Or rather, I am just now reaching it – twenty years too late.

I’m comfortably middle aged at this point. I’ve avoided the trap of refusing to accept responsibility for who I am and projecting it outward in some form of public violence or domestic abuse, I also avoided the pit a lot of people with illnesses like mine fall into when, faced with their own incompatibility with the demands of life, seek to annihilate themselves as painlessly and unobtrusively as possible with drugs or drink. The second one was a bit more difficult to evade. In any case, by any reckoning as a schizoaffective, I am doing well for myself, but there are times when in this perpetual struggle for self-actualization I am faced with how far I have yet to climb – and it is daunting.

I spend too much time at home, in a virtual cell, looking at computer screens. I always have. My circle of acquaintances is very small. Most of my family is dead and it was always rather clannish and insular. Due to family strife those that remain are either estranged or unavailable. Neither me nor my brother could find a partner, and I can quite honestly see the evolutionary disadvantages in the Caco Line withering the branches of the Family Tree right before my eyes. This is extremely humbling and almost hopeless. And I don’t have the slightest idea what to do about it.

Functionally what this means is that I am stuck with a series of habits and hobbies that I should have abandoned two decades ago, and the people I try to relate to via these areas are mostly people half my age. The people my age who I could relate to on that basis have careers. They’re married. They have children. It’s creepy that I don’t. And furthermore, most of what I read and perceive insists that these circumstances were choices on my part, easily avoided, and I am solely culpable for what happened to put me here. I reject these assumptions, but it is not much of a leap from that assertion to developing the inability to change myself in any meaningful way, and I’m not really interested in that trap either. I must press on.

Of course, there are many economic advantages inherent in creating a perpetual class of infantilized consumers, primarily capable only of paying outrageous fees to consume comforting fluff, reactionary to societal pressures and easily driven toward whatever goal the overarching establishment sees fit to direct it. The amusing part is that both political sides of the aisle realize this, they just use different window dressing to present their argument. Suffice it to say, I suppose that conditions in mass market capitalism are advantageous for creating these Wanderers and it is rather mystifying that nobody seems to understand the end result of it: young men (and sometimes women) absolutely incapable of dealing with the demands of functionality as an adult and acting as captains of their own well-being. The result will always be maladaptive behavior.

One could easily jump from this awareness to the conclusion that we need to undo all the progress of the last hundred years: emphasize old fashioned values, place the nuclear family back at the center of our culture, discourage and repress alternative viewpoints and lifestyles as aberrant not necessarily because it’s the right thing to do, but because they weaken the foundational mechanics of society. I am sensitive to all these criticisms, but I don’t believe that this is the answer either. For mankind to progress much beyond its status of “glorified ape with battery powered toys” we must develop new rules for ourselves, and most importantly adapt ourselves to suit these new rules. The last bit will be the tricky part – what can change the nature of Man? All of this would require revolutionary changes to human comprehension.

Seems to me the only way to manage something like this is to rewrite a lot of the “Lizard Brain” that mankind relied on in its early history to keep from dying off. This would only be possible in a reasonably humane way by extending it out over the evolutionary scale – spending hundreds or thousands of years fostering a new cultural awareness. My inner cynic doubts that even this would be possible – the subconscious is too deep, too ingrained, and therefore the only way to countermand it is to delete it and replace it with something else entirely. This only seems possible with cybernetic hardware or powerful drugs, and the human rights violations required to achieve this would be almost incomprehensibly evil and destructive.

I guess what we’re left with here is a sort of middling compromise and gradual realignment so we can survive long enough to manage the ultimate final option for a sentient race – Transcendence. We may ironically find this essentially supernatural possibility a lot more feasible than cold fusion, interstellar travel, or other such considerations for growth into a truly galactic species. Maybe this is the path that all of the “intelligent” races go down, this one or self-destruction. One thought that will never leave my mind though is that any result we achieve in this vein would be incomprehensible to the beings we are today – so what’s the difference between them really?