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When I think about how thinking about climate change affected my childhood, two memories come to mind.
The first is from when I was 8 or 9 and I caught the second half of a Kevin Costner film called Waterworld. It absolutely terrified me. Everything you need to know about Waterworld is in the title. I wasn't a good swimmer. It was around the same time that I found myself stranded on a floating dock in the middle of a lake. My fluorescent noodle blew away and I just sat there, watching it drift farther off, waiting for my brother – who had earned all of the swimming badges – to come along and get it back for me.
In the second memory I was a little older. I saw some photographs of Hong Kong in a textbook: shoulder-to-shoulder human beings against orange skylines of smokestacks and tin roofs. The photos may have been especially unsettling because I was from a small town; I remember being thankful that I didn't live in China, and worrying that the same thing would happen here, and that the whole world would become a city. That was a genuine fear, one that's even more relevant now than it was when I was growing up.
But now I'm 23, and when someone says something like, "Your grandchild is going to be one of 30 billion people fighting for a scrap of doomed beach property in the Midwest," I don't feel anything at all.
It's not that I don't believe it. I do. I can see toothless scavengers bashing each other in the head with crowbars for bottles of Nestlé water. Enough movies and video games have capitalized on our fear of a post-apocalyptic wasteland that it's become its own genre, even the dominant image of the future.
It all seems so plausible that it's almost trite. And maybe that's it: The scariest truths are just totally boring. Death, taxes and climate change.
Being born in 1993 puts me at the tail end of the millennial generation, and like many other millennials I was the child of a neurotic (but also courageous, loving and talented) mother who all but worshipped my bowel movements and fridge-magnet art.
When I was 12, she called me her Indigo Child and told me that this meant I was an old soul. She liked to read me passages from parenting books that explained all of this.
Even public schools made sure to tell me I was special. More than half the classrooms in which I sat before high school were outfitted with a banner above the alphabet and blackboard that read, “Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you will land among the stars.” And I believed that things would simply work out, that I would stumble into my beautiful life as if I’d sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus. The road was, more or less, paved with golden fortune cookies.
I take this to be a stereotypical millennial upbringing, though I’m sure I did have an exceptionally smooth childhood: I had friends, I learned to play an instrument and nobody hit me.
But now I’m an adult – all of the millennials are adults – and as far as I can tell all we really want is to keep being kids. We want to share things with our friends, articles and images and videos, important things, but nothing stays important to us for very long because our attention spans are approximately the length of TV commercials and video game loading screens.
It isn’t possible to care about everything, but the Internet makes it possible to pretend to care about everything.
Unfortunately, rising sea levels and the heat death of the world are just as slow and boring now as they were with Kevin Costner (I can’t actually remember the plot of that movie).
But even if we did care – and a good many of us claim to – our idea of caring is miles from something conducive to actual change. Just putting down our phones to vote in a federal election is cause enough for mass millennial back-patting.
I’ve heard it said that my generation’s biggest problem is our belief that science is on the edge of a solution for everything. This really is the closest thing we have to a bona fide ideology. The irony is that “millennialism” literally means a Christian belief in “a future golden age of peace, justice and prosperity.”
The truth is probably less interesting, though, than our faith in technology. The truth is that the culture moves too fast; we don’t have time for things that kill us slowly. Even as I write this, I am more concerned about having my work published in The Walrus and sleeping with a girl named Rachel.
I am not dead inside. I still want to fall in love and produce art; and I still want to engage with the culture that produced me. But the prospect of actually having to yield for the good of a day I may not live to see? It doesn’t sound nearly as entertaining as going on like this for just as long as I can.
Matthew K. Thibeault lives in Victoria.