It’s hard to walk the streets these days without feeling like the whole damn place is collapsing around your ears.

I suppose proper writing style calls for me to document that statement, give a few examples but I’m not even going to bother. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, good for you. Enjoy your bubble as long as you can, I won’t be the one to pop it.

Besides, we might all have a slightly different list of specifics pointing to the same conclusion. That’s part of what makes this all seem so conclusive – the number of roads that seem to converge on that same nearby chasm. It’s simply a matter of when and how we get there.

I tend to optimism. If I have a religion, that’s it, really. Optimism, to me, isn’t some dreamy-eyed feeling that life is wonderful and we’re going to live happily ever after. It’s a clear-eyed understanding that everything is temporary and that pain doesn’t last anymore than pleasure does, that all experience is fleeting. And that almost all experience is worth cherishing and embracing, the good and the bad, because the boundaries between the two will seem much hazier and less conclusive when we look back. Only richness of feeling will remain, will live on inside us.

So, first of all, cause for optimism. If our present way of life collapses, life will go on. We who have very little will continue to have very little – and soon, we’ll have lots of company. Which might lead to fighting over scraps – or, if you’re optimistic, to people working together for their common benefit.

After all, what we’d have right in front of us is the example of that collapsed pigsty created by unrestrained greed and selfishness.

So what dance do you dance at the End of the World? Who cares? Just dance. There’s music in freedom and all of us newly-freed slaves.