How We Live Now

Set aside, for one chapter, the powers and the perils, and simply ask what it is like to be an ordinary human being alive at this moment, because that too is where we actually stand, and it is stranger than we usually pause to admit.

There are now more than eight billion of us, more human beings alive at once than in any previous age, and for the first time in the whole story you have read, most of us live in cities rather than on the land, gathered into dense human hives our foraging ancestors could not have pictured. We live longer than any humans ever have; a child born today can expect decades that were denied to the healthiest king of the Bronze World. Most of us are freer from famine, from plague, from early death, and from the rule of a distant lord than almost anyone who came before us. By the cold measures, this is the most comfortable moment in the history of the species, and it would be a dishonesty of the doom-saying kind this book refuses not to say so plainly.

And yet. Something in the lived texture of it is not well. We are the most connected humans in history and, by many measures, among the loneliest, joined to thousands and known by few, our old hunger for the small circle of familiar faces answered instead by a glowing rectangle that offers the appearance of a village without its substance. The languages are dying, roughly one every few weeks, as the great homogenizing currents of the connected world pull the children of ten thousand small cultures toward a handful of large ones, and each language that goes takes with it a whole way of carving up the world, a library that was never written down. And beneath it all runs something people have taken to naming a crisis of meaning: the quiet difficulty of knowing what a life is for, in a world that has, for many, set aside the old religious answers of the Age of Meaning without settling on anything to stand in their place. The science this book has celebrated did not only unseat us from the center of the cosmos; it left a great many people in a universe that no longer arrives with instructions.

This is the present condition, and I raise it not to lament but because it bears directly on the choice the book is about to hand you. Every one of the great external dangers we have surveyed, the warming air, the waiting weapons, the unaligned machines, will be met, or not met, by human beings in exactly this state: comfortable and anxious, connected and lonely, powerful and unsure what any of it is for. A species trying to steer through the narrowest passage in its history while quietly uncertain why it is steering at all is in a more precarious position than any tally of physical risks alone would suggest. The oldest questions, the ones this book has carried from its first page, what is real, what is a life for, where are we going, were never merely academic. They turn out to be, at exactly this moment, survival questions. Which is why the last thing this book will do is place the largest of them, honestly and without an easy answer, back into your hands.