In 1970, Roger Zelazny published a classic of fantasy literature, Nine Princes in Amber. In it, he imagines a world at the center of everything — Amber — from which all truth emanates. In a sense, Amber is the only thing which really exists; everything else is merely a distorted reflection of it. The scions of Amber can learn to move through these reflections, and the further one goes the weirder and wilder the world gets. Travel far enough, you can find all manner of strangeness: pink skies, unrecognizable plants, different physical laws, even alien-like creatures. But none of it is real, the way Amber is.

I find myself thinking like that, sometimes. I’ve been mostly traveling though the UK and Europe. And it can feel a lot like I’m traveling along a gradient — the UK uses different money, head to Germany and it’s different money and language (although everyone speaks English anyway). By the time one reaches Turkey it’s language, money, and lots of people who don’t speak English plus the food’s really different. And the cultural differences start to pile up as well. It’s trivial to catch a taxi on the street in London. I’m pretty sure I could do it in Berlin. I’d be nearly useless figuring it out in Istanbul.

This is an illusion, of course, and a pernicious one. It sits at the heart of Eurocentrism, and forms the core of the chauvinistic delusion which leads to nationalism. The vast majority of cultures broadly agree on values: the sanctity of human life, the importance of community, the need to feel safe and secure. Most of our disagreements are on the edges. No one has any real claim on being the center of it all.

Maybe what I’m doing is traveling so fast, hopping from country to country so quickly, that all the differences become just a blur, that the only things that remain in focus are the commonalities, the things which stay the same. And at the end, whenever I stop, wherever I stop, I’m dizzy and winded, disoriented, with whatever I’m calling home feeling just as strange and exotic as those heathen lands on the opposite side of the world. Not for nothing, it is a hallmark of the hero’s quest that one must lose oneself before one can find oneself.

In August, David Koch died. He repeatedly expressed the wish to be remembered for his charitable contributions — he donated billions to museums and theaters and hospitals — but, of course, it will always be eclipsed in the public mind by his political activism. He and his brother were responsible, by setting up think tanks and making targeted political donations, for destroying the emerging consensus on global warming in the United States in the 1990s.

I think it’s important to recognize he wasn’t a supervillain. He wasn’t trying to destroy the world. It even seems like he wasn’t trying to improve his profits or protect his businesses. He genuinely, honestly, and fully believed he was doing a good thing for the United States and the world. And maybe he was right. Science isn’t entirely sure global warming is happening. Oh, unquestionably, it’s almost completely, totally, nearly 100% certain at this point. I’d bet on it. But that’s not certain. It can’t be. That’s not how science works. Science creates hypotheses, gathers evidence, tinkers with what it believes, and stands ready to jettison anything that no longer holds up.

Shuttering coal powered plants and eliminating fossil fuel production — along with all the associated shocks to the system like banning all gas-powered vehicles — is a hugely disruptive enterprise. People are going to be thrown out of work and industries are going to collapse. As a society, we have to look at the relative risks: how certain is the science, how likely are the costs, at what point do we hit the point of no return? In effect, through all our policies we’re placing a bet. Every dollar that goes towards solving a problem that doesn’t exist is a dollar that doesn’t go towards improving schools or fighting poverty.

In a very real sense, then, every dollar we spend ameliorating global warming is a bet on the future. It’s a bet that the cost of not spending that dollar is going to end up costing more than a dollar. It’s a complicated bet. You have to weigh all the likely results: research may or may not pay off, waiting a year might provide better insight into what will be the most effective course of action, or might just make everything one year worse and double the costs of dealing with it.

We’re all placing those kinds of bets, every single day, in ways both big and small. Should I become a vegetarian? A vegan? Is it okay if I’m mostly vegan, but I have a steak sometimes? Can I take this flight? Book a train instead? Cancel my trip entirely? Should I buy soda in a glass bottle or a plastic bottle? Should I buy water instead? Do I really have to carry this empty bottle with me until I see a recycling bin, or can I chuck it in the nearest trash can?

Each of these decisions comes down to a single question: is the marginal improvement in my life worth the potential cost to the environment? It’s a bet, and one that I don’t know how to answer for you. But I do know, no matter how you answer that question, it basically doesn’t matter. Because our system is set up so that one billionaire with an opinion can personally override the effect of every decision you will ever make in your life.

I’ve been traveling for about 18 months now. I’ve been to over 30 countries and 94 cities since I started. Admittedly, this is probably the worst way to think about travel, just a collection of stats, as if seeing fifty countries makes you a better person than someone who’s only seen five, or one. But it’s a simple way of tracking … something. Velocity, maybe? It’s at least an order of magnitude removed from what really matters, but I don’t know how to wrap numbers around the really interesting parts of this experience. Friends visited? Things I’ve seen for the first time? Thoughts I’ve never thought before? What’s the measurement for how much your understanding of the world has shifted?

I’m finding an appreciation for the ocean I haven’t been aware of before. Not the kind of ocean you find washed up on beaches, warm, calm, sheltered and tame, but the kind you find crashing into land at the edges of the world, wild, cold and wicked, with rain lashing the windows and no sign of letting up. A week ago I was in the middle of the North Atlantic, at least two days from any sort of land, with absolutely nothing between me and the horizon but the waves crashing against the ship.

It’s calming. It’s a way of regaining perspective, of removing yourself from the center of the universe. It reminds you of the scale you’re dealing with, of the world, of our place in it. We may destroy vast ecosystems and ourselves in the bargain — we’re well on our way, there — but the Earth will outlast us. Wipe us clean, take a million years or so to recover, and try again.

I’m rereading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and the main plot (such as it is) involves an American, Tyrone Slothrop, wandering vaguely across Europe in the wake of World War II. Small wonder I’m finding it resonant. But Pynchon does a strange thing with the narrative: it’s like a faulty radio with a busted receiver. It keeps tuning into other broadcasts. Slothrop’s story is continuously preempted by other stories, of German rocket scientists and Argentinian U-Boat crews and Herero military officers. As the end of the novel approaches, Slothrop doesn’t disappear so much as dissolve, vanishing into the background static of dozens of other people, other stories, all launched on their own trajectories, all barreling heedlessly down to the zero point.

One of the highlights of my travels so far has been Skellig Michael, the sharp splinter of island jutting out of the Atlantic off the Iveragh Peninsula in Ireland. Roughly a millennium ago a group of Augustinians rowed out to that desolate place and founded a monastery. The isolation was important; like many religious traditions, they believed the highest calling was to go off into the middle of nowhere — cloister themselves — and spend their days in contemplation of God.

That idea is beguiling, that you can discover the real meaning of life not by discussion or debate but by closing yourself off from the world. It reminds me of Gnostic mysticism, and the belief that God represents complete and utter perfection. I think it’s a dead end, though, a false lead. For the time being we have to live in this world, not the next one. And that depends on listening to each other.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin suggested you could divide people into two types: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes know lots of small things, contradictory and scattered bits of knowledge, each to varying degrees useful or useless as situations present themselves. Hedgehogs only know one big thing, a single unifying principle, a grand vision that explains the entirety of the world. Berlin argues these represent a kind of psychological default. On the one side you have hedgehogs like Plato, Nietzsche, and Ibsen. On the other, foxes like Aristotle, Montaigne, and Molière.

But it seems to me like the world is increasingly tuned to churn out hedgehogs. Social media bubbles, single-issue voting, echo chambers, and political polarization all make it harder to find nuance, to understand the limits of your understanding, to recognize common ground or to accept ambiguity. This kind of thinking will kill us, eventually. The world’s too big, too complicated, too interdependent to survive these kinds of barriers for long. There are solutions out there, but they have to start from the knowledge that the world is a messy place, and we can’t keep making decisions as if a 51% majority were the same as a 99% majority.

I’m finishing this on Christmas Eve. I’m not religious — even calling me spiritual is kind of a stretch — but the holiday season for me has always been time to spend with friends and family. I’ve been staying with a friend in New York City this week, and I’m visiting my father and brother and sister-in-law and niece and nephew later on. I’m grateful, every year, that I’ve always had someplace I’ve been welcome.

I lost a friend about a week ago. I didn’t know him particularly well, but I knew him well enough. I’m choosing to take it as a reminder of how important community is, for all our sakes. As horrible as it is, there’s a kind of comfort in seeing the community we shared reacting to his death, supporting each other, asking for help, sharing their memories. It’s that mix of anger, grief, and love that’s going to save the world.

I know I said your individual decisions don’t matter, on a global scale. That’s true. But it’s only true on an individual level. Collectively, working together, it doesn’t have to be. Individual action isn’t going to do much, unless you’ve got a couple million to throw at a think tank or NGO. You’re not going to change the world by carrying around bags for your groceries. But coordinated, collective action might. Certainly, it can. It has.

So that’s what I’m thinking over at the end of 2019, as I prepare for 2020. We need to be better with each other, kinder with each other, and better and kinder to ourselves as well. Live with more conviction but less certainty. Remember to breathe. Relax. Try to be in the moment. And when you want to do more, look for ways to work with others. Give to charities. Volunteer your time. Lend your voice to organizations you support. We need to pool our efforts and our energy. We’re all in this together.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take a friend with you.

Next: New York City (JFK) to Lagos (LOS)
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