Dear People of the Future:
07/11/2022
“Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”
I’m writing this around 7 pm, on Monday, July 11th, 2022.
The above quote is from the intro to an improv comedy tv show called Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and in addition to explaining the premise of the show where all of the scenes are improvised and the host awards points at random and doesn’t keep track of them, it’s I think a useful phrase for all of human civilization in general.
Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
I’m an atheist, which is an unpopular position in 2022. (I’ve come around to the idea of worshiping the universe as a whole and the improbability of our existence as a sort of miracle, but that’s a whole other post.) Despite living in a very secular society, atheists are still mistrusted and disliked more than any religion, even the deeply unpopular ones. So that’s fun.
But it means I don’t believe in any kind of divine mandate. I don’t believe in God (or gods), and thus I don’t believe that any part of human civilization was handed down from up on high. Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
This doesn’t just apply to religions, or to outdated concepts like the Divine Rights of Kings, but really to the whole of human civilization. Everything from money to borders to language to gender roles to weeks and months to racism to homophobia is something humans invented, something we made up. And the points do not matter. There’s no afterlife, no Anubis to weigh our hearts to see if we did as we were told.
And of course, people have killed and died for all kinds of things that were made up, like religions and borders and manufactured hatred. I’d wager every single war ever has a root in some kind of made up bullshit, with extremely serious results for everyone who died in them or who saw their homes and entire world destroyed in them.
Everything’s made up and the points are unfortunately deadly serious.
I suspect that in the future, even if you’ve moved on to some sort of groovy post scarcity utopia, that you are unfortunately still saddled with bullshit that you don’t need. That people with power are still making shit up to make life worse for people without power. And of course, if you’re reading this from some kind of global warming wrecked wasteland I suspect all these things are even worse.
Regardless, things don’t have to be the way they are just because that’s the way things were. Everything’s made up, and the points don’t matter. Even in the distant past of the early 21st century, many of us understood that. I worry about our ability to change things for the better, to improve things that need to be improved. The world absolutely feels like we’re headed to a really terrible few decades, if not permanent future. I hope we avoided it, but I am not optimistic. (Honestly, an optimistic person who feels good about the future would not write this series.)
So please, people of the future, take a look around at your world, at your civilization, at your everything, and try to make up something better than what the people of the past made up.
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That’s all for today, see you again in the future.
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