I’m 75 years old. The world of extinction capitalism before 2023 (our first extinction summer) would have me planning (socially, emotionally, and financially) for transition to a senior living community, followed by assisted living, adult daycare, nursing home, and finally hospice. All stages of dying turned into profit making opportunities for the final phase-out of elderly individuals.

But that kind of transition to death seems far fetched for the years ahead. Death will be far more sudden and full of brutal promise.

And to think of young people with so much life ahead, it’s just incredibly sad. But of course nothing is over until it’s actually over.

Each summer ahead from now on will be a marker that will either markedly reinforce the trajectory of extinction, or it will be a muddle of pause, and a grasping of hope by us mere mortals.

Humanity’s common psychological state from now on will be a kind of paralysis stopping us from undertaking drastic change. Either nature gives us a pass in some mysterious way, or we perish ingloriously by our own folly of burning coal (et al) insatiably over the last few centuries.