I think now that this was something that I maybe internalized from society as a whole: capitalism likes specialists, not generalists, but a healthy society needs both. I spent a good deal of time kicking myself for not having that sort of focus. This is unlike my wife, who has known she wanted to work in politics since she was 14, and has pursued that goal tenaciously and successfully ever since. I like learning about all sorts of different things, and I flit from one to another reliably every few years. I just don’t have a single thing I want to do. First: I’ve come to accept that, when it comes to career trajectories, I am congenitally aimless. You and I - we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. “Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe… and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. Why would it bother me?” Mosscap’s eyes glowed brightly. “The thought that your life might mean nothing in the end?” This quote, incidentally, is the closest it gets to a spoiler, though hopefully it’s deprived enough of context that it won’t give anything away:ĭex turned the mug over and over in their hands. I do not particularly want to give much away about the book - it can be read in an afternoon, with plenty of time left for chores, except to say it’s a warm hug of a novella, which you feel the second you read the dedication:īut there was something in the book that floored me, and I wanted to discuss it here.

On the shock of this event, humanity transitioned from an industrialized society to a sustainable one, leaving half the earth for wilderness and nature, and adopting renewable energy and egalitarian politics to support this new society. The book is set in a future where humanity decided to radically change course after all of the robots in all of the factories decided to put down their tools and leave humanity behind, instead escaping into the wild.

A psalm for wild built