Nothing Matters, Until It Does

“Nothing matters, in the end. You might think it does, and there has certainly been a lot of paper wasted trying to argue otherwise, but none of that matters either. Even the paper used to argue that nothing, indeed, matters was wasted before anyone ever put anything down, for it is inherently wasted simply because, well, nothing matters. But no, here I am, making the same mistake: acting as though something does matter - because for something to have been wasted, there must have been a chance it wasn’t wasted if things had gone differently somehow, which implies it could have mattered in the first place. This sort of thing gets really tricky once you start thinking about it in any detail. Luckily, it’s not as if that matters, in the end.”

That was what The Man thought. Now, you might find such rudimentary ramblings vulgar, childish and, worst of all, gauche; but if you were to place yourself in The Man’s shoes, you would still find them all of those things and also feel very uncomfortable (because The Man’s shoes are really, really bad), but you would at least grasp His necessity for this line of thinking.

Now, you are all aware of what awaits our planet unless you clean up your act very soon - that is, you are all aware of what will certainly and inevitably happen. You know, climate change will make entire swaths of the planet uninhabitable, every resource will run perpetually short, infertile soil will be better at causing dust storms than growing food - that kind of stuff. You know it so well you make blockbuster movies about it, spending hundreds of millions to imagine what it would look like instead of simply waiting for it or, I don’t know, delaying it, at least. I suppose people hate missing out that much, even on disasters.

Of course, most of those movies have some sort of “escaping the planet” subplot that entails figuring out space travel instead of responsible resource management, and is usually a ham-fisted metaphor for, like, class inequality and capitalism or something. They also feature a dramatic “breaking point”: a colossal tsunami, a continent-wide drought, or the world flash-freezing for no coherent reason. You know, a neat “Event” to signify humanity’s shift from the “Mess Around” to the “Find Out” era.

Well, sorry to disappoint, but it doesn’t play out quite as cinematically as that. We won’t figure out space travel to escape Earth. There will be no “Event”, no poetic comeuppance, no final struggle to overcome for a chance at a better future.

Sure, a few memorable moments did stand out. Like when Venice finally sank for good - the tip of Saint Mark’s bell tower refused to be fully submerged for weeks, while gamblers went bankrupt or got rich guessing the exact moment it disappeared. Then came the death of the world’s last male tiger, after a three-month live-streamed effort to preserve his sperm - poor fella was just too old for all of that. The collective grief from that was rivaled only when the last ever coffee crop was harvested in ’97; people held candlelit vigils for the Death of Coffee, it was all quite bizarre. Or when the International Space Station was expanded too fast, jam-packed with tourists, and eventually crashed and burned over Madagascar, snuffing out any hopes for space exploration we might have had.

Oh yeah, the whole Siberia War was something of a big turning point, I guess - though I am still not entirely sure whether nuking Moscow was truly necessary to take Siberia from the Russians, but I guess those guys really didn’t understand any other arguments than that…. Now, what was I talking about again?

Oh, right. No Escape. No dramatic Collapse. It was all kind of bleh, really. Food kept getting more expensive, along with everything else. People travelled less, squeezed into ever-smaller living quarters, and the climate progressively worsened to the point of uninhabitability everywhere (except Siberia, which is why we had to take it from the Russians for everyone’s benefit. Right?). Then, of course, much crazier things started to be routine: mandatory euthanasia with a steadily shrinking age cap; stamps required for absolutely everything; democratic elections being ruled “inefficient” and “unconducive for the survival of humankind” and suspended indefinitely... Well, these sound crazy to you, I’m sure, but for us it was normal enough - far from ideal, sure, yet it was what it was, given the circumstances. Overton Panoramic, Floor-to-Ceiling Window, you know?

So it just kept grinding on. I’ve no idea how many people are left on the planet - probably no one does. The only place where any semblance of the life you once had survives is the United Nations-Administered Special Humanitarian Area Siberia, or UNASHAS, or simply Siberia, or “Shithole” for the locals - whatever you prefer. And when I say semblance, I mean semblance: it is more like what the Chinese had in the 1950’s and 60’s, but everywhere else on Earth is so far removed from your normal that I really have no other frame of reference... Or so I’m told, anyway - not like I’ve been outside the Shithole. Stories of cannibal tribes and oil-worshipping cults make good bedtime frights for the kids, but surely those are just tall tales… right?

I was born in New Liege in 2145, if you are curious. I don’t recall what the Russians once called it, but that’s irrelevant; it became a proper city only under UNASHAS. I still live in New Liege, I have never left New Liege, and I will die in New Liege. But I don’t matter - not for this story, not in general.

I would say The Man matters for the story, but He would be offended by that, for He maintains that nothing matters, in the end. You remember Him, right? Not that it matters. He lives in Miller City, one of the Shithole’s largest cities, named after the general who ordered the nuke that delivered the final diplomatic coup de grâce. How, you ask, do I know The Man and this story if I’ve never left New Liege? Well, see above - and don’t worry about it.

To fully grasp how The Man came to possess such a negative, childish, and frankly embarrassing philosophy, we need only have a brief rundown of The Man’s biography. And it really would be brief, for not much has happened in His life - He was born to unknown parents who immediately surrendered Him to the Administration, grew up in a UN orphanage where a thousand children shared a single room, educated in public schools with five hundred kids per class until He could read and write, and finally given five square meters of living space in a housing block with ten thousand apartments, along with a job pressing a button that incinerates defective bugs at the food factory. All in all, you could say even The Man’s life’s trajectory was shared with hundreds of thousands of others just like Him.

For the past ten years He has risen at 06:00, endured a two-hour commute, pressed His button for ten hours at thirty-second intervals - with a half-hour lunch (bugs) somewhere in the middle - then spent two hours returning home to eat His dinner (bugs) and sleep, only to do it all again the next day. Weekends and holidays, of course, do not exist; the effort to keep humanity alive can never pause, not even for a moment.

Now, to you it may seem impossible to endure this life for ten years without losing your sanity. For some of you, admittedly, it might not feel far removed from your own routine, but - sympathetic as I am - it is still a plight in your eyes, something abnormal and unacceptable. Yet you must understand: The Man is nowhere near the category of “unfortunate” in UNASHAS. He is a model citizen with a desirably average life. Plenty of people have it far, far worse in the Shithole, to say nothing of whatever the hell happens outside of it. And still He struggles to keep going, day after day - after all, however normal this may seem here, when the only reason you have a job is because your existence is cheaper than the electricity it would take to automate you, finding Meaning becomes rather difficult.

Ah. Meaning. There it is - the toxic word, the UNASHAS Unachievable, Impossibly Cruel Dream. I tried to avoid it, but I’ll need it going forward, so best to name it now and get used to it. Yes, The Man struggled to find Meaning in His existence. And I know that probably doesn’t surprise you; the same affliction haunts your own time. But please try to understand that a “lack of Meaning” is a broad, layered concept. It’s one thing to take a “gap-year” backpacking through Indochina to “find yourself”; quite another when your entire existence can be reduced to pressing a button to save electricity - and it’s also considered perfectly normal and not reason enough to lament your fate. The difference is elusive, hard to comprehend, but you must try.

Whether you now understand, or only think you understand, or fail to understand, or are altogether incapable of understanding matters little to me; that, in any case, is the root of The Man’s outlook on life. I hope you find Him and His opening tirade just a little less obnoxious now. If you cannot find Meaning in your life, it is far, far simpler to just convince yourself that Meaning itself does not exist - so it’s really quite alright to not have it.

But I’ve already piled enough meaningless (ha-ha) detail on you. Please consider having to go through this avalanche of exposition a small sample of The Man’s daily reality - a way to set the mood, so to speak. Well, a taste of what His life was like, right up until one perfectly ordinary, entirely average day.

And that is very much how it began for The Man, exactly as on the 3,652 days before. Six-a.m. wake-up call. A five-second cold shower from the housing block’s communal, endlessly recycled water supply - UNASHAS survives on efficiency. Then the two-hour commute on the underground train system, aptly nicknamed “the Sardine Can”, as passengers stand pressed against each other in pitch darkness like, well, sardines in a can. Of course, none of these people have ever had sardines in their lives - nor any fish, for that matter - so the joke is lost on everyone, and it’s really not funny at all.

Then His “work station”: Furnace Line C213, Station 127. A red button beside a conveyor belt that ends in an incinerator. The neighbouring workers are spaced precisely far enough apart that you must shout to hear one another - any closer and idle conversation might break out; any farther and the floor space would be “inefficiently used”. Not that The Man minds - His neighbours have been the same for ten years, and since all their lives revolve around pressing a button, there is little to discuss anyway.

Fourteen o’clock: lunch. Bugs (boiled today). With each passing year, the bugs they eat increasingly resemble the defective ones they burn in this very facility, but a society that hasn’t noticed the erosion of human rights will never spot something so small, so the workers remain content. After finishing His meal, The Man returns to His station.

Press. Hiss. Smell of burned bugs. Press. Hiss. You survive this rhythm for years by letting your mind slip into white-noise blankness - well, you have to. If you are, however, feeling brave, you can, of course, think. But what would you think about? There is little nourishment for the mind in Siberia. There are no plans to make. And if, god forbid, you’ve been listening to the sterilised news feed during the ride in the “Sardine Can” and - worse still - managed to piece it together over time into a trend of how things are really going in UNASHAS, then the blinding light of that particular revelation would send you scurrying back to the blissful darkness of ignorance, wishing you’d never thought at all.

But The Man thought anyway. Today He returned to the same mantra you’ve been subjected to in the beginning. Well, He had actually thought of it about five months ago and had been repeating it ever since, over and over again, polishing it over time. It was slow business, and not much progress has been made, as you could tell. But He kept at it.

Until something entirely unusual happened. Now, it wasn’t all that uncommon for the conveyor belt to pause when a knot of bugs jammed the works; He would clear the blockage, and operations would resume. Every few months or so it happened, and The Man actually relished these occasions as a chance to do something - anything - different. So, when the belt lurched to a stop again, He stepped over and began cleaning out the joints as usual. What was truly extraordinary, however, was what He found in the process.

It was wedged between two charred chitin shells - something minuscule, determinedly un-buglike. When He pried it loose and it rolled across His palm, The Man froze, for - almost miraculously - it was green. And not the sickly olive green of moldy rations that had been a luxury decades ago, mind you; this was a vibrant, living hue, the kind painters once wasted their careers on before all pigments were standardised to a single, efficient gray.

The Man, of course, had never seen a real seed. He had read about them in His school texts, though, but they were always abstractions to Him, like picnics, or friends. By now all “seeds” were artificial, meticulously edited at the gene level, and they were certainly never this green. And yet here one was: inexplicably, deliciously out of place.

By rights, He ought to have reported it. That was Protocol: any extraneous organic matter must be surrendered, catalogued, and incinerated for bio-security - after all, a single genuine sapling could consume as many resources as an entire optimised farm. But the find was so utterly irregular, so exhilarating, that The Man only thought about surrendering it, savouring every second of this inner struggle until His shift ended and He had to go home.

That night, back in His five square meters, The Man faced a problem: where and how does one plant a seed in a world of rationed air and paved in concrete? He owned exactly two items capable of holding soil: an enamel mug with the slogan EVERYTHING FOR HUMANITY, and the left boot that had finally given up last month and really should have been surrendered for recycling. The mug was already assigned to His nightly water allowance, so the boot it would have to be. He scraped dust from the corridor filters, mixed it with a spoonful of recycled compost pellets He’d been hoarding for no reason He could coherently articulate, and pressed the seed into the gray mush. Then The Man waited.

For weeks he did - fourteen of them, to be precise, because you can bet that The Man counted every minute as He spent His shifts thinking about the discovery and what awaited Him at home. Each night after dinner (do I even need to say it?), He dribbled a little bit of His reusable water - what a crime! - into the boot and stared.

On the ninety-ninth dawn, the seed’s crust split and a sliver pushed through - nothing grand, merely a sprout no longer than an eyelash. Yet it lived, and it was impossibly green, and The Man felt His chest constrict with a sensation suspiciously close to joy.

Eventually, the sprout became a stem, and the stem opened into two precious leaves - lush, alien, scandalously green. The Man noticed His neighbours peaking into His room in the evenings and mornings, mesmerised by the sight, and He feared they might report His Treasure to the Administration - but no one did. No, this was above pettiness or jealousy, and even the lure of double servings of bugs for a week that would reward the report wasn’t temptation enough to betray the little Plant.

Of course, it couldn’t last forever. That much unaccounted-for oxygen was bound to trigger some sensor, and on day one hundred thirty-four it did. When it happened, the whole affair was strangely underwhelming. No security squad burst through His door; The Man was not chased through the block, shielding His Plant from the bullets wheezing past. No, it was all kind of bleh, really.

A polite knock. Just one person: a dry old woman wearing, for some reason, a lab coat. She glanced at The Man’s greatest possession, and there was no wonder in her eyes - only routine. As she dumped the Plant into a plastic bin, she did so with as much gravity as The Man used pressing His button every thirty seconds. The Man had never felt hatred before, but in that moment He almost did. Almost.

After the Plant was gone, and the room - along with His life - slipped back into it’s habitual absence of colour, He expected everything to return to normal: to the same monotone days that meant nothing and contained nothing. You, for one, might have expected Him at last to succumb to the absurdity and despair of His life - or to flare into anger and rebellion against such an existence.

Instead, He felt oddly… at peace. The boot remained on the floor, empty but ready. The next morning He rose at six, endured the five-second shower, squeezed into the “Sardine Can”, and returned to Furnace Line C213, Station 127.

Press. Hiss. Smell of burned bugs. Each press was still pointless, of course, yet every faint shudder in the conveyor belt now carried a tiny possibility: Could it be? Could it happen again, somehow? And in that sweet moment, in that flicker of hopeful anticipation - ridiculous, futile, unlikely - The Man finally found His Meaning.