Is humanity on a mission?
Last week some ladies in blue went on a mission. Are we all on one too?
World-building a mundane future
I started this Substack one month ago as a side project to my side project. As some of you know, I’ve been writing a novel — an existential work that takes place 7,000 years in the future.
Unlike any other novel I’ve read that is set similarly far from now, this work is not science fictional. It relies on no new or broken laws of physics. Nor is it fantastical. Nor is it dystopian. The world I built is simply…topian. It’s life for humans in the far future that is more or less like life for humans in the here and now.
It’s a world in which all humans achieve a living standard on par with advanced economies today. It’s a world in which there are self-driving vehicles and economically produced nuclear fusion power. But it’s a world in which no new major breakthrough technologies are hereafter discovered. And so it’s a world that is highly recognizable to people living in advanced economies today.
This should seem harmless. Outright boring even. Yet it troubles people.
Some call me and my mundane future world short-sighted. Some tell me it just doesn’t feel right. More than a few just say, “What about AI?” or “What about quantum physics?” One person even accused me of “throwing a wet blanket” on humanity’s aspirations. Whatever they say, most people, in one way or another, exhibit discomfort with the idea of a topian future.
I get all that. Having lived in the 20th and 21st centuries, I’ve grown up with all the future biases modern human culture imposes upon us (see this post for discussion of those). These biases cause us to expect the future to become ever and ever different and, in the process, unimaginable and unimaginably better. It’s a let down to think otherwise.
Another bias about the future revealed
But as I’ve shared my novel draft and its setting in recent months — in author workshops, reading groups, and informal discussions — I’ve perceived another bias about the future I hadn’t previously considered. That bias is the vague but pervasive sense that humanity is on a mission.
Here are two reactions I’ve received to my work in recent readings. I offer them as examples of this bias.
There is a scene in my novel in which a teenage boy is thinking about his date to prom. The reaction I received to this (my paraphrasing):
“In the year 9000, we better have bigger things to be worrying about than teenagers going to proms.”
There is another scene in which a teacher is giving a lecture to students. The reaction (again, my paraphrasing):
“It’s great that, even though it’s so far in the future, people are still just doing their thing and getting on with their lives.”
The first example very directly expresses this bias that humanity is on a mission. Whatever humans will be doing in the future, it will be more important…so important in fact that something so fundamental to the lived human experience as romance will not even feature in it. (That sounds like fun…right?)
The second example is indirect. It’s a passive expression of surprise that humans just might be leading normal lives a few thousand years from now. In expressing such surprise, this reader acknowledges implicitly that that’s not what was in their mind beforehand.
Many other reactions I’ve received fall in line with these.
An overwhelming question
I get it. But I have to ask:
If humans in the future won’t be living normal human lives, what is it that they will be doing? What important goal will humans dedicate their lives to, what mission will we be on — either individually or collectively — such that we will want to, or have to, suppress “normal life”?
I don’t have a satisfactory answer. (If you do, please share!)
I suspect there isn’t one. We aren’t on a mission, and are never going to be. Not in a grand sense that will change the lived human experience for average people living average lives in all the time that will follow our own existence.
On the contrary, I believe that in a hundred years, or in a thousand, or in a million (if humans are still around), we’ll be eating, and drinking, having friends and romances, pursuing personal goals, raising families, helping our community, laughing and crying, and doing all the other things that are inherent to living a life.
And even if we take over the galaxy in the process, or we spend parts of our lives uploaded into the Matrix, we’ll still be doing those things. Why wouldn’t we want to?
A different question
What does it say about humans that we harbor this bias about the future? Why do we want to feel like we are on a mission?
I can think of two reasons — really two sides of the same coin:
The “Pull Reason”: The thought of a better, more important future (in whatever vague sense each of us imagines) can give purpose and therefore meaning to our lives. The idea that we are moving toward something better is appealing. That sense is powerful. It can even serve as a replacement for religion. This sense, in other words, is a pull, or an encouragement, toward having this bias.
The “Push Reason”: On the flip side, the thought of a future that is just more of the same can strip meaning from the things we do now in our life…as if we’re not working toward anything. When things stop changing for the better, we lose purpose and meaning. Instead, we have to confront the bleak, existential, flat, unchanging plane of existence. This line of thought may not be so nice for many. It pushes us away to embrace a bias that covers it up.
(By the way, it occurs to me as I write this that dystopian stories perhaps are a way of resetting the struggle. A world that’s turned to hell gives us something to fight back against — a purpose to which we can re-dedicate our lives and our futures).
I’m sorry if this discussion troubles the reader. It’s not meant to. I don’t mean to be a wet blanket.
But shedding our biases about the future, even if it’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable, need not cast us into the depths of despair.
The broadly embraced biases we hold today about our future are, I believe, learned behaviors. They have to be.
Members of our species, homo sapiens, have walked the Earth for 300 thousand years. Humans (members of the various species that make up the genus homo) have inhabited this planet for nearly three million. That’s 60,000 and 600,000 generations of humans, respectively that have preceded us. All of them had complex thoughts. All laughed and cried, experienced joy and suffering. All of them lived human lives. Just like us.
Unlike us, most of our predecessors saw little change in their lives. They lived like their forebears, and they expected their descendants to live just like them. They had no reason to expect otherwise.
I take comfort from that. If they, devoid of the biases we harbor about the future, abided such an existence long enough to bring us into being, so, I think, can we.