2025 has been a lot of things for me.
It’s been a year of change, a year of re-calibrating, and it’s been a year that’s been shrouded in the real possibly that this is the 11th hour for our species on earth, or at least of our quality of life as we’ve known it. Maybe that sounds dramatic, or impossible, but this year it really hit home for me that to avoid total collapse we (humans) need to radically change our course, yet we’ve built nearly all our incentive structures in a way that makes that near impossible. Maybe we have five years left, maybe ten, maybe it’s a “soft” collapse, I don’t know — but it seems to be the case that in my lifetime there will be a major inflection point where we either pull through and transform into something new, or experience some kind of major breakdown of life as we know it (or maybe both).
I just spent the last month around a group that’s working on solutions to this existential risk, people who are genuinely brilliant and collaborating with some of the best minds in the world, and I’m sad to report that while they can clearly diagnose the deeper structural problems, no one has solutions they are confident will actually work. In fact, the people who understand the system most deeply tend to be the least confident, because they see how many well-intentioned proposals collapse under the weight of the larger dynamics at play: misaligned incentives, competitive pressure, and large-scale coordination failure that reliably reward short-term advantage over long-term collective well-being. It’s quite the pickle we’re in.
Not surprisingly, the tendency after understanding all this is to feel defeated. Then, when that feeling of defeat is too much for our hearts we resort to nihilism, because at least that allows us to move on with our lives, given there is only so much most individuals can do to change the future.
While I don’t have any good answers to how we’re going to pull through, there is a thought I’ve been sitting with this last week that I believe is worth sharing (and feeling).
Humanity is worth keeping.
I don’t always feel great about humanity. I see the way we’re disconnected from our bodies, isolated and addicted to screens — murder, rape, genocide, slavery, and the myriad of horrors we commit against each other, not to mention what we do to animals and the natural world. It’s hard to look at our species and want to find reasons to keep it, but that’s exactly why we should.
Maybe the thing that we’re really fighting against is a collective depression that’s leading us to all consider a type of society-level suicide. Even for folks that are more confident we will pull through and figure it out, most of them would acknowledge that there’s at least a small chance things go south. Why aren’t we fighting harder to not lose this thing that is so precious to us? Why are we allowing ourselves to give up so easily when what’s at stake is everything?
I know for me, the answer is that I forget how beautiful we are. How precious it is to be alive. That’s one of the things children do for us, they reconnect us to the sense of wonder and magic that’s possible.
I’m constantly in awe of the kindness of strangers. Something as simple as a person holding the door for me, then looking in my eyes as if to say “I see you” often makes me emotional. I love the drop-off areas at airports. It’s so beautiful, almost cinematic, watching two people hug just a little longer and say “I love you” and really mean it. They know that even though we have the magic of telephones and video calls, there is nothing like the feeling of being with someone you love and feeling them pressed up against you.
I’m lucky enough to get to play music and sing for people on a regular basis, and although I certainly have cranky moments where I don’t appreciate the magic I get to take part in, there are so many times that the music coming from me moves someone in a way that is beyond words. Sometimes they cry, sometimes they cheer and sometimes they just close their eyes and mouth the words to the song. I get to witness that, and it moves me too. What a blessing it is for us to be able to experience something like music, that allows us to feel so deeply.
One of the things I would miss most if we experienced a society-level collapse is movies. The reverence and sacredness of being in a dark room with a group of humans, all feeling together, hoping together, celebrating together — it’s something that when done right, stays with me for weeks, even months afterwards. What an honor to so effortlessly be the recipient of the hard work from so many artists, craftsmen and devoted filmmakers.
I love how many older folks feel like my parents. Although they know nothing about me, they choose to offer me kindness, a warm glance, or a loving smile as though I were their own son. When I was five years old I took a flight by myself to see my grandparents (this was back when you could walk up to the gate without a ticket so it was easier for kids to fly alone). When I boarded the plane I sat in a seat next to an older couple, and the gentleman pulled out a deck of cards and asked if I wanted to play. I loved playing cards, and I taught him how to play a few of my favorite games and we played almost the whole flight (I think he already knew those games but let me teach him anyway). At the end of the flight he thanked me for playing with him, then handed me the deck of cards. “This is for you, keep it”, he said. I was over the moon. I left the plane like I was walking on clouds. I can still remember exactly how it felt, almost four decades later.
It’s easy to forget how beautiful people are, especially when more and more of our lives are lived online, getting replaced with a digital simulation. It’s harder to understand the beauty of people through a screen, our animal bodies don’t get it. It’s a bit like how my dog doesn’t recognize me on a video call, and only responds slightly to the sound of my voice through the speaker. I’m so often delighted by how wonderful people are when I experience them in person and I believe that feeling is built-in to what it means to be human. We are tribal animals, and no amount of anti-social rhetoric will convince me otherwise. All it takes is one person who needs help to see how much we all want to help each other, how much we want to work together. Right now, in every city on earth, there are humans looking out for other humans they don’t know and aren’t related to. We do it all the time. We watch each other’s kids, we alert people to danger, and we treat each other like the big human family that we actually are, even if at times we slip up. Our default is loving each other.
Maybe you’ve seen that too, or maybe your human experience hasn’t been as kind as mine. I’ve been pretty lucky, for sure. I don’t know how the future will play out, and I certainly hope the predictions about impending collapse are wrong, because there is a lot to be grateful for and so much worth keeping.
I’ll leave you with a short story.
In 2017 I had the honor and privilege of hosting Claire Wineland as a speaker for a TEDx event I was organizing. In a phone call with her before the event she shared something about death that has stuck with me. Claire had spent one-third of her life in the hospital, having lived with a terminal illness and nearly dying when she was 13. I thought she was going to tell me about overcoming the fear of death and how that has empowered her life, but that’s not what she shared.
She told me the story of a girl who had recently reached out to her for advice. This girl was crippled by a constant fear of death, but she was totally healthy, and had no more reason to fear death than anyone else. She wanted Claire’s help in being less afraid. Claire said to me that she used to tell people to not be afraid, that death was inevitable, but she chose to say something different to this girl, and I’ll paraphrase it in my own words.
The fear of death is also a salute to life.
There are people that tell us to not be afraid, to transcend the fear of death, to make death “no big deal” — but that’s not it. Certainly we don’t need to let the fear consume us, but on the other hand — if you love being alive, if you have something to stick around for — it’s okay to be afraid of dying.
The fear of dying isn’t a weakness, it‘s a tribute. It’s us kicking and screaming to hold on to this precious thing that’s being taken from us against our will. If we didn’t love something, we wouldn’t be afraid to lose it.
Good feelings about humanity aren’t enough to make the kinds of changes necessary to save us from potential collapse, but what’s also true is that we have no chance of success if we’re not connected to the beauty of what we’re fighting for. We’re not protesting to stop something we hate, we’re fighting to save something we love.
The risk of humanity being over is hard to conceptualize, so it gets lost in a sea of helplessness and nihilism, but it doesn’t have to if we hold dear the things that make being alive so precious.
Humanity is worth keeping, and as we enter into an unprecedented age of new technology and complexity that will test our ability to collectively steer the right course, it may be that this little bit of optimism and love provides the determination we need to not give up on a better future.
