Dear Isabel,
What is the point of living when human beings are destroying life on Earth? (I am ten years old.)
Pointless
Dear Pointless,
Your letter breaks my heart. I think you are saying: how do we feel hope for the future? And that is a heartbreaking question from anyone, but I wish you could live the carefree life of a child a little longer before being burdened by such a big worry. I have a few answers, so what I’m writing is pretty long. I hope it helps you.
I’m 45 years older than you, and you know what? When I was about your age and shared my worries about the earth’s future, people 45 years older than me said the same thing to me—“that breaks my heart.” I suppose that for a long time, most kind, decent people have wished they were making a better world for the next generation than they have managed to do.
And what I just said is one of my answers. I take hope from the fact that kind, decent people do keep trying to make the world better. You and I are not carrying this burden alone. Humans have worried about the state of the world for hundreds, probably thousands of years, and on the whole, they haven’t given up on making it better.
A second thing that gives me hope for the future is that we often have made it better. Here are three huge, seemingly un-fixable problems that human beings have fixed:
As you know, right here in our country, it used to be perfectly legal for one person to own another, and to do anything they wanted to that person. Through all that time, many people fervently believed that this was a terrible wrong, but it took them 400 years from the beginning of the slave trade to abolish slavery everywhere in the United States. And still, they finally did it.
Only 30 years ago, 38% of people around the world lived in what is called extreme poverty (living on less than $1/day). It caused so many early deaths from hunger and disease and other preventable problems. Since then, we have cut extreme poverty so that it affects only 9% of the world’s population—still far too many, but a huge, huge improvement, saving millions of lives.
In 1900, people died young of many diseases that we can now prevent entirely, cure easily, or treat pretty effectively. That might seem like a long time ago, but it is only a few generations. Your grandparents’ grandparents lived in a world where there were no antibiotics, so people often died of simple infections; almost no vaccines, so people often died of such things as measles, polio, tetanus, and rabies; and almost no treatments for cancer, so almost everyone who got cancer died.
Here's the thing: we look back at those things now and see them as solved (or partially solved) problems, but at the time, people didn’t know they would be solved. They often felt that they were hopeless. So in our imagination, we can travel to 50 or 100 years from now and see people looking back at us and saying, “Those people in 2024 had to deal with environmental destruction! Wow, good thing we fixed that problem.”
And here’s the third thing that helps me feel as if life has a point, even when I am really worried about big problems (and like you, I’m most worried about the environment). It’s the day to day things: Snuggling with my cat. Walking in the forest. Laughing with my family. Having a really good conversation with a friend. Making art. Reading a book. Doing something that makes life better for someone else. In other words: love, beauty, friendship, joy, purpose.
Wishing you well,
Isabel
Next week: My son refuses to baptize his baby, and I’m worried for my grandson’s soul. I say I should get him baptized, even if I have to do it secretly. My wife says I shouldn’t. Who’s right?
*Great news! This site will migrate to Ghost.org next week. Many thanks to the fabulous Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of the fabulous Life Is a Sacred Text, who made time in her very busy life to answer my questions about Ghost. I am satisfied that it is a much better alternative to Substack. I’ll explain more about this decision when we get there, and don’t worry, I’ll take you with me!