We are all Anthropoceans now.
It is said that you don’t know what you’re feeling until it has a name.
Ours is an ever-increasingly anxious era. Plagues and calamities abound. They aren’t the only thing that’s going on, of course. Technologies of all sorts are advancing at an exponential rate. That’s exciting. It’s possible that humanity will be able to use them to deal with the threats our planet faces. But technologies can also create and amplify dangers.
The complicated forces impacting everything lead to our consumption of extraordinary amounts of information. So much to know! So many distractions! It’s impossible to know all that one wants or needs to know. These cognitive limits generate this epoch’s distinctive neurosis.
The Anthropocene: The Age of Humanity.
Anthropocene is a word that defines our time. This is the Age of Humanity. All previous geological epochs have developed pretty much without having to pay too much attention to Humanity. Humanity pays a lot of attention and thinks it’s a big deal, but the Anthropocene is when it started to disturb the natural system in an extreme fashion.
Given that atmospheric pollution, environmental disregard, and war are three of Humanity’s signature activities in the Anthropocene so far, the odds are pretty good that it will be the shortest of the Earth’s epochs and equally as disastrous as a bunch of meteors hitting our home simultaneously. We’re on the verge of doing to ourselves what the dinosaurs had done to them by nature.
On the other hand, if Humanity takes a learning-oriented approach to the management of our situation the Anthropocene go on forever.
If Humanity takes a learning-oriented approach to the management of our situation the Anthropocene goes on forever.
By definition, we are all Anthropoceans now. The Anthropocean is my report as a citizen of the Anthropocene. It will contain a variety of ideas and information. Politics, Culture, Science, Social Evolution…lots of words like that. I get obsessed with some things, e.g.:
- apathy and depression in the face of the climate crisis
- the 1/6 coup attempt and the MAGA movement’s on-going threat to American democracy
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
- And other matters that seem to me to be significant to the next direction of the Anthropocene. (At least that’s the way I rationalize various fixations to myself).
But here my overriding objective is to be a participant observer to the Age we are all living in, to discover what I’m learning about being an Anthropocean by writing and otherwise symbolizing my experience.
If my stuff engages some people I get along with, so much the better.
