Phantom Inheritance

Lately I’ve been having the same recurring nightmare. The kind where each time I wake up I’m not really sure whether the nightmare is over or if it’s just starting again.

I dream I’m trapped in an interrogation room like the kind we see on cop dramas. Cold concrete and metal furniture. Blue-grey bricks and a single one-way mirror.

My interrogator isn’t a cop. He’s this old, sickly pale man who's busy chain-smoking like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve filled up documents with descriptions of the guy and it all feels a little too poetic and flowery. I’m no poet and this guy’s no flower.

The nightmare starts off light. He asks me questions I’m already tired of hearing.

“What do you want to be when you grow up? How many kids are you going to have?”

Then it gets a little more pointed.

“Have you thought about college? Have you considered joining the military? Where are you gonna work? What kind of car are you gonna drive? How are you gonna make your parents proud?”

By the time I’m sick of mumbling through some pre-crafted zero-sum answers, the kind that fill the already smoke-clogged air with niceties of no consequence without ever committing to any course of action, he hits me with something harder.

“Aren’t you grateful to be alive?”

Here’s where the nightmare really begins.

Subtlety and subtext are the jurisdiction of novels and longer series with time to explore themes and really delve into the matters of the heart. Dreams are a little more like poetry in that they feel confusing at first but after you’re done dreaming you can piece it all back together and gain some semblance of sense. Some specter of sanity.

But like I said, I’m nobody’s poet.

Depression is an old friend of mine. Been here a lot longer than I knew it had a name. Colored my experiences a darker shade than I might have liked if I had had more of a say. It makes looking at the world, such as it is, a daunting and deeply exhausting task. I can fill up a lot of words with just how dark it all is. But that’s not what I’m trying to do by sharing this nightmare.

So let’s look at this another way.

You've probably heard the myth about the frog in boiling water versus the frog in lukewarm water, heated to the boiling point. You might also know by now that it has been disproven. But it is such an apt metaphor that I doubt it will lose potency any time soon.

I think of my parents’ generation a lot like that frog. The world has only gotten crazier and hotter around them until now that, with all the craziness that’s out here filling too many of our waking moments with dread, they don’t seem to notice anything is different. Sure things are bad, I’m not saying I think they don’t realize it. I’m saying I think they’ve lived through too many other crazy events to take anything new… seriously.

Who could blame them for that? I’m certainly not trying to.

The fact is that this world we all call home, whether we like it or not, is on fire.

The spark was lit before I was born and it has been burning ever brighter and ever hotter until now. For the people who grew up back when things could have changed, it probably looked about the same. The water always had a few bubbles in it, right? Nothing’s changed. Not really.

So what about the riots and brutality? That’s always been there.

So what about the ice caps melting? Haven’t they always been?

So what about the economy? Those are made-up numbers anyhow.

So what about children in cages? Seen that before.

So what income inequality is higher now than prior to the French Revolution?

So what, so what, so what.

Say something enough times and it loses all meaning.

Hear enough tragedies on the nightly news and it stops being thoughts and prayers and starts being who cares. And who can blame them for that?

It really is all too much. And it’s not like we… I mean they… can do anything about it, right?

No. I’m not super grateful to be here, mysterious nightmarish figure. I was raised to believe in ideals I did not grow up to see reflected in the world around me. I was lied to. Misled. And left out to dry.

Our world is on fire. Our children may be the last to breathe free air on Earth. 8 Billion souls at one time may be the breaking point for humanity’s time on Earth. And who gets born just in time to witness it all possibly come crashing down?

You guessed it.

So no. I’m not overly thrilled to be here.

No. I don’t really care about differences of race, ethnicity, gender, or any of the other ways we’ve been taught to separate ourselves. We’re all human here. We’re all living in this same dystopia, pretending we aren’t, and just trying to get by.

I get it. I see it. I see you.

But I never say any of that to the man in my nightmare.

He’s pale, he’s old, his suit speaks of money and his sickly appearance is probably my subconscious drawing some comparisons between the cigarette smoke he’s filling the interrogation room with and the greenhouse gasses we’re pumping into Earth’s atmosphere year after year to sustain our fragile lifestyles.

What I say instead is, “Yes, thank you. Can I please have some more?” Because what other choice do I have?

He asks me more questions. They get harder and deeper and some of them haunt me even when I wake up. But the one you’re here to hear about is the question he leaves off on each night.

“What does the package hold?”

He points his disgustingly gnarled finger towards a bedraggled package addressed to me. I can barely see it through the choking haze of smoke the old man has left me with now that he’s departed. The package is worn and torn and barely holding itself together by the strips of brown paper wrapped around it. A barrage of little burn marks dot its surface. Places where countless cigarettes have been extinguished. Over and over again.

The beat-up tag says it's not just for me, it’s for all of humanity.

To tell you the truth, I don’t truly know what the package holds. I have two prevailing theories that appeal to me, and one that does not.

One. That the package represents the future. It's a little beat up and maybe it won’t ever be like it was for the older generations. But maybe, just maybe, it could be better.

Two. That the package is yet another metaphor for Pandora’s Box. Maybe the package contains hope itself and I must never open it lest I give up hope for good.

Three. And here’s the one I dread, the one that gets dark so be warned. That the package is empty. That there is no future. There is no hope. And all that there is left to the world is this. Not the bang of war that propels us to be greater than ourselves, nor the boom of exploration and science that compels us to be bold and bright and wise.

Just this cyberpunk reality we should really stop ignoring. A slow, sad decline into a pitiful little whimper and that’s it. No more frogs. No more humanity.

Just a boiling, empty rock circling a doomed sun amidst a universe rendered colder and emptier for lack of those clever little primates that used to peer up in awe and wonder what hope the future held. No one left to perceive Earth’s beauty or write songs of her majesty or weave ballads to the heroes who fought to save her. Because they’re all gone. Because humanity boiled themselves off the surface of our only planet.

… so what now?

I think it’s going to get a bit darker before (and if) it gets light again so buckle up.

Suicide is a taboo topic.

Whether we acknowledge it or not it makes us all afraid.

For those of us who understand it, it hurts to see others go through that. Because hope is hard to foster in a world gone cold to us. A cold world dying of heat, ironically. We are afraid not of death but of ourselves and our capacity to seek it.

For those of us who do not understand, it must be horrifying to contemplate another sentient being forced into a position where they truly believe there is no way out. No other way out, anyway. Suicide must seem so… inhumane.

For all our faults: an imperfect remedy. A permanent solution to problems that should have only ever been temporary.

We do not appreciate feeling helpless. Feeling locked into an uncertain destination. Feeling as if our ability to exercise whatever free will we do have is being infringed upon. Stunted. Suffocated. It is anathema to how we view ourselves. Free creatures capable of complex thought and unparalleled resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.

So what happens when that is challenged? We get afraid.

That fear is a feeling that we can all understand regardless of how fine the water feels to you. So why, in all the years we’ve had to learn our lessons, did we still come to this?

Why then is the human race committing suicide?

Especially when we could be so much more.

I consider myself a dreamer. I believe in humanity. I believe we are essentially good, I believe we can care about one another. I even believe that when push comes to shove we generally go out of our way to help one another. And I think that any example one can give to say that is not the case can be explained quite easily with one word.

Trauma.

We are not born evil. We collect it as we grow until it becomes us. Maybe even consumes us. When feeling and caring and thinking fail us, because we still get hurt, we have a choice. To keep doing the thing that hurts, or to start doing the hurting instead. And every time we choose the latter we collect another piece, however small, of evil. Of unkindness.

We grow numb. We care less. We think as little as possible. So that we don’t get hurt.

But deep down I think most of us want to be good, again, even if the whole world feels like it’s against us doing so.

So when I refuse to open that package and give up hope that there might be a bright future in store, I’m gambling. I’m betting that the package is not empty. That there is something left for humanity to say. That maybe things are not as dark as they seem.

I walk away from the package, keeping it another day, and I open my eyes to this. Our world.

And the nightmare continues…

But so do I.

On a side note, does anyone else ever wonder why it’s always children that save the day in dystopian stories?

My theory is it’s because children are the only ones still ‘crazy’ enough to think the world can be saved.

Adults have already opened the package and seen the contents. They know it’s empty. They have already accepted their phantom inheritance. They’ve resigned themselves to the status quo; maybe even found a way to make it work for them so they can live well enough in this broken world to not care anymore.

Because ‘so what,’ right?

Well, if that’s the case then here’s to never truly growing up.

Oh, and whatever you do, if that specter of all our failings ever haunts your nightmares like he does mine... Don’t open the package.