The other night, I put on some Bob Dylan–a thing I have not done in many, many years–got to chopping garlic for dinner, and the next thing I knew, I was brainstorming a poem about humanity’s imminent annihilation by AI. As one does. Because in 2026, the crises are so numerous and fly so fast that the very idea of writing fiction or even essays about them is laughable, you really only have time for a poem before the next one blows up your phone. And because, I don’t know, maybe our phones noticed that we’ve stopped paying attention to climate change/Gaza/school shootings/measles outbreaks/Donald Trump doing (fill in the blank) and so it needed something new to scare us with this week? Which, I will say for myself, it really fucking did–enough to bring me out of hibernation here–with all these revelations about how the very people who are building the AI that’s swiftly making us stupider and more isolated while also killing our creativity are more than a little concerned it’s eventually going to kill us all. “Eventually” in this context meaning “in the next decade or so.” And when asked Why, then, do you continue to build it?, their best response seems to be Because if we don’t then someone else will and their version might kill us even worse. Or, Because none of us can trust that the others will stop so we can’t, either. Or, Because when the machines inevitably take over, we want them to know we were on their side. The most brilliant minds on the planet, and this is the best they can come up with: we can’t stop building the thing that will destroy us because we at least want to know that whatever version of it ultimately seizes the reins of this beautiful globe and shakes humanity off like the infesting fleas we are will be our version. A handful of friendless losers with God complexes and endless money, building a thing they call “Superintelligence” to show the world how brilliant they are, accidentally (or not) ruining the world. If that’s not the logical end result of patriarchy and late-stage capitalism, I don’t know what is.

Seriously, though: have none of these tech bros watched Silicon Valley?! War Games? The Terminator movies? Fucking 2001???

I will stipulate, though, that maybe it really is superintelligent if its plan is to wipe out humanity. And that it might not actually be the AI that’s making us stupider, as it appears we have, as a race, been pretty colossally fucking stupid all along.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have become deeply and furiously tired of living with a gun to my head. Maybe we each have our own fixations, our own personal vulnerabilities when it comes to which threats we respond to, but for me, climate change has been an ever-present background terror for as long as I can remember, though the threat level ratcheted up dramatically once I became a mother (a fun fact people allude to but that you can never really appreciate until you have an actual child of your own in the world). But it’s widely understood that people can get used to anything, and I realized this week that I’d gotten used to the idea of climate catastrophe the way a person might get used to having a chronic illness, which is to say that it’s something I’d learned to live with: unhappily, with great emotional discomfort, but its ultimate outcome seemed far in the distance, and not totally clear. Like, maybe things would stay livable throughout the remainder of my stay, and possibly my kids would be more secure than most. That was the place of mental compromise I occupied most of the time, save for when the occasional heat dome or wildfire sent my cortisol skyrocketing. I was able, with some effort (mostly between the wakeful hours of 3 and 5 a.m.), to continue living the life I wanted to live.

But this AI thing? Feels like a terminal diagnosis. It feels like You have one to three years left. And by you, I mean all of you. On the planet.

Standing at my kitchen counter the other night, feeling the panic rise in my chest as I pondered this week’s unbearable news (as distinct from every previous week’s unbearable news), I felt myself going a little wobbly. It happens every now and then, when the overlords or whoever it is running this show decide to step up the planetary threat level by announcing that we’ve run out of ice in the Arctic or there are no more whales or, I don’t know, the Trump administration has a new policy to give free AR-15s to everyone who votes Republican–there’s a part of me that just has to ask itself, Can I keep doing this? Like, how am I supposed to handle this? It’s not about wanting to give up, it’s more a question of whether I have the capacity. How much is any one human being supposed to handle? Historically, the thing that has provided me the most consistent comfort–in the wee hours while I lay sleepless, grieving the myriad glorious creatures, landscapes, lifestyles vanishing from the face of the blighted earth, or when my heart pounds and my palms sweat at the thought of the wars, famine, societal collapse I or my children might live through–is this: that no matter what else has been ruined or lost, one thing has not and will never change, and that is the fact that we were all going to die, anyway. That was always going to be the end result, so that, at least, is still true. At least there’s something we as a species haven’t managed to ruin! It is the bleakest of all possible consolations, I know. But it’s been working for me a long time now.

So, prepping our dinner with Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright) playing for the third time, I fell back on my usual coping mechanisms: I thought about the native Americans, who lived through an apocalypse and still remain. The African people who survived through Middle Passage only to endure a centuries-long odyssey that surely felt unsurvivable much of the time. I thought about the people in Gaza, who live every single day with the prospect of annihilation by both sentient humans and some of the most sinister AI on the planet, but continue making movie theaters out of the rubble for their children, and writing poems and cooking for one another and building whatever lives they can. And I thought about the many people I’ve loved in the course of my life who were here one day and gone the next, because nothing in this life is guaranteed except this: that every one of us, no matter how beloved or reviled, will eventually draw their final breath.

I’m looking at you, Elon. Altman. Thiel. All you fucks. Build what you will, revel in your God delusions. You’re still going to end up just as dead as the rest of us.

There are a couple of ways you can go with a strategy like mine, of course. One is fun and carefree: Life is short! Eat the pizza, drink the tequila, go home with whoever you want! And I do try to embody a certain amount of that philosophy. But it’s easy to let oneself get dragged down into futility: Why bother working on this revision? The world will be over before I get this fucker published. Think too hard about all there is to grieve and the sadness is a quicksand that will never let you go. I know several of my family members would urge me to consider the life to come, and I would have to tell them to stop right there because talk of the Lord is a hard pass for me. If an afterlife exists, I have no fear of it, because there is not a cell in my body that believes in the punitive, score-keeping God of the Bible who would consign His own flawed, fragile children to an eternity of torment. What I do believe is that religions–and Christianity most of all–have relied on promises of eternal reward in the afterlife to justify and rationalize incomprehensible abuse and exploitation in this life, and bear enormous responsibility for the plight in which we find ourselves today. So no–miss me with your admonitions to take comfort in the knowledge that heaven awaits.

Mostly I try to aim for the sweet spot between thoughtless hedonism and bleak despair, which is something along the lines of running down the street in broad daylight screaming WHAT ARE WE DOING, PEOPLE? WHAT ARE WE DOING?

WHAT?

ARE?

WE DOING???

The problem is that, for myself at least, most of the screaming happens inside the echo chamber of the internet and so…not super effective. There are other tactics, too: community building, creative expression, the determination to continue living one’s life despite the overlords’ (and the devices’) determination to keep us distracted and terrorized. Why should I trust that all this is, as one of the “whistleblowers” claimed, “not a marketing stunt?” These people have not demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy, and if Gen X has learned anything by this stage of (mid)life, it’s that America runs on Americans being afraid of something. You can pick your poison but whatever you choose, it’s all the same in the end.

If you read this far hoping for a conclusion of some sort, or an action step or a deliverable, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about this situation–vote? protest? take to the streets? unplug from all our devices and start learning to live off the land? I just know that what we are doing, right now, is entirely insufficient.

We should all be screaming all the time.