My attention had become so fractured, and my world had become so loud, that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was paying attention to. But when I put myself into the reviews as Sarah suggested, I felt like for the first time in years, I was at least trying to pay attention to what I pay attention to.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans

As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.

I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety—terms that did not exist a few decades ago but are now widespread phenomena.

is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.

Climate change is probably the biggest shared challenge facing twenty-first-century humans, and I fear future generations will judge us harshly for our failure to do much about it. They will likely learn in their history classes—correctly—that as a species, we knew carbon emissions were affecting the planet’s climate back in the 1970s. And they

Here was a world without whys, where life was meaninglessness all the way down. Modernity had come to war, and to the rest of life.