Bitter Wind Lullaby was about a past where humans were even more like helpless little animals than we are today; when winter was much more often a death sentence.
We’ve grown up a little since then; we understand our world better than we used to, and we have ways of dealing with such relatively basic challenges as winter.
But our trials have scaled up along with our capabilities, ever growing in complexity and stakes.
For example: if I’m a nurse in a hospital and my patient is having a complicated crisis and I give them this medication and not that, will they die?
Or: if I’m flying a plane through a storm and I pull this lever and not that, will my plane crash and kill the 200 passengers on board with me?
Or: how likely do I think it is that there will be a nuclear war that hits my city? In what situations should I evacuate?
Or, perhaps, given certain assumption: if I write this piece of code this way and not that, does this make it more or less likely that the world will end?
The hardware we’re using to make these decisions is the same monkey hardware our ancestors were using four thousand years ago to find the best places to hunt and forage, and to socially navigate within their small tribes and villages. No wonder it’s so hard.
It can be paralyzing, to live in a world where your decisions matter and you know that things can go very, very wrong. Hell, even with only individual-level stakes it can be paralyzing to know that there is absolutely no guarantee that things will be okay; that just because you need something doesn’t mean you can get it, and just because you cannot bear a possible outcome does not mean it will not come to pass. We fail, sometimes, and we know we fail.
This can feel almost impossible to live with. And yet we must live with it. And, sometimes, we even can.
This next song is for sitting with this grief and fear and discomfort, howling together into the void against the cosmic injustice of a world full of loads too merciless to bear.
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