Author: Justin DaMetz

Father of Julian and Evelyn, Husband of Tabitha, Christian theologian, writer, 5th grade teacher, book addict, displaced Middle-Earth resident

The world is probably ending, but I don’t feel too bad about that

One of my pet fascinations/habits over the last year or so has been what you might call “optimistic catastrophizing.” What I mean by this oxymoron is that I have been kind of obsessed with the end of civilization1 and how that might come about and what that would mean for how people live their lives. I have a lot of thoughts around this, and I should probably write more about them.2

Anyways, I don’t necessarily view this end of things with a worried or pessimistic view, beyond my natural concern for the harm that would come to many, many people. The reason I observe things “optimistically” is because I tend to think some sort of “end” to civilization as we understand it today – and have understood it since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps even the Enlightenment – is somewhat inevitable, possibly within my lifetime, fairly probable within that of my children. Whether its environmental degradation, massive political unrest, permanent economic disruption, or hubristic and fatal technological development (or perhaps a combination of all these things), I do think big, irreversible changes are coming, after which life will look radically different for everyone. This is in terms of social interaction, economic activity, travel, consumption, entertainment: all of it will mostly go away, or at best, become extremely difficult to access and participate in.

But I stay optimistic precisely because I see it as inevitable, and thus something in need of preparation for, at least psychologically (I’m not really interested in survivalist/prepper-style hoarding and planning, mostly because I think the idea that one can plan logistically for that kind of thing is really hubristic and misguided). These shifts are coming, and we need to be ready for the day when we can’t simply hop in our car and drive to the local grocery for everything we might want to consume, or click on the television or phone for endless entertainment and distraction. Despair is not helpful, nor is it something Christians are allowed to traffic in. So, I try to stay optimistic, in the sense that tomorrow really is not promised in any way, and each day will bring us struggles and challenges and even tragedy we must confront, that giving up and curling into a ball is not really an option, especially for those of us with children and family and other human beings we love and feel a sense of responsibility for. To reference my post on friendship from yesterday, another demand of human relationship that many people shy away from is that of hope: that is, the hope that no matter how bad things may be, the love and fellowship we have with one another is not dependent on any outside product or construction or value. We can survive it all simply through our attachments to one another and our commitment to mutual care, love and interaction.

All this is a long set up for me to praise this piece by Oliver Burkeman on his fantastic newsletter “The Imperfectionist.”3 Titled “It’s worse than you think”, it is a wonderful piece of writing that successfully pulls off the trick of being terribly pessimistic and oddly uplifting all at the same time. Here is a taste:

Or maybe your issue is feeling anxious about what the future holds, in your life or the world at large. You feel as though you need to engage in constant planning, or reassurance-seeking from others, or some other form of psychological self-defence, in order to cushion yourself from the worst of the uncertainty. But it’s worse than you think! In fact, anything could happen at any moment. The future is always entirely uncertain. And while planning has its uses, it will never do the slightest thing to alter what the spiritual author Robert Saltzman calls your “total vulnerability to events.”

That’s….oddly comforting. You can try to plan for every eventuality. But honestly? Everything is going to go to shit at some point, because we are limited beings and entropy is a fact of the universe and we just can’t foresee every permutation things could take. You could try to plan for it all. But chances are, you’re gonna be wrong. And in the end, we all are fatally wrong at some point.

My optimism arises here (where I think most people would turn to nihilism) because this is a pretty freeing notion, if you think about it. Stop grasping after the future. Live today. Love today. Experience today. You can’t stop the inevitable, and the end is in fact inevitable, whether you like it or not. Yeah, things are gonna hurt at some point. Everything you built may come crashing down. You never know. You can’t predict it, and trying to it a fools errand. So just be. Here is Oliver again:

In short: we can’t ever get free from the limited and vulnerable and uncertain situation in which we find ourselves. But when you grasp that you’ll never get free from it, that’s when you’re finally free in it – free to focus on the hard things, instead of the impossible ones, and to give this somewhat preposterous business of being a human everything you’ve got.

Honestly, I think this is also a radically Christian view of things. Ever heard the phrase “let go, and let God”? Yeah, that’s some cheesy and shitty cultural Christian schlock that’s often used to justify injustice. But there is a kernel of truth in there too. Part of surrendering to Christ is just that: surrendering. Jesus told us: building up a bunch of treasure here is foolishness, because its all going away eventually.

The end is coming sooner or later. Things are falling apart. It really is all probably a lot worse than we imagine it is! But you know what? It always has been. If we all just spent a little more time caring for those around us, and a little less time trying to erect unwieldy, complicated and Babel-esque structures in some Sisyphean effort to stave off the inevitable, things would probably work out for all of us a little bit better in the end.

1 Note the word civilization here, not world. I don’t think the ending of the entire world is something worth worrying over. But the ending of western civilization as we understand it today? Completely within the realm of possibility within my lifetime, I believe.

2 I have a longer piece, centered around a review of the novel Station Eleven, that has been in the works at my newsletter for a while. Perhaps I’ll wrap that up and publish it soon. In the meantime, subscribe to my newsletter!

3 credit to Alan Jacobs for first pointing the way to this piece on his “Snakes and Ladders” newsletter.

Social media and the death of friendship

I posted this last week on my person Facebook page, but I wanted to share it here as well. Enjoy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friendship and the role it plays in the modern millennial techno-culture that I find myself inhabiting. There is a real tendency among people in my demographic – especially among those you find online tweeting and creating meme culture – to relish in the difficulty of creating and maintaining friendships, and an attendant valorizing of the “self care” of saying no to those who want to make plans. There seems to be real comedy to be found in the last minute breaking of plans and turning down attempts at connection. I’ve come to think of this as a phenomenon called “ironized introversion”, in which it becomes cool to radically embrace the identity of introverted- to the point of refusing to interact in an embodied way with people when it is not required by work or family obligations (and even those are becoming more and more optional for many.) Social life becomes a purely digital and online endeavor, where the other avatars and accounts on social media become more “real” than anything else about people. 

I know I sound like “old guy yelling at technology” here, but I’m really not meaning to. Because I do sympathize; I am an introvert, very much so, although I like to embrace the hubris of thinking I’m a real introvert, and not one for the social credit it seems to bring nowadays. Human interaction wears me out; an evening with friends requires about three times as much isolation afterwards to recover energy. So I get it, I really do.

At the same time, I do work hard to cultivate real, embodied friendships, in the “meatspace” and not only the digital one. I spent the majority of the last two years off social media by and large, and one of my fears in doing so was that I would lose a whole host of meaningful relationships with people who I am “friends” with here. But, in fact, I found that what it forced of me instead was intentionality and active cultivation in my building and maintaining friendships. Sure, the number of people I regularly interacted with in some way went down in absolute terms. But I also became vitally aware of my actual, important friendships, and they really flourished over the last couple of years in a way that I hadn’t really experienced since high school probably (school life is, after all, probably the peak for many people’s experience of real friendship.) Now, these weren’t all free of technology. The closest friendships I built were still over distance, maintained by and large via Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls and text chains. But notice the intentionality found even in that. We made regular, weekly plans to talk, face to face as we could. We hold each other accountable to these check-ins. And, when we could this summer, we all came together for a few days of real time together, time that I look back on already as one of the highlights of the year for me.

So, it really bugs me, the attitude contained in this tweet, that I see so often around me. Friendship is really hard. It’s risky. It’s messy. It can be exhausting. It involved real flawed human beings, so the likelihood you are gonna get hurt at some point is high. I get that. But there is also nothing like it. Friendship – real, honest to goodness friendship, with other physical human beings – is amazing and life-giving and vital to being a whole human being. Family is great, but there is nothing like real friends who are there and present and choose to love you and spend time with you.

Friendship is an embodied thing. It requires proximity and effort and intimacy and vulnerability. And it is a vital feature of the Good and Virtuous Life, for everyone. Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas all teach us this, that you cannot be fully human without the presence of others, without the love of friendship. Yeah, making plans is hard, and leaving the comfort and safety of home can be a lot, especially after a full week of work and obligations. But real friendship is necessary. Other human beings are not consumables or commodities, and they aren’t the stuff of memes and social media irony. To relegate friendship to the digital world and spend a lot of time laughing at your own ability to turn down other people’s attempts at relationship building is to make means of those around you, of which there is no greater sin we can commit against one another. 

So, make plans. Go out. Risk yourself. Court exhaustion. Cull your friends list. Be a friend, a real, flesh and blood friend. 

this is the meaning of all created things

I’m reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain for the first time, and enjoying it so far immensely. I imagine I’ll have a lot to say about it in the future, but for now, I just wanted to share this wonderful passage that stood to me, from early in the book. Merton here is describing the French town he and his father settled in during the late 1920s, Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val:

Here, in this amazing, ancient town, the very pattern of the place, of the houses and streets and of nature itself, the circling hills, the cliffs and trees, all focused my attention upon the one, important central fact of the church and what it contained. Here, everywhere I went, I was forced, by the dispostition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church. Every view of the town, from the exterior hills, centered upon the long grey building with it high spire.

The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of it intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d’Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rogue, to the winding river, and the green valley of the Bonnette, the town and the bridge, and even to the white stucco villas of the modern bourgeois that dotted the fields and orchards outside the precinct of the vanished ramparts: and the significance that was thus imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, or in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man’s reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole

Oh, what a thing it is, to live in a place that is so constructed that you are forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative! Where all day long your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ!

What a thing indeed! May we all be blessed to dwell in such a coherent landscape, of both the world and the mind.