Parameters: Calculating the limit of death

The third in a series of meditations on the Benefits of Collapse Acceptance.

Karen Perry’s Fifteen Benefits of Collapse Acceptance give us a vocabulary to talk about something that’s difficult to put into words. This series explores the Benefits, in intermittent dispatches.

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One advantage of collapse is that it removes the future. Planetary catastrophe will be upon us within a couple of years, or maybe five, or, just maybe, ten. So we don’t really need to be planning for long years of senescence. We won’t have time to senesce! (I.e. we won’t be getting old.)

With the future gone, in the here and now we trade our imaginary long-term security for the ability to take action in the present day. We embrace Urgency (the second Benefit) to achieve Freedom (the first Benefit). Our calculations change.

Of course, we need enough to live. If we’re not living off the land (and who among us is?), then we need to pay for water, food, shelter, etc. — the necessities of life. But we do not need to store up large amounts of cash and property to support a future self who will never exist. (And in any case, nowadays it’s impossible to store up money, because the greedy rich are keeping it all to themselves.)

Ideally, we would have a plan to spend all our money so that the last penny drops at the very moment of our death. But we cannot know the timing precisely enough to make that calculation. The best we can do is to imagine an “asymptotic curve” in which our assets approach zero as we approach our demise. Such a curve has no end, but it does have a “limit” — the zero which denotes our passing.

Such esoteric calculation distracts from the important truth: We have been seduced by a vision of the world as our infinite playground. Purchases! Property! Entertainment! Travel to exotic locations (where other people used to live)! We have been tricked into abandoning a natural connection with our home for a frenzied pursuit of satisfaction which must always elude us.

Our civilization is based on the lie that more is better: more territory, more wealth, more power. Our obsession with “discovery” and “exploration” has led us to the very limits of our world. We now inhabit everywhere there is to inhabit. And we’re killing it all.

There is nowhere else to go. Here and now is all we have. Give up the future. Center all your planning on today. Let the curves of your destiny tend naturally to zero.

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