Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot

OR: Borg vibes

photo cred: my dad

Everyone I know has given up. That’s how it feels, at least. There’s a creeping sense that the jig is up, the fix is in, and the party’s over. The Earth is burning, democracies are backsliding, AI is advancing, cities are crumbling—somehow everything sucks and it’s more expensive than it was last year. It’s the worst kind of armageddon, the kind that doesn’t even lower the rent.

We had the chance to prevent or solve these problems, the thinking goes, but we missed it. Now we’re past the point of no return. The world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes, and the only people still smiling are the ones trying to sell you something. It feels like we’re living through the Book of Revelation, but instead of the Seven Seals and the apocalyptic trumpeters, we have New York Times push notifications.

On the one hand, it’s totally understandable that these crises would make us want to curl up and die. If the world was withering for lack of hot takes, I’d assemble a daredevil crew and we’d be there in an instant. But if history is heading more in the warlords ‘n’ water wars direction, I’m out.

On other hand, this reaction is totally bonkers. If our backs are against the wall, shouldn’t we put up our dukes? For people supposedly facing the breakdown of our society, our response is less fight-or-flight and more freeze-and-unease, frown-and-lie-down, and despair-and-stay-there.

Maybe humanity has finally met its match, but even though people talk like that’s the case, the way they act is weirdly...normal. Every conversation has a dead-man-walking flavor to it, and yet the dead men keep on walking. “Yeah, so everything’s doomed and we’re all gonna die. Anyway, talk to ya later, I gotta put the lasagna in the oven.” If things are just about to go kaput, why is everyone still working 60 hours a week?

Something strange is going on here, and I’d like to offer an explanation in two parts: a wide circle, and a bullet with a foot in it.

CIRCLE TAKES THE SQUARE

Forty years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer argued in The Expanding Circle that humans have, over the course of millennia, decided to care about a broader and broader swath of the living world. Originally, we only gave moral consideration to our immediate family, then we extended it our tribe, then the nation, and now we are kind-of sort-of extending it to the whole globe and to non-human animals as well.¹

I think Singer was right, and I’d add three things to his analysis. First, the trend has only continued since the ‘80s—for instance, some people are now worried about whether shrimp are having a good time. Second, while the circle has gotten wider, it has also, paradoxically, gotten closer. It’s one thing to “care” about distant strangers when you can only read about them in a newspaper; now we can all witness the suffering of anyone in the world through a glass portal we carry in our pockets. And third, when you stare into that portal, the portal stares back. Social media has made everyone into z-list public figures, and now we all have an audience watching us to make sure that we’re sufficiently concerned about the right things.

Expanding the circle was, in my opinion, a good move. But it comes with a problem: if we’re supposed to care about everyone and everything...that’s kind of a lot of caring, isn’t it? If I have to feel like a mass shooting in Tallahassee, a factory farm in Texas, and a genocide in Turkmenistan are all, morally speaking, happening in my backyard, my poor little moral circuits, which evolved to care about like 20 people, are gonna blow.

When there’s too much to care about, what’s a good-hearted person to do? I think many of us have unconsciously figured out how to escape this conundrum: we simply shoot ourselves in the foot.

BULLET MEET FOOT

Humans are pretty savvy at social interaction, even though we get so anxious about it. (Maybe we’re good because we’re freaking out all the time.) Evolution and experience have endowed us with a deep bench of interpersonal maneuvers, some of which are so intuitive to us that we don’t even realize we’re deploying them.

For example, sometimes life puts us in lose-lose situations where it’s embarrassing to try and fail, but it’s also embarrassing not to try at all. It sucks to study for a math exam and still flunk it, but it’s foolish not to study in the first place. When you’re stuck in a conundrum like that, how do you get out?

Well, one canny solution is to subtly manipulate the situation so that failure is inevitable. That way, no one can blame you for failing, and no one can blame you for not trying. Psychologists call this self-handicapping, and as far as impression management strategies go, you gotta admit this one is pretty exquisite.

Here’s what self-handicapping looks like in the wild. I had a friend in high school who “forgot” to apply to college our senior year. Literally, May came around and we were like “Nate, did you get in anywhere?” and he was like “Oh shoot that happened already?” Nate was a smart kid but a bad student, so it’s possible he actually did forget, but some of us suspected that the entire application season had conveniently slipped his mind so he wouldn’t have to face the shame of being rejected. We could never prove it, though, and that’s exactly why self-handicapping is such a clever tactic.

Of course, Nate’s self-handicapping came at a cost. No one can ding him for being stupid, but we can all ding him for being irresponsible. The ideal form of self-handicapping, then, is one that obscures the role of the self entirely.² In fact, it works best when even you don’t realize that you’re doing it. Nate’s months-long brain fart is more believable if he believes it himself. If you’re gonna shoot yourself in the foot, best to do it while sleepwalking, so you can wake up and be like “A bullet!! In my foot!! And it got there through no fault of my own!!”

Which is to say: many of the people who are engaging in self-handicapping would earnestly deny the allegation.

You can see how self-handicapping is a handy response to a world that demands more care from us than we can give. If all the world’s problems are fait accompli, well, that’s sad, but it ain’t on me. I don’t want it to be that way, of course, but it is, which means my only obligation is to bravely bear witness to the end of it all. That’s why it’s actually very important to maintain the idea—even subconsciously—that democracy is unsalvageable, AI is unstoppable, the Middle East is intractable, the climate apocalypse is (literally) baked in, and so on. For the aspiring self-handicapper, the best causes are lost causes.

BORG VIBES

The problem with shooting yourself in the foot is that now you have a bullet in your foot. A self-handicap can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we believe our situation is hopeless, the more hopeless it becomes. We’re never gonna right the things we write off.

Succumbing to despair might offer you a reputational reprieve in the short term, but avoiding the blame doesn’t mean you can avoid the consequences. When rising sea levels, secret police, or AI-powered killer drones come for you, they won’t ask whether you have a doctor’s note excusing you from the greatest struggles of your generation.

In my experience, this is an unpopular argument. To some people, suggesting that our problems are solvable means denying that our problems are serious. (But of course our problems are serious, that’s why we want to solve them.) Or they’re offended by the implication that they have any responsibility to fix the things they didn’t break, as if a sinking ship only takes you down with it if you’re the person who punched a hole in the hull. Or they’re so certain that our fate is sealed that they scoff at anyone who believes otherwise. Most of all, though, I think people want everybody else to admit that life is really hard, and they’re being courageous just for showing up every day. As Kurt Vonnegut said:

What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.³

I don’t think this is an old/young divide anymore: everybody wants credit for surviving, and we’re all too stingy about giving it, and that only makes us want the credit even more. I’m happy to give that credit: being alive in 2025 is hard in a way that gets no sympathy from anyone (“oh I’m sorry are your TikToks not amusing enough??”), and we all deserve gold stars. But wouldn’t we all like to live in a world where we didn’t feel like it was an achievement just to keep going?

Of course, the naysayers could be right! Prophets of doom don’t have a great track record, but then, they only have to hit the mark once. As the futurist Hazel Henderson put it, though: “we do not know enough to be pessimistic”. We won’t know that our problems are solvable until we solve them, we won’t solve them until we try, and we won’t try until we believe. Either way, the problems we’re facing don’t take prisoners, so we might as well go down swinging.

I know this is easy for me to say—I’m far from the first in line to get disappeared or swallowed up by the sea. That’s fine: the people who can do more should do more. But we’re wrong to act as if withdrawing from the world is inherently rejuvenating. When we’re so eager to explain why we can’t help, we forget helping actually feels great.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago. When I was out for a run, I happened upon an older lady who had fallen and hit her head on the sidewalk; she was bleeding and confused and obviously needed medical attention. I called an ambulance and waited with her until the paramedics came, and once we were all sure she was going to be okay, I got to feel proud the rest of the day: I did the right thing! I helped! I’m a good boy!⁴ I run by that same corner all the time now not hoping to find little old ladies in distress, of course, but ready should my services be required.

So when folks seem hell bent on giving up, I wanna know: why are they holding on so tightly their hopelessness? What does it do for them? If the future is so uncertain, if no one can justifiably say whether or not we’re gonna make it, why not pick the belief that gets you out of bed in the morning, rather than the one that keeps you there? Why do we have to make it seem like being on the right side of history is such a bummer?

Dealing with the state of world by despairing is kind of like dealing with a breakup by drinking—you’re allowed to do it for like, a day, but if it becomes clear you’re planning to do this for the rest of your life, your friends ought to step in and stop you.

Here’s an analogy for the nerds: in Star Trek lore, Starfleet academy cadets have to complete a simulation where they attempt to save a ship called the Kobayashi Maru, which is disabled and stuck in hostile territory. Unbeknownst to the trainees, the simulation is rigged so they can never win; the Klingons always show up and vaporize everyone. This is supposed to teach cadets that some situations are simply hopeless. Captain James T. Kirk, refusing to learn the lesson, famously saves the Maru by hacking the machine before the simulation begins.

Anyway, my point is that it’s possible to pull an anti-Kirk, to hack a winnable scenario and guarantee a loss. The fact that you can save face by doing this doesn’t make it noble or admirable. After all, in the world of Star Trek, “resistance is futile” is something the villains say.

ICE CUBES IN THE OCEAN

There is a grumpy version of this argument, one that scolds every doomer for finding a galaxy-brained way to signal their virtue while sitting on their hands. I don’t feel that way at all. We were right to expand our circle, and I admire every generation that did it, even if they only made it a single centimeter per century.

But a wide circle is also a tall order. Although the circumference of our moral circle is theoretically infinite, the extent of our efforts is not. We can care about all eight billion people riding this rock with us, but we can only care for a tiny fraction of them. Trying to solve every problem at once is like trying to stop global warming by throwing ice cubes in the ocean. So if our collective despondency is a way of dealing with the fact that our moral ambitions have outstripped our abilities, I get it.

The solution is not to shrink the circle, to default on our obligations, or to pretend that we’re helpless. When you’re paralyzed by the number of problems, the only way out is to pick one. What kind of world would you like to live in, how do we get there from here, and what can you do—however small it may be—to move us in that direction? We’re not looking for saints or superheroes, just people who give a hoot. In the billion-person bucket brigade that’s trying to put out the fires, all you need to do is find a way to pass the pail from the person on your left to the person on your right. There are, remember, many underrated ways to change the world.

Personally, I care a lot about science because I think the expansion of knowledge is the only thing that makes us better off in the long run. But whatever, some people want to clean up the park, other people want to help sick kids, and other people want to save the shrimp. Godspeed to all of them. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all comrades in a war that has infinite fronts. Nobody can fight on all of them, and I won’t ask anyone to join mine if they can do more good elsewhere.

But there is no neutral territory here. There may be plenty of front lines, but there are no sidelines. The best way to prevent people from taking themselves out of the fight is to recognize that there is no “out” of the fight. There’s no room for anyone to play the Switzerland strategy—“I’m not involved, I’ll just hold on to your valuables while you guys fight it out!” The sum total of our actions will either make the world better or worse. Which is it gonna be?

SPONGE TIME

In the classic formulation of the hero’s journey, step one is the call to adventure, and step two is the refusal of that call. I think we’re all stuck at step two. Gandalf’s at our door, but we literally just sat down to lunch, and have you seen the forces of Mordor? They’ve got trolls. Obviously it would be great if someone did something about Sauron, but I don’t see why it should be me.

I understand that feeling. A death-defying adventure to save the world? In this economy? No thanks, take it up with all the people who imperiled the world in the first place. I just got here!⁵

But alas, we cannot pass the buck into the past. As much as we love to argue about which generation had it worse and which generation did it better, we don’t get to Freaky Friday ourselves with our ancestors and face the tribulations that fit our preferred aesthetic.

When I was in high school, I used to volunteer with this group that, basically, held car washes and then donated the money. The organization wasn’t explicitly Christian, but Peggy, the woman who led it, was. She used to tell us: “People see bad things in the world and ask why God doesn’t do something about it. But God did do something. He sent you.”

We can argue about whether this is a theologically sound solution to the problem of evil, and we can ask why a supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful God would entrust anything to me, a guy who can’t even do a single pull-up. But I always appreciated this attitude. Yes, things are bad. No, it’s not your fault. Unfortunately, the world was under no obligation to straighten itself out by the time you arrived. These are the problems we got. Would you like them to be better? Then here, grab a sponge and start washing.

1. For a counterpoint, see Gwern’s “The Narrowing Circle”.

2. I once came very close to doing something like that. I really hated my time in Oxford, and so when I got a nasty stomach bug, I secretly hoped it was something serious so I could go home without losing face. When the NHS prescribed me some antibiotics, I thought for a hot second about not taking them—after all, nobody would know if I let those little microbes wreak some more havoc in my tummy, and then maybe I can get out of this place. I ultimately downed the pills, but only because six weeks of diarrhea was too steep of a price for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

3. The other half of the quote:

What is it the slightly younger people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgement, and without further ado, that they are without question women and men now. Slightly older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowledgement.

4. The 911 operator asked me how old she was, and although she looked to be in her mid-70s, maybe 80, she was sitting right there looking at me so I panicked and said “uh uh maybe late 60s??” I hate to make someone feel self-conscious, even when they’re bleeding from the head.

5. More Vonnegut:

I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.”