"The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead." - Roy Scranton

I'd be wary of equating and then dismissing meditating on death as fatalism. In the Western world Memento Mori has a history going back to antiquity, perhaps tempering the worst instincts of individual pride and vanity, and as the wiki article suggests, something like it can at a stretch perhaps be thought of as the proper function of Western philosophy in its entirety. While we're stretching, you could argue that at least one of the great Eastern religions (Buddhism) is an extended meditation on the inevitability of (bodily) death, a religion renowned for its eschewal of the kind of material excess that has hastened the onset of collapse as we understand it here. I'd argue that, if we, as a culture, had maintained that tradition the rampant consumerism and unbridled individualism of the last, what, hundred years or so, we might have bought ourselves a little more time. I don't know what the author is suggesting, but I'm open to the idea that meditating on death, as a species rather than as individuals, might be one of the most useful things we can do right now.

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