We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human future, revolutionary or otherwise. The human species and its creations, ultimately, are just like individual humans: ultimately, this too shall pass.

I don’t want to knock attempts to make progress in the world. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably better than were those hundreds of years ago, in the short time we have on this planet. As Peter Berger rightly noted, “remind yourself that, in any historical painting depicting a scene prior to the mid-19th century, 80 percent of the people in the picture are suffering severe tooth pain.” That progress matters. But we must not lose sight that there is no more ultimacy to that progress than there is to progressive improvement within our own individual lives.

This is what Martin Hägglund’s work misses: the “realm of freedom” he envisions cannot be our telos, our ultimate end. I have found Hägglund’s work very helpful because it envisions a utopia that actually seems relatively utopian to me – and by doing so, shows us the limits of utopia itself. Even if we can envision a material utopia that we take do be as desirable as that one seems, and we think that utopia is possible, we need to recognize that that utopia is not our ultimate end; our ultimate end is a literal end, human extinction. (That’s not even to mention the point that even in a material utopia we will have tons of other problems to deal with.)

How then should we live our lives, knowing that, individually and collectively, they must end? It seems to me that this realization helps us shift our attention from the future to the present, in a myriad of ways – recognizing the need to be here now, to use a once-popular phrase. Multiple traditions point us to the importance of such a present-orientation. I think it is at the heart of George Grant’s Daoism. William Christian’s introduction to Grant’s Time as History says: “Grant found [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of eternal recurrence of the identical an attractive correction to the view of time as history: ‘It is… a doctrine of the trans-historical whole of nature.'” Most traditional cosmologies do not understand time as a progress of history, but as in some respects cyclical or recurrent, and there is something about such traditional views that helps us attune ourselves to the present rather than focus obsessively on the future.

We do not have to take those traditional descriptions as factual to see the wisdom in them. The Cakkavatti Sīhanāda Sutta (“lion’s roar of the wheel-turning king”) tells a cosmological story (which I describe at more length in Disengaged Buddhism), where lifespans once were 80 000 years long and will one day drop to ten years, but then start coming back up. There’s no reason to believe that story factually. But Steven Collins suspects it never was intended to give a factual account of history, but instead to give a “sense of the futility of temporal goods”. Such a detached attitude to time can be helpful even as things get worse in the short term, and I think it can help us in the long term as well.

I don’t want to throw the baby of progress out with the bathwater. Thinkers like Grant can be tempted by a small- or capital-T traditionalism, which can lead us to a reactionary place that makes the short times we have here worse. Women, above all, have been kept down for thousands or more years; the past couple hundred years have abolished slavery, as a practice known throughout the rest of human history. Things did get better! People do reflect on their situation, and move it in a direction of trying to make it better, and that is a good thing. I just don’t want to make that movement more significant than it is. In the end, as Ecclesiastes would say, it too is a vanity of vanities. There is only so much that it will fix before human beings are gone and none of it matters anymore.

Where then does this all leave us? Well, we all have to deal somehow with the fact of our own individual deaths. Many of us seek to do this through something that will outlast us, whether revolutionary social change, a great work of art, or our descendants. But that approach doesn’t suffice to deal with the deaths of those things we have striven for. We are better off taking an approach to our own deaths that can also handle the deaths of the species, like these wise words from Epicurus:

death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the later do not exist. (Letter to Menoeceus 125)

When we’re dead, we won’t care that we’re dead – whether the “we” stands for each indivdual or for the entire species. The eventual death of the species makes it more urgent to live in the present moment rather than in an envisioned future. For Epicurus as for the Daoists, only the present is our happiness. We need to give up the hope of “I’ll be happy when…” – not only individually, that I will be happy after some problem in my life is fixed, but collectively, that we will be happy when some major social problem is fixed. Living well means living well now, in the world we have. All of this, in turn, is easier said than done; that’s why I’d been so suspicious of Daoist sudden liberation. Sometimes you need to spend this present moment working hard on yourself so that in a future moment you will have become able to appreciate it as present. But that’s the goal – or at least a goal, a crucial one.

So I think there are at least two ways one can reasonably respond to Weil’s claim that “to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future” – both of which reject the attempt to be revolutionary. One is to accept the claim while rejecting the idea of an absolute good: one refuses to trade in absolutes and limits oneself to what Charles Hallisey has called “rather fragile and local achievement”. The other is to reject the claim and indeed find the absolute good down here, in the beauty of each individual moment. Both of these responses seem to me rather Daoist. Either way, we take what we’ve got in the present, rather than putting our faith in the future.