What you do today matters.

Act accordingly -- and spread the word!

I write about being “human in the post-human world”; that implies a stark division between the two, but post-humanity is a growth of humanity. Whether it’s an evolved feature or a nasty cancer is a matter of opinion, but either way the post-human world is a human project.

Every bomb has a designer. Every banking system has its architects. Humans invented AR-15s, Big Data, algorithms, LLMs, actuarial tables, and everything else that makes you feel forgotten and small. With all these powerful black boxes surrounding us, it’s easy to forget that there’s always someone “in the box” — just as someone was hiding in the Mechanical Turk, “someone” is hiding inside TikTok and Facebook and YouTube and Amazon. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play in which HELL is “other people” — and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has given us an additional 16 seasons. The inhumanity we face in the post-human world is, simply, man’s inhumanity to man — a terror as old as time! But as our technologies have developed, the old terror has acquired new reach, deeper saturation, and a PR push of inevitability.

On the flip side of Sartre’s HELL is the fact that HEAVEN is other people too. “Other people” is a powerful coin and it does have two sides. Ask any person about the greatest joys AND deepest agonies of their lives and the two answers will have something in common: other people. If your best and worst memories do not include another human, you are an outlier indeed — and good luck to you. But the rest of us have a problem: our greatest vulnerability is also our only defense. We cannot fight inhumanity with inhumanity — that only propagates it. To counter inhumanity we must expose our tender belly flesh. To quote Kipo of the Age of Wonderbeasts, We cannot END the war by FIGHTING it.

I wish there were one set of simple guidelines — keep left, yield, stop, no right on red — but there is not. Instead there’s a universe of human thought that might resonate with you more or less depending on your unique personality and history, and be more or less useful to you depending your current situation. Maybe I could invoke a Bill Hicks routine, or the house from UP, or a line from a Jane’s Addiction song¹, or Timothy Snyder’s rule #1: “Don’t obey in advance.”

But if your goal is to cultivate your humanity IN SPITE OF the post-human world, there are no universal guidelines or directives. Sorry, humanity is too messy for that. Humanity is oblique. It comes to its truths by angles and accidents. It is empowered via interactions as rational as alchemy. If you go to sleep tonight with a smile on your face, it will be for reasons that this morning you cannot imagine.

But this I can assert with confidence: What You Do Today Matters.

Maybe in the grand scheme of the world and its ongoing terrors, your “job” today does not seem “important” — but it is important. Because every social contract from unspoken to salaried to enforced by law matters right now, more than ever. In sturdier times, you might cut someone off in traffic or bump someone on the sidewalk or fail to call someone back about the $20 they dropped and return it to them, and it wouldn’t send the world into a tailspin. But when things are fragile, every move matters.

This isn’t chaos theory, it’s not that you are the butterfly, and the ocean is awash in hurricanes, unable to bear a single flap of your wing. The pond of humanity feels your steps differently. Ripples only move outward but their effects can be wonderful OR terrible. Others’ wake crashes against you. You make decisions.

Others can move fast and break STUFF, but they can’t move fast and break US

I’ve read stories of women dragged to gas chambers defiant and unbroken, spitting in the faces of uniformed weasels who “just follow orders.” It is a great human virtue to proclaim “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees”; the soul, too, has feet, and knees. Do not let your soul bow to venal inhumanity, and if, as a result, your soul comes to bear scars, wear them with pride.

Most often, dignity is quiet. Sometimes you can save the world with silence — especially if by “the world” you mean the sphere of human sanity and human harmony that surrounds you. Patience is a form of forgiveness. You always have the option to forgive. Even yourself.

Fellow human, these are hard times for our humanity. You don’t want to let your personhood get absorbed into someone else’s schemes, even tho that is the easy choice, the no-choice, the default. All the triggers are set up to prompt you and nudge you and get you to react, or to collapse in a heap of helpless feeling: nothing I do matters! Nothing I do can help! But it does, and it can. Instead of reacting, you decide to act. Choose to do things today that feed your SOUL. Choose to do things with no material advantage or long-term goal. Choose to do something just because It Is Good.

And hey, fellow human, what is your “role” in this world? Are you a caretaker? Are you a judge? Do you make food? Scrub toilets? Do you teach children, or pull over speeding cars? Do you deal with “idiots” or “assholes” all day? No matter the role you play, it has power baked into it, that double-sided super-coin, HEAVEN and HELL. YOU are someone else’s “other people.” Whatever your social contract to the people around you, perform it with dignity, strength, patience, and forgiveness.

Make your own decisions. Do you or don’t you smile to the letter carrier? Do you or don’t you let the person in the other car merge? Do you let the lady who’s just buying one thing skip ahead of you in line? Do you hold the door for the guy with the double-stroller? You’re responsible for what you choose. What you do matters today. And it will matter tomorrow. It may ripple outward and come to mean the difference between harmony and catastrophe, in ways we can’t imagine.

1. "If you want a friend, feed any animal” is the one I have in mind, but you could pick another :)