oh hello

And I know it is all ok in the end- Kiki has friends who look out for her and she takes care of herself and finds her place.

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

first thing you’re gonna need to do is have a normal life as a moderately successful young adult novelist for about eight years. You can pay the rent because you’ve got a partner who also works. That kind of thing. then unexpectedly you’ll need to sell thirty million books in three years.

Then you should have a mental health crisis that is partly born of your need to be liked by strangers and partly due to a total lack of meaning in your life and partly due to bad brain wiring. eventually you’ll need to realize that you didn’t deserve to sell thirty million books but you also don’t deserve the catastrophically bad brain wiring. Deserving, you’ll belatedly realize, is the wrong framework through which to look at the miracle of consciousness.

this crisis of meaning will be no joke. What should you do with your resources—not just all the money they gave you for those books but also the time that remains to you? Eventually you’ll need to decide to that the money and time are only useful if you do something with them. So you try to do that, in part by starting a business that donates its revenue to charity instead of paying you money you don’t need.

it will of course be very easy to lose sight of your good luck because you breathe your privilege like oxygen, but hopefully you are now at least doing the beginning of something with the absurd lottery you won.