Intellectual Humility vs. Passionate Certainty

I’ve been going through a sort of existential crisis the last few years. And because I’m sometimes a bit slow on the uptake, I couldn’t figure out what was causing the toxic combination of malaise and irritation I’ve been experiencing. Was it my diet, was it a lack of alcohol – I gave up drinking a few years ago – was it growing old and the slow, inevitable loss of mental and physical function that comes with ageing, or was it the preponderance of daily nonsense I read on social media?

To a degree, it was all and none of these things. But there was something concrete that irritated me, which I slowly began to understand. When the isolated pieces of the puzzle fell into place, I realised we’re all doomed, at least for the foreseeable future – and that there’s nothing we can do about the coming catastrophe. The issue is as old as human society, but one which has taken a new form under the dominating pervasiveness of information technology. It’s the problem of…