Something borrowed, something blue.
Written 25 September 2026, on Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.
Death is experienced much in the same way characters in a scene experience the screen being switched off — that is to say, not at all. Subjectively, the moment never arrives, nor can we ever recognize that the threshold has been crossed. Instead, we can only experience varying degrees of sense of doom in every moment leading up to death, and afterwards, grief and legacy, indirectly through those who survive us. So it isn’t death itself with which we should be preoccupied, but how it shapes our lives as we prepare for it, and how it affects the lives of others who are left in our wake.
Global catastrophic risk, as visualized by the doomsday clock, has a similarly Zenonian terminus. Depending on what finally turns the clock past the eleventh hour, immense suffering may persist, at scale and potentially over generations, as the walking dead roam a withering ecology that has been pushed beyond all hope of recovery. While we hold a delightfully diversified portfolio of man-made existential risk factors — from nuclear holocaust to bioterrorism to resource depletion to AI misalignment — an earth that is uninhabitable remains the most irrecoverable scenario. Musk’s ambitions to make us a multiplanetary species is a good instinct, but aquaponics megafarms in underground habitat cities simply cannot host the level of biodiversity, biomass accumulation, environmental heterogeneity, or especially niche complementarity necessary for us to thrive. And of course, it’s not just us that’s on the line. If our legacy is to snuff out the evolutionary potential of the other moral patients with whom we share this pale blue dot, that’s arguably an even greater loss than that of our precious civilization.
Given the stakes, one would expect a strong and specific call to action, but the book expends a lot of pages preaching what sounds suspiciously like solipsism and defeatism. It prescribes suspending judgment and critically reflecting as the prime virtues of our time, but conflates the passive and active dimensions of adopting such a valence. Refusing to be swept up by “social vibrations” is one thing, withdrawing from engagement is entirely another, and yet the book makes no rigorous attempt to disambiguate the two. It also fails to address the most obvious pitfall of such an approach taken naively: burying your head in the sand and confusing stillness for peace, stuck in a blind stupor indistinguishable from yielding to the infocratic regime of distraction and overload. If accepting death means sinking into reminiscence and resignation instead of changing your ways not just to embrace life to the fullest, but also to facilitate it to the best of your abilities and gumption, I frankly don’t see the point.
The book is never quite sure whether it wants to do investigative journalism or existential philosophy, and ends up getting not very far in either direction. It raises some good questions, but never delves into them at enough depth to provide any novel insight. I did like that it brooked no easy answers, and even ruled some out. In any case, my takeaway is a little different from what the author seems to have intended: to learn to die is to take on the mantle of Gilgamesh, and embark on a mission to re-civilize (mission civilisatrice). To learn to die is to live and literally let live, not to wallow in learned helplessness and complicity through inaction. To learn to die is not to court oblivion, but to make of the earth a heaven. Living on borrowed time and space, the least we can do is to leave it better than we found it.