SuperProust, or rather, even the fear of the future starts to bore us after a while

We are waiting for either disaster or the best of all possible worlds. In the meantime, reality settles somewhere in between. We have accommodated ourselves to a sort of unified moral state where events unfold and we allow them to do so. There is no definitive catastrophe—the kind that knocks us flat—and there is no peace. One day Elon Musk’s cars are flying through the air, and a few days later the whole of Paris is ablaze. There are wars, but there is also the vaccine that cures cancer. We are partly submerged and partly saved. The internet is the great Pandora’s box without a lid: everything gets mixed up in there; it takes just a few hours for the manifestations of the contemporary world to converge on the same fate – the meme. It could be the Pink Panther amidst the tear gas, Trump complimenting Nicki Minaj’s bum, or Anthropic’s IPO; all of this generates a sense of sameness, which is strange, because the impressions it should evoke would be quite different. This collective state of mind constitutes a new ‘SuperProust’ sentiment: a weary yet ready irony, a certain cheerfulness the colour of a nearly healed bruise that I would like to define more precisely. Perhaps we have found—I will not say the cure—but certainly the right attitude for the future. We have given up on taking it seriously any longer; it may appear to be a defeat, yet it is actually the solution. This is not naivety; it is simply that we have exhausted all our reserves of fear. Even worry grows tired; anxiety requires respite and hunger to grow; if you feed it too much, it becomes a fat, placid beast.

There were two schools of thought on possible futures. The Great Optimists. Silicon Valley, the new hub of creation, which would take it upon itself to rectify the errors of the Almighty. On the other side were the doomsayers, with their entire catalogue of collapses – climatic, geopolitical, moral, not to mention psychiatric. The middle ground was desperately empty, and this should already have raised suspicions: when have catastrophes ever been neatly ordered in their progression? If we are all the walking dead, wouldn’t we have realised it by now? Similarly, this certainly does not strike me as the best of all possible worlds, not by a long shot. It’s just that perhaps these aren’t two predictions at all; they are the solemn literary genres we have devised for ourselves out of an excess of free time, with the difference that great contemporary novels are now written in the flow of social media. The point, then – and even a casual observer will spot it straight away – is that the two schools bear a striking resemblance and converge on this point: neither is capable of imagining continuity as the next historical phase. Among the hypotheses for the future, there is no imagination, only rigidity: they offer us ‘magnificent’ or ‘terrifying’. The idea that ‘this is it’ – that is, that what we will have resembles, with a few gradual changes, what we have now – does not hold water; that is the possibility that has been confidently ruled out.

We have grown accustomed to this new way of thinking; points of no return come one after another, but no one knows where we stand. The dangers are there, mind you – there have never been so many, all at once – it’s just that fear has lost its grip. ‘I’m quite willing to believe in disaster,’ the moderate pessimist will say, ‘but you must tell me how many times I’m supposed to believe it.’ In my view, Homo sapiens has invented the latest stage of evolution since Homo technologicus: it has honed the part of the brain capable of absorbing every kind of disorder into the grind of habit. “Habit! A skilful organiser, yet terribly slow, which begins to make the spirit suffer for weeks, in an arrangement which it is nevertheless quite happy to encounter.”

Here we are in the world we are destined to inhabit – that perpetually liminal realm of alternating and costly chaos, which approaches the limit but never quite reaches it. A Sisyphean world in which some things get worse and others improve, and history continues to grow more complicated; but by the time they realise we are incapable of navigating it, we will have learnt our lesson.