“I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.”

— Donald Trump, when asked how he manages stress on Larry King Live in 2004.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

This Trump quote surfaced recently in my browsing, and once again I was struck by how humanistically it reads to me, despite my relative certainty that the speaker in no way cares about the cataclysmic death he’s describing.

When I thought about why, the word futility came to mind. There is a humanism in asserting the essential futility of life: that no matter how you live it, it comes to an end; no matter how much you try to save or care for others, their lives will inevitably end too.

When considering hyperobjects like climate change or incurable disease this tragedy comes to the fore. You can spend your entire life trying to save a few trees in a small park in New York City, meanwhile the global temperature rises another 1.5 degrees.

I remember being eight or nine years old and lying awake in terror late at night, having learned about the inevitable heat death of the universe at school that day. At that age, although I’d had pets that had died, the reality of my own life coming to an end was still beyond reach. I hadn’t yet gone through the process of separating my own perspective from the external universe, so learning about the death of the universe was the closest I could come to conceptualizing the end of my own life.

Futility can be a poetic and even transcendent emotion in certain contexts. It’s one of the feelings you have to actively deny if you don’t want to slip into a deep chronic depression. Recognition of futility often leads to grief, as you have to accept the inevitability of future or current loss. It works best when it glances across you, as when you suddenly become aware of the fleetingness of a beautiful moment in the middle of experiencing it.

In terms of narrative structure for fiction this can be quite beautiful: you watch a protagonist fight and struggle and endure a lengthy journey through unfamiliar territories, only for them to realize that all of the effort was for nothing. Or you knowingly observe an obsessive struggle to complete an impossible task, admiring the refusal to back down in the fact of unwinnable odds. It’s one of those pains that feels exquisite.

But the sinister side of futility is that it leads to a kind of ruthless nihilism in which anything can be justified against the essential meaninglessness of existence. Ergo the futility of all action. In that framing there is no point to anything, and therefore you’re free to exert any and all powers towards any ends.

So like ice, it’s something to briefly press your fingertips against; that momentary sensation is intense, but too long and it begins to numb.

The last thought I have on this topic is that futility and nihilism tend to conflate themselves with pragmatism and realism. But any reflection on history, no matter how superficial, immediately produces a different constant: of enormous upheaval and constant change.

I was inspired to begin this blog as I read through the archives of Mark Fisher’s k-punk, which circles the idea of the end of history. But AI is on the horizon for everyone now, and with it the sense that a huge new era in history is only beginning.

More on that topic to come.