Gooooood morning, Hank. It's Thursday.

So let's talk about human life 300 years ago. Almost all humans were farmers or hunter-gatherers, as they had been a thousand years earlier, and they cooked their food over an open fire, as they did a thousand years earlier. Their carts were driven by horses or pack animals, as had been the case a thousand years earlier, and it took about as long to go from Beijing to Shanghai as it had a thousand years earlier, although the roads had gotten slightly better. There were no ice-cold drinks on hot days, because there was no ice on hot days. Recorded music did not exist. There was no electricity. There had been small improvements in lamp technology, making night slightly less terrifying for some people, but only slightly. And there was no way to hear a human voice unless you were within earshot of that voice. And just like a thousand or five thousand years earlier, information could only travel as fast as humans could travel, which is to say about as fast as horses could travel.

And this is not ancient history, Hank. If you distill the story of our species to a single calendar year, with the emergence of humans around 300,000 years ago being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59 PM, we don't even become the only hominid until Neanderthals go extinct in November. Julius Caesar becomes the emperor of the Roman Empire on December 28. And the Industrial Revolution, which made possible ice in summertime and blueberries in winter and modern medicine and faster-than-horse travel and so much else? That happened earlier today. In fact, not even that much earlier today. If we currently live at 11:59 PM, the Industrial Revolution began this afternoon. And yet, those ten or so hours of human history have seen a lot of change.

On a very basic level, the population of humans increased dramatically. It took around 1700 years for the population of humans to double between 1 CE and 1700 CE. It took just 150 years for the human population to double again between 1700 and 1850, and for the record, it has also doubled in my lifetime. Also we, like, left our atmosphere and flew to the moon, and we dramatically increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and we deforested most of North America, and we reduced child death by 95%, and we eliminated smallpox and dramatically increased our food supply and drove many large mammals to extinction or the brink of it, all in the last, like, 8 hours of our human year. 

What I'm trying to get at here, Hank, is that we find ourselves in a very weird situation, and one that is relatively quite new. These days, instead of nearly everyone working in agriculture or hunting and gathering, only around 12% of people do. Most of the rest of us work in fields that didn't exist 300 years ago, like paving asphalt roads, or maintaining computer servers, or working on oil rigs, or making YouTube videos. I'm offering you this context because one criticism I hear a lot of humans is that we're bad at this. Like, we're bad at having this much power–and that's true, we are bad at it, we're a catastrophe–but we're also so much else. We have to allow for complexity in the human story that we have been both good at understanding and solving our shared challenges, and not nearly good enough at understanding and solving them. We are capable of extraordinary generosity and sacrifice, and equally capable of extraordinarily short-sighted thinking and horrific violence and destruction. As Walt Whitman noted in the thick of industrialization, we contain multitudes.

So, Hank, I'm broadly in favor of humans. I like the art that we make and the stuff we figure out together and the ways we collaborate. None of this is unique to our species, but I think we are especially good at making art and figuring stuff out together and knowing like, what's keeping the stars apart. And I think we should celebrate those aspects of humanity rather than concluding that we just, like, suck. Any simple narrative is always going to be untrue and the narrative that humanity is just a piece of crap, it's just not true because it's so straightforward and simple. The idea that humans are good is untrue. The idea that humans are bad is untrue. We are both/and, not either/or.

Now listen, I am, of course, not optimistic about humanity long-term. Long-term, we're doomed. I also have to confess that at the moment, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about humanity in the short term. I've got a little spidey sense that we might have some hard times ahead, but I still think we will get through this. This, like, poly-crisis of climate change and growing violence and massive inequity and so on, I believe that we will emerge from that, that we will, for lack of a better term, survive our moment. Because the truth is, if you go back and read history, we've been in a poly-crisis for the entire industrial age. And yet here I am. Here you are.

Most of all, Hank, I think humanity is worth it. Worth the toil and sweat of trying to make a better world for ourselves and for each other, and worth the hope and heartbreak of what my father calls “hard-headed optimism”. We are really new to this unprecedentedly powerful business, and I have to believe we can get better at it.

Hank, I'll see you tomorrow.