I have been known to face the future with a certain mild pessimism. A sort of preventive pessimism, you could say. It wasn’t absolute pessimism, because deep down I didn’t always expect the worst. In fact, if the worst were to always happen, I would be very disappointed indeed. However, at all times, I exercised my capacity to resist frustration, convincing myself that nothing would ever work.

What good did that do me? Well, for a start, if everything did actually go wrong, I was already psychologically prepared for the failure. And if things only half worked out, then that was enough to make me happy. 

However, lately I have changed. Pessimism has ceased to serve as a strategy for controlling my fledgling optimism, my hidden self-confidence, my shy Utopia. The future, in a certain way, has already arrived, or has at least been sketched, and I already know it’s nothing like I had hoped. My preventive pessimism has lost the ability to make me settle for less.  

I have assumed a whole new attitude. I really do expect the worst. I have become an authentic pessimist. I genuinely believe that nothing is going to work out. Not even in the most distant future. I truly believe that humanity is doomed. I also have no doubt that I will never, even on my deathbed, be able to turn around and say: “Yes. I did everything I wanted to do”. 

And yet, my new pessimism does not make me half as unhappy as one might expect. Which is strange. I always thought that true pessimism was the shortest possible route to existential misery. But I continue liking life, even if I can see nothing good along the way.

Take the planet for example. Only the most acutely cloistered are not pessimistic on this score. It’s already clear as day that humanity is on the verge of getting evicted once and for all, like residents in an apartment block who don’t pay their share of the maintenance, don’t pay the council tax, don’t recycle, don’t give a damn about their leaking pipes or noisy kids. Or, of course, those that fart in the elevator.    

After all, it’s the gases our species emits that are boring a hole in the atmosphere, letting in all those ultra-hard rays from the sun. These gases and rays together will be our downfall.  

We will, of course, try to get out of this by taking our overpopulation as far away from the sun as possible before the inevitable occurs, most likely to some form of underground city. We’ll have air processing plants, while outside, where our nostalgia for natural life resides, accumulated pestilence and greenhouse effect will reign supreme.  

Obviously, on many fronts, we won’t be able to avoid leaving ourselves open to nature’s counter-attacks, one of which will certainly be access to water. We’ll be far too many people for far too little water.

Then, at last, the environmental delirium will hit its peak. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, infernos, volcanoes… the menu will be long and distinguished. One after another, and in a relatively short span of time, these cataclysms will destroy the bases of the civilization that brought them about.     

Our utopia of infinitely using and reusing our natural environment will fulfill its own parable of suicide. All of our plants for taking the salt out of seawater and the scum out of the air will be destroyed, our cities buried, with a resounding death toll. The sun will fry us, the poisoned air will smoke us through and through, the drought will leave us shriveled and crunchy.   

In despair, a return to nomadism will be our only chance of survival. Vast human caravans will migrate to wherever there is water, food and clean air. Federal divisions and national borders will try to resist, and perhaps they will succeed for a time, but they will eventually fall. After a fair few genocides, but fall they will.    

Humanity will be reduced to wandering hordes. The law of the jungle will prevail. Bestialized, but procreating on end and ready for anything, we will scour the earth en masse after those few remaining resources. Like any other predatory species, our lives will be a relentless hunting expedition ended only in death. 

Proof of this could be seen in what recently occurred in New Orleans, and particularly in the stadium used as a homeless shelter. Without water, without food, with no beds, no light, melting in the sweltering heat, vicious gangs formed and attacked under the cover of the multitude. Women were raped in the dark, provisions were ripped from the hands of the elderly and from children, there were fights, robberies, murders. The waters had only been up for a little over 72 hours… All it took was three days, and that’s in the richest country in the world.     

We, and mammals in general, are marked for death. Maybe the birds too. I don’t know. One thing that is for sure is that the dank humidity and the excessive heat will favor other species. Reptiles and insects and larvae and microbes and microorganisms, and perhaps ocean life as well, will be delighted that mankind proved so self-destructive. They will thrive in the heat and the pestilence.  

The toxic gases left behind by humanity, our most lasting trace, will dissipate slowly. 

*

Of course it is true that we are not self-destructive for no reason. Up to a certain point, our causes are noble: to perpetuate the species, produce and distribute foodstuffs, produce and distribute wealth, consolidate and spread our marvelous material culture, etc. To this end we have modernized our societies, invented so many machines, developed so many technologies, going to work on all of the earth’s materials.

Perhaps it is this praiseworthy side that prevents my pessimism from making me so unhappy. Nevertheless, a good pessimist knows how to identify the flaws in any process.   

The tragic error of the human race, the one that will prove the essential cause of its extinction, is to have used science to escape death and politics to avoid war. Multiply and prolong life: the only two commandments worthy of the name and the only two we really obey. It’s because of these that we go forth and multiply, compacting our problems by putting more and more people on the earth at the same frenetic pace as our cogwheel of progress comes up with the means to further those noble causes.    

The paradox is as follows: in order to produce and distribute more wealth to more people, we industrialize more nations, intensify the exploitation of our natural resources and in so doing, little by little, and with the best of intentions, steadily destroy the planet. 

It could not be otherwise. Industrialization is the only way we know to provide health, education, housing and food to a people. 

Now that China and India, the two most populous countries, are glimpsing a chink in the door onto the first world, all of the calamities of which my pessimism forewarns are also drawing near. The day that most of the gigantic Chinese population gets its hands on its first fridge-freezer, it’s game over. The Amazon will wither, the polar icecaps will melt and solar radiation will have a field-day.  

Brazil, poor devil, won’t even manage to go to hell on its own two feet. We’ve never developed at such a rate, which means that we have not produced half as much pollution as either the great or the emerging powers. Such is our primitivism that our major contribution to the human downfall will have been slash-and-burn. Our great contribution will have been fucking up the Amazon. If we’re lucky, this will be the result of the incompetence of our best politicians. But we won’t be. We’ll elect the worst and it will all come unstuck because we got bogged down in the same ridiculous, typically Latin American populism as ever.       

What form this populism will take won’t make much difference. Only the names change. He pisses in the wind in Argentina, wears olive-green in Venezuela and plants coca in Bolivia. In Brazil, after swapping his factory overalls for a silk tie, or vice versa, I bet he will be some messianic evangelist, which is, after all, the kind we do best.   

*

And yet, as I said earlier, I remain just as happy as I ever was. No more, no less. Why is it that my pessimism, greater now than before, does not make me unhappier than I was a few years ago? What has not changed, after nearly forty years?   

 Love between men and women perhaps? Could this be our consolation? But hasn’t this changed too? 

Did the freedom so costly won in our amorous theory and practice not instill in us the necessity to love with our eyes open, periodically assessing the feeling by which we are bound to the “object” of our love? Didn’t we finish with that “happily ever after” lark? As far as I know, this doesn’t even exist as an ideal anymore. We have turned love into a field of knowledge, a science. According to the results of these periodical check-ups, these ultrasounds of emotion, we may find we would rather reconfigure our love lives. Who, in our day and age, would be willing to relinquish self-determinism? We develop techniques for starting relationships and then we post-graduate in ending them. Those who flunked their degree are left behind. Humanity learned to control its passion. Men and women have learned not to mingle excessively, not to surrender to the love of another, not to scupper entire portions of their lives in such a high risk joint venture.  And how did we pull that off? Easy: little money, little space and sex, loooottttss of sex. 

I could also say that the secret of my incongruous, almost sinful happiness resides in parental love. Perhaps the subjugation of this feeling is not yet quite complete.  

But the good pessimist looks ahead, always. Individualism will have its way there too. 

That’s why children have to grow up more quickly today. They have to shake off the childish world as early as possible. Go to school at two. Pre-teens at eleven. Voters at sixteen. Choosing a profession by seventeen.  

Parental love today should be demonstrated through the super-stimulation of one’s kids and a utilitarian fast-tracking of childhood. When parents are poor, the kids are sent out to work. When they’re rich, it’s extra tuition. Even their bodies reflect this imperative, according to the World Health Organization. The girls are menstruating earlier and earlier, which, if we were to think about it, is a phenomenon of potentially planetary consequences!    

The party is just about over. We will push this process of eliminating age differences to the absolute limit and end up throwing a spanner in our own biological works. 

*

But when all is said and done, where do I get this strange complacency before the woes of the world, despite the clarity with which they appear to me? Why does a part of me resist the horror of my prognostics?   

When I really think about it, there’s nothing so special about my life that would justify it. I love a woman, adore my daughter, work for money, write for pleasure. Just like billions of people. I dribble the interest at the bank out of necessity and go to the beach in hours of despair. Like everyone else. I sleep, go to the bathroom, eat and drink, just as nature dictates. I’m not rich, not famous, not the genius I dreamed I’d be. I no longer expect life to get much better than this. I already know I won’t make my grandest dreams come true.   

So what happiness is this then? This essential happiness I feel for no apparent reason? Where does this desire to prolong my life come from, the wish to have more children? 

Perhaps, on the baseline, this essential happiness comes from daily contact with the instinct of survival. If that is so, then the human race, with all its self-destructive determinisms, is happy. It’s going to disappear, but it will do so content, that is, it will go out multiplying and prolonging life. It’s going to disappear, self-destruct, but making the most excusable of errors, the most understandable of mistakes. It’s going to be wiped out for living so entirely its own nature. Humanity, in its daily existence, nourishes the gloomiest perspectives and grapples with the most degrading realities. This is essential happiness.     

I know of no other argument to convince someone that life is worth living. Perhaps his life really isn’t. Perhaps mine isn’t. But I refuse to give up the ghost. I have kids and I’d like to have more. In a bid to prolong my life I follow elementary rules of nutrition, believe too much in medicine and bet it all – wager everything — on cryogenics. When I am condemned to death row by some sickness, they can freeze me and wake me up when they have a cure. Fuck it if everyone I love will have died by then, I want to live.       

The existence of men and women unhappy to the point of wanting to die, of being tired of life, is an aberration of the behavior of the species. Essential unhappiness is unnatural. For me, the philosophical dilemma of suicide is resolved. The answer is no.  

The day the air becomes putrid and the water runs out, I want to be there. When we go back to nomadism, swallowing up borders like famished animals, I want to be the best hunter in my pack. When my new love ends and I have to start all over again, that’s what I’ll do. When my daughter grows up and doesn’t need me for anything anymore I’ll keep on loving her whether she likes it or not.  When it all comes tumbling down, I want to see it with my own eyes. When we flee from the Sun, I want to learn to forget what it looked like.  

Despite my pessimism, I laugh whenever I can, cry whenever I have to, and like one just as well as the other. Thank you very much.