CZM Book Club: How to Live Like the World is Ending by Margaret Killoy

Margaret reads you an essay about how to think about living during what feels like apocalyptic times. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Book Club book Club, book Club book Club. Hello and
welcome to the Cool Zone Media book Club, the only
book club where you don't have to do the reading
because I do it for you. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and every week I bring you well usually I bring
you stories, but I've been promising you for a little
while now the Cool Zone Media book Club is going

(00:29):
to change. It's not going to drop stories. It's not
going to drop me reading you stories. But what it
is is that we're going to start adding more stuff.
And we've been talking about different things that we can
bring you and one of those things is it occasionally
we're going to bring you essays. We're going to bring
you like kind of zine content and things, and so

(00:52):
this week I'm going to do that, and I'm going
to do it. You're going to be shocked to know this.
I'm going to break that ground by reading thing I wrote.
And one of the other things that we're working on
with pools On Media book Club is being able to
expand what sorts of authors were able to get the
content of. But for now, we're expanding the type of

(01:14):
thing to read to you. I want to read you
this piece because I care about this piece, and because
I recently reposted this piece to my substack. I originally
wrote this piece in twenty nineteen. It's called how to
Live Like the World Is Ending, And it's interesting to
me because when I wrote this, I felt like the

(01:35):
world was ending, primarily because of climate change and also
because of the ascendance of fascism in the United States,
which clearly wasn't so far along in twenty nineteen as
it is now. But I wrote it feeling almost a
little alone in this kind of feeling, and I don't
feel nearly so alone anymore. The one strange upside of

(01:59):
this seemingly apocalyptic times that we live in. And to
be clear, and I'm going to get into this in
the essay, I'm not saying like the end is here,
but rather this is a piece that explores what it
means to be alive when sometimes it feels like the
world is ending and there's like specific dramatic things happening
around you that sure seem a little bit like the

(02:23):
end of the world. And of course, you know, I
wrote this, and then I pretty shortly thereafter was like,
you know, I'm going to start a podcast. It wasn't
my first podcast. My first podcast was this fiction podcast. Actually, actually,
if you like this, you might like the like ten
or so episodes I did of a show called We
Will Remember Freedom, I believe is the name of the podcast.
I like naming things very dramatically. Anyone who's read my

(02:45):
books is aware of this. And it was short stories
about well radical ideas and things like that, sometimes the
very same short stories that I've read on this show.
And I started that in I don't know, twenty eighteen
or something like that. I'm not sure. But then in
early twenty twenty, I was like, I'm going to start
a podcast for preparedness, and I was going to call

(03:09):
it Live Like the World is Ending, And a friend
of mine was like, that's not as good wordplay as
live like the World is dying. So it became Live
Like the World is Dying. And that became my first,
like real podcast, or the first podcast that anyone I
knew listen to which somehow leads us to the chain
of events that brings us here. That's not really. You

(03:29):
didn't listen to this to hear my origin story as
a podcaster. No one cares about that. Podcasters are the
opposite of superheroes, but not even in a cool way
like supervillains. So I first wrote this piece in twenty
nineteen and then started a preparedness podcast in twenty twenty,
shortly before the pandemic hit, which was really good timing, hooray.

(03:50):
And it's been interesting to reflect back on this piece.
And I don't know, I think you all might like it.
How to live like the world World is Ending. There's
a commonly replicated piece of anarchist folk art that means
a lot to me. I don't know who drew it.
It's a drawing of a tree with a circle a superimposed.

(04:12):
The text of it reads, even if the world was
to end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today.
I grew up into anarchy around this piece of art.
It was silk screened as patches and posters, and visible
on the backs of hoodies and on the walls of
collective houses. It was graffitied through stencils, and it was
photocopied in the back of zines. The quote itself, in

(04:36):
one version or another, goes back at least around two
thousand years. I've actually learned that since I first published this.
This is my note from the future. I edited this
piece very lightly this morning, because I keep learning new
incarnations of this quote ever since I first published this. Anyway,
most directly, it's a paraphrasing of a quote misattributed to

(04:58):
Martin Luther Regional Martin Luther, the guy who started Protestantism,
not Martin Luther King Junior, although plenty of people misattribute
the quote to him as well. That quote, the one
that they're misattributing to Martin Luther, is something like, even
if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,
I would still plant my apple tree. The earliest reference

(05:21):
to this version, the Martin Luther Protestant version, seems to
be from the German Confessing Church, a Christian movement within
Nazi Germany that sought to challenge Nazi power. The quote
was used to inspire hope and to inspire people to action.
I've since learned, though, that it's a paraphrasing of a
hadith from Islam quote, if the resurrection were established upon

(05:45):
one of you, while he has in his hand a sapling,
then let him plant it then. More recently still, I've
found an even earlier source, Robin Johann ben Zakai who
lived in the first century Sea. He's a Jewish rabbi
is quoted as saying, quote, if you are holding a
sapling in your hand and someone tells you, come quickly,

(06:09):
the Messiah is here. First finish planting the tree, then
go to greet the Messiah. Either way, no matter where
you get the quote from anarchist folk art, from a Protestant,
from Islam, or from Judaism, regardless of whether or not
the end times are coming, finish your work, plant your trees.

(06:30):
That idea is something that I can get behind. There's
also this book that means a lot to me on
the Beach by Nevill Shoot. I've never read it. I
can't bring myself to I think about it all the time, regardless.
The novel describes a nuclear war destined to kill all
life on earth, and it describes the last days of

(06:52):
people living in Australia waiting for the inevitable death of
all things. It describes how they live their lives, how
they find meaning during the apocalypse. It's a book about
how to live without hope. It's a book of resignation.
It's too much for me. I think, at least right
now the world might be ending A lot of people

(07:14):
will argue with me about that. They will correctly point
out that for large numbers of people all over the world,
especially in the parts of the world long ravaged by
Western imperialism, the world has been ending for a long time.
They will correctly point out that the world itself isn't
going anywhere, that change is constant, and even if what
is left behind by climate catastrophe and war is a

(07:36):
scorched desert, it's probable that life will continue. Human life,
non human, animal life, and plant life will all, in
some form or another, survive. All of this. People will
argue correctly once more that most every generation has believed
that the world was ending. The machine gun slaughter of
World War I, the genocide of World War II, the

(07:59):
doomsday cel of Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, those all
must have felt like the apocalypse for entire peoples. They
were yet here, some of us are today alive. None
of these arguments detract from the fact that it shore
feels like the world is ending. Mountains are blown up

(08:20):
for coal to pump poison into the air, Pipelines clear
cut the last vestiges of the wild to help us
pump more poison into the air. Oceans are swallowing islands.
One hundred year storms happen every year, and it feels
like every day we break new climate records. A sense
of urgency about coming disaster is fueling the rise of

(08:41):
a I Got mine, Fuck you nationalism and climate scientists
are being ignored to an unconscious able degree. The world
is ending. It's always ending, but it's ending a lot
right now. For me and the people I'm close to.
It's ending more dramatically than it was when I was
born thirty seven years ago. That's fucking paralyzing. The news

(09:07):
is full of extinction and fascism and death and death
and death, and we're expected to get up in the
morning and go to work just like me. My job
is making content that advertisers can put ads into. And
here I am, and here's the ads, and we're back.

(09:38):
For a while, I coped by means of a cycle
of denial and panic. The potential apocalypse was basically too
much problem. I couldn't wrap my head around it or
its ramifications, so I acted like it wasn't happening, until,
of course, some horrible event or reminder of the apocalypse
broke over a certain threshold and sent me spy. I

(10:00):
relin into despair. Then numbness took over once more, and
the cycle began again. That didn't do me much good,
But a year ago I decided to embrace four different,
often contradictory priorities for my life. I run decisions past
all of them and try to keep them in balance.

(10:22):
One act like we're about to die. Two act like
we might not die right away. Three act like we
might have a chance to stop this. Four act like
everything will be okay. One act like we're about to die.
We have so many sayings about this. Every breath we

(10:44):
take is the last breath we take. You only live once.
Smoke them if you got them, do as that wilt
Memento mory. Nothing is better later. Our culture is full
of euphemisms and clever sayings that focus around one simple idea.
We're mortal, so we might as well try to make
the most of the time we have. Embracing hedonism has

(11:05):
a lot to recommend it. These days. It's completely possible
that the majority of us won't be alive ten or
twenty years from now. It's completely possible, though a lot
less likely, that a lot of us won't be alive
in a year. I used to think when I was
younger that I was a terrible hedonist. As a survivor
of sexual and psychological assault and abuse, I never had

(11:27):
much luck with drug use or casual sex, But fucking
and getting wasted, while perfectly worthwhile pastimes, aren't the only
ways to live in the moment. Hedonism is about the
pursuit of pleasure and joy. The trick is to find
out what gives you pleasure and joy. For myself, this
is meant giving myself permission to pursue music, to sing,

(11:49):
even though I'm not trained to play piano and harp,
to travel, to wander, to seek beautiful moments and accept
that they might be fleeting. I'll rudely paraphrase the host
of the rather wholesome podcast ologies, Ali Ward, and say,
we might die, so cut your bangs and tell your
crush you like them. My hedonism is a cautious one.

(12:12):
I'm not looking to take up smoking or other addictions.
I'm not trying to live like there's a guarantee of
no tomorrow, just a solid chance of no tomorrow. Frankly,
this would be true regardless of the current crisis, but
it feels especially important to me just now two act
like we might not die right away. Preppers have a

(12:35):
bad reputation for a good reason. The people stockpiling ammunition
and food and doomsday bunkers, by and large don't have
anyone else's best interests at heart. Still, being prepared for
a slow apocalypse or dramatic interruptions in the status quo
makes more and more sense to more and more of us.
Preparing for the apocalypse is going to look different to

(12:57):
every person in every community. For some people, it will
mean stockpiling necessities, for other people securing the means to
grow food. One thing I've learned from my friends who
study community resilience and disaster relief, however, is that the
most important resource to shore up on isn't a tangible one.
It's not bullets, it's not rice, it's not even land

(13:18):
or water. It's connections with other people. The most effective
means of survival and crisis is to create community disaster plans,
to practice mutual aid, to build networks of resilience. Every
apocalypse movie has it all backwards. When the plucky gang
of survivors holds up in a cabin and fends off
the ravaging chaotic hordes. The movies have it backwards because

(13:41):
the ravaging hordes are, in the roughest possible sense, the
ones doing survival right, they're doing it collectively. Obviously, I'm
not advocating that we wear the skulls of our enemies
and cower at the feet of warlords, though wearing the
skulls of would be warlords has its appeal. I'm advocating
staying open to opportunity and building collective power. There are

(14:06):
infinite reasons not to count on holding up in a
cabin with your six friends as an apocalypse plan, but
I'll give you two of them. First, because living a
worthwhile and long life as a human animal requires connections
with a diverse collection of people with diverse collections of skills, ideas,
and backgrounds. It's all fun and games in your cabin
until your appendix bursts, and none of your surgeons where

(14:27):
you're the only surgeon. Likewise, small groups of people who
tend to agree with one another are subject to the
dangers of groupthink in the echo chamber effect, which will
limit your ability to intelligently meet the challenges that face you. Second,
because by removing yourself from society you're removing your ability
to shape the changes that society will go through during crisis.

(14:50):
If you go hide in the woods with your stockpile
and your buddies and fascists take over. Guess what, it's
kind of your fucking fault, because as you weren't at
the meeting when everyone decided whether to be egalitarians or fascists.
And guess what now that rampaging horde is at your
doorstep and they want your AMMO and your antibiotics, and

(15:10):
they're going to get it one way or the other.
Fascism is always best stamped out when it starts. It's
never safe to ignore it, not now, not during any
mad Max's future. Tangible resources do matter. Of course, any
likely scenario that prepping is good for won't be so
dramatic as an utter reconstructing or collapse of society. It

(15:33):
might mean food shortages, power outages, water contamination. It never
hurts to keep non perishable food, backup sources of power,
and water filtration systems around for yourself and your neighbors. Still,
this is a terrible basket to put all your eggs into.
You probably shouldn't live out your days, whether or not
they're your last ones are not over preparing for something

(15:56):
that may or may not come to pass, whereas you
know what I I can tell you we'll come to
pass advertisements unless you prepared. If you prepared by getting
cooler Zone media, then you get one hundred percent of
the ad pivots and zero percent of the ads. That's right.
You get the finest part of this podcast without the

(16:17):
worst part of this podcast, all at once if you
have cooler Zone Medium. But if you don't, well, I
suspect your phone has a plus foward, fifteen or thirty
second button and you can just do that until the
bumper music kicks in. And then like, like when I'm
listening to podcasts and there's an AD and I skip
through it, I can't handle if I cut back in

(16:38):
in the middle of a sentence, I like have to
go back again until I get to the bumper music.
Even if it means I listen to like ten seconds
of ads. It's worth it. It's worth it for the way
my brain is wired. Anyway, here's your ads or non ads,

(17:03):
and we're back three. Act like we might have a
chance to stop this. We can and should stop the
worst excesses of climate catastrophe. We can and should stop
fascism by whatever means necessary. Throwing up our hands and
walking away from the problem is no solution. It's hard

(17:27):
to remember that we have agency unless we were raised
ultra rich. We've had the concept of political and economic
agencies stripped from us at every turn. We've been told
there are two ways to affect change. Vote for politicians,
or vote with our dollars. Politicians and Western democracies are
likely incapable of changing things as dramatically as they need

(17:50):
to be changed, and they certainly won't bother trying unless
we motivate them to do so in fairly dramatic ways.
As for economic agency, there is a small handful of
men with more wealth and therefore power than the rest
of us combined. We've been told we cannot take matters
into our own hands politically or economically. We're not allowed

(18:12):
to have a revolution. We're not allowed to redistribute the
wealth of the elite. You will be shocked to know
that I don't put a lot of stock into what
we are and aren't allowed to do. Still, even if
we give ourselves permission to undertake it, revolution feels like
an insurmountable challenge. We've got optimistically ten years to completely

(18:34):
overhaul the economic system of the planet, five years now
revisiting this piece in twenty twenty five. It can be done,
It has to be done. Yet it feels like it
won't be done. We're all running the cost benefit analysis
of acting directly. We all have different fuck it points,
the point beyond which we can no longer prioritize our

(18:56):
own immediate well being but instead must act regardless of
the outcome. In the meantime, we're waiting until it seems
like we can act and actually have a chance of winning.
When I interject here from the future and say that
we're starting to see people reach their fucket point, We're
starting to see people act out individually or in small groups,

(19:20):
often in ways that are very unstrategic and some of
which are questionably moral. But we're starting to see more
and more people reach the fucket point, And I think
that it behooves us to offer support to the people
who reach that point, who are trying in their way

(19:42):
to make the world a better place, even if it's
different than how we would have told them to do it.
That actually applies to me for people who act in
ways that I consider sort of boring, like gluing yourself
to art or something. I don't mean to talk trash
on that. If anyone who is putting themselves at risk
to confront climate change or fascism or the current genocide

(20:03):
that's going on, we should be supporting, even if they're
doing it in ways that we find either too boring
or too extreme. Anyway, back to the essay, all over
the world, even in some western countries, people are no
longer waiting. They're acting. We need to be helping them,
supporting them with words and actions while we get ready

(20:24):
to act here as well. The revolution needs mediators and facilitators,
medics and brawlers. It needs hackers and propagandists. And it
needs financiers and smugglers and thieves. It needs scouts and coordinators,
and it needs musicians, and it needs people invested in
the system to turn trader. It needs lawyers and scientists

(20:47):
and bookkeepers and copy editors and cooks, and it needs
almost everyone almost every skill. One thing it doesn't need, though,
is would be managers. The people who claim to know
how to run a revolution don't know how to run
a revolution, or they would have done it by now,
the authoritarian urge to decide what the revolution should and

(21:09):
shouldn't look like, how people should and shouldn't express their
rage and reclaim their agency will fail us every time.
Authoritarian communism is the death of any revolution. Authoritarian liberalism
is the death of any revolution. Even the more dogmatic
anarchists will get in the way if given a chance.

(21:32):
The revolution cannot be branded, despite Hollywood representations of rebellions,
they don't work well under a single banner. They are diverse,
or they're not revolutions. The revolution cannot be controlled by
a vanguard of activists. If it is, it will fail.
The revolution must be controlled by its participants, because only

(21:54):
then will we learn how to claim agency over our
own lives and futures. We have a chance to stop this.
I forget that sometimes, but I shouldn't. Still. I can't
count on hope alone, or the days when hope fails
me would lay me low. And then Priority four act

(22:18):
like everything will be okay. All the times the world
has come close to ending before, it hasn't. It's ended
for some people, some cultures, civilizations have collapsed, ecosystems have
radically shifted, species have gone extinct, including the species of
humans that came before Homo sapiens. Colonization was an apocalypse.

(22:40):
Some people survived those apocalypses, but plenty more didn't. Still,
the world is still here, and we're still here. Capitalism
is a sturdy beast, quite adept at adaptation. Marx was
wrong about a lot of things, and one of those
things was the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism under

(23:01):
the weight of its own contradictions. With or without capitalism,
the society we live in might stagger on. We might
curb the worst excesses of climate catastrophe through economic change
or wild feats of geoengineering. I won't bet on it,
but I won't bet entirely against it either. As much

(23:23):
as I need to live like I might die tomorrow,
I need to live like I might see one hundred
years on this old, green and blue planet unless things change.
I am not burning every bridge. I'm trying to maintain
a career. If I was certain to die under a
fascist regime by twenty twenty one, Yep, Okay, there wouldn't

(23:45):
be much point in writing novels. They take too long
to write, publish, and reach their audience. I get some
joy from the writing itself, sure, but I get more
joy from putting my art in front of people of
letting it influence the cultural landscape. With novel writing in particular,
it takes time. That takes there being a future. I

(24:07):
want there to be a future, almost desperately, not enough
to bank on it completely. Keeping some small portion of
my time and resources invested in the potential for there
to be a future is important for my mental health
because it keeps me invested in maintaining that health. The
world might end tomorrow, and it might not if we

(24:30):
can help it at all. We shouldn't let it end.
We still ought to act like it might, and we
ought to figure out what trees we would plant. Either way.
That's the end of the piece, and it is fascinating
to revisit this particular piece six years later. It's fascinating

(24:54):
because I wrote this not really sure. I mean, you
probably picked up a this not really sure. I'd be
here five years later, right, And I'm happier than I
was five years ago. The world is in a worse place,
and I'm happier in my personal life. What does that mean?

(25:15):
I don't know, but I've had more of those moments.
If I'm going on act like we might die and
just seeking out beautiful and precious moments. I've had more
of those now, and I'm so grateful for every single
one of them, even the ones I don't remember. That's
not a statement about me drinking, because I actually don't

(25:36):
really drink. That's more statement about how I have a
really bad memory. So I try to write things down,
but I don't write enough things down. And I also
think that okay, in terms of priority to get prepared,
that's happening more and more. I think that part of
why I'm happier is that the idea of mutual aid

(26:01):
as disaster relief, the rise of that and having that
supplant old prepper narratives is really really beautiful and gives
me hope. It gives me hope about the ways in
which we can shelter from storms. On the other hand,
point three about how maybe we can stop this not

(26:24):
looking so good Five six years later, I gotta say
we have not taken measurable steps towards confronting climate change
at all. We have gone backwards by anything that I
can immediately measure. I'm sure that there are hope punks
out there who keep track of everything that we've done
positively and maybe certain by some certain measure, we are

(26:46):
confronting things better. But I would say culturally, we are
gutting any portion of our political system that might possibly
have been used to confront climate change, even though our
political system was always poorly designed to do something like that.
And we are on our back foot compared to where

(27:08):
we were. But backfoot doesn't mean down and out right,
It just means backfoot. We've always been in this permanent
ebb and flow between you know, people power and freedom
on one side, and fascism and authoritarianism in whatever guys
on the other side. We've always been an ebb and flow,

(27:30):
and pieces of one side of that turn into pieces
of the other side of that, and everything is messy
and not a not a tug of war, but you know,
spiraling tides if you can imagine my visual metaphor in
this audio medium, and maybe more people are aware that

(27:55):
things are dire and that it's going to take dramatic
action to at the very least defeat the mini boss
of fascism. And I hate calling it the mini boss,
but climate change weights in the wings laughing. As for
act like everything will be okay. I have a more

(28:17):
complicated view on this than I did before, because I'm
starting to understand that things being okay is even more
subjective than I would have guessed before, and that in
some weird way, acting like everything will be okay ties
into acting like we're all about to die. It ties

(28:38):
into the hedonism, the seeking of joy, because acting like
everything will be okay means building things together, and it
sort of means planting that tree. It sort of means saying,
if the world were to end tomorrow, I would still
plant this tree today. Is to say like, acting like

(29:01):
we can win, acting like we can survive, is probably
overall a better way to go about things. That's my
analysis of this essay that I wrote. But it was
a long time ago, so I feel like I can
do analysis of my own essay a little bit. And

(29:21):
that's where I'm at. If you want to read more
things like this, I write about this kind of stuff
all of the time. Over on my substack. Almost all posts,
including this one, are free for anyone to read, and
they just some of them are behind at paywall. They're
more personal, and I like, you know, tell them talking
about my weekend or my young life as a crosspunk

(29:43):
gloving under bridges or whatever. That stuff is more likely
to be paywalled. But all of this stuff is free,
and I will see you next week on cool Zone
Media book Club, where maybe I'll also go wildly back
and forth between reading you Winnie the Pooh one week
and telling you that we're all about to die in
the next week. Who knows. I actually don't, because I

(30:05):
figure out what I'm gonna read as the week goes on.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
All right, by everyone, It could Happen here as a
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Thanks for listening.