On Resolutions and Wildfires

With each new year comes greater calamities— are personal goals and resolutions rendered meaningless?

Photo via NBC

A viral tweet whose origin I can no longer track once said “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” 

It reminds me of Martin Niemöller’s “First they came…” poem, which displays the refusal of an unnamed group to shield any other from the Enemy until they’re the last ones left standing, upon which the Enemy descends upon said group, who no longer has anyone left to help them. The poem is often quoted in reference to genocide or other atrocities (I’ve seen it used in Gaza to explain why we should care about war crimes in foreign lands), but is applicable here, too. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The deep-rooted sensation that tragedy only happens to others and not ourselves is pervasive in every aspect of life (I just spent a lot of money on car insurance, overcoming the natural instinct that only others get into bad car wrecks), but most notably so among the elite. At least throughout America’s history, our plutocracy has oppressed and exploited the lower classes, creating systems and institutions that are meant to bolster the upper hand they have socioeconomically. But over the last half century, the middle class has disappeared and American oligarchs have consolidated. They have become more insular. The things they’ve done since, say, the Vietnam War only serve to line their pockets and are bereft of any foresight. They don’t care about their children or any subsequent generations; they only know greed and corruption while they are still alive.

Nowadays, long-term environmental and economic policy fallout no longer just affects ethnic minorities or the impoverished, but every American, except those in rare echelons of power. The last decade has accelerated this feeling: the COVID-19 pandemic, mass flooding in America’s southeast, and, now, the Los Angeles wildfires engulfing the entire area in a searing orange blaze are naturally-occurring phenomena destroying major swaths of this country. The thing about devastating hurricanes and unstoppable floods and worldwide pandemics and raging wildfires is that Mother Nature does not discriminate, nor does she care whether you have $26 in your bank account of $47 million. Colin Powell died from COVID-19. In this week’s footage from phones in California, we see burnt-out blocks and smoky devastation in some of the nation’s swankiest zip codes (Malibu, the Palisades.) These were of the class meant to be protected and—oftentimes—helped by the very regulations that are now killing them. Once the cruel indifference of nature rears its ugly head and wipes out those who built the system for themselves, where do we turn? I get the sense that we’ve passed the point of no return, and now we must simply wait and watch the world burn through our phone screens until we’re the ones filming. 

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I’ve thought a lot about doom at the dawn of this new year. Normally, I fight the good fight. It seems that many disavow the virtue signaling of New Year’s resolutions. It’s just another day, they say. Why wait until January 1st to make the changes you want to see in life? Are you just procrastinating? The truth is, as people, we love milestones and rites of passage. We love to celebrate birthdays once a year and we mourn our loved ones on the anniversaries of their death. People will post their goals online for all their friends to see because they believe it will help them stay accountable. We do “75 Hard” days of no fast food or alcohol to turn self-improvement into a competition. It’s human nature to use arbitrary dates as measuring sticks for improvement over time, guard rails on our spiritual journeys. It’s cleaner and neater and nicer than life, and if it makes us feel good, and accomplish what we set out to do, why bother disparaging it? 

But, for me, fighting the good fight was more difficult this year, as it was last year more difficult than the year before. If the New Year is meant to be a symbol of a clean slate, a fresh start, where brighter things are on the horizon, how are we supposed to reckon with the first week of 2025? Hours after midnight, a truck mowed down innocents on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The genocide in Gaza is still happening. Meta is removing fact-checkers, which will likely exacerbate online misinformation. A scorned ex-husband blew himself up in a Cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, injuring several others. Donald Trump is about to be sworn in as President. And now, the wildfires? And it’s only January 8th. 

How are we supposed to focus on the minutiae of our own lives in times like these? Suddenly, losing 50 pounds or reading 45 books feels hopelessly trivial. If we’re surely doomed and life on Earth is in the throes of early onset apocalypticism, why shouldn’t we stop trying? It’s all in vain anyway. What’s stopping us from living like libertines and vagabonds? We might as well let inertia carry us to wherever the gods please. Will being healthier, or more well-read, mean anything when humankind is wiped from the planet?

Truthfully, I think it does. We only exist in our own minds. Reality is different for every person because it only exists in our individual image, and sentience of the human psyche is the very thing that makes our lives, lives. Otherwise we’d be no different than plants or single-celled organisms, simply breathing without any consciousness, let alone selfdom. We must work tirelessly to make the world a better place, because it’s the only vessel in which the human experience exists, but real joy comes from inside, from edifying the burning desire to improve that lies deep within the human soul. From visionaries to despots, the essence of life is the struggle for purpose and self-actualization. Richard Nixon once said, regarding his lust for power,  “The unhappiest people of the world are those in the watering places, the international watering places . . . drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little. . . . They don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.”

On the other side of the spectrum, Fyodor Dostoevsky, wisened by years of exile in Siberia, still found joy in life— maybe even more so after facing unspeakable horrors.

"“I exist.’ In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there."

If two icons of modern cultures, who came from different sides of the planet, led utterly different lives, whose ethics couldn’t be more divorced from one another, arrived at the same conclusion that man’s insatiable desire to grow within himself is the lifeblood of humanity in any civilization, why can’t we?