We’re all going to die.

There. I said it.

The only real question is whether we do it individually, or all together at the same time.

There’s a pervasive, ambient terror many of us have been carrying for a while now. Words like “collapse” and “polycrisis” have replaced more actionable entry points to social change, such as “environment” or “peace.” Doom is everywhere. It sometimes feels as if there’s nothing we can do but sit and hold space for what’s about to happen.

And over the past couple of years, I’ve concluded that this form of acceptance may not be failure at all, but our most necessary adaptation to a world in crisis. What if surrender—or even more actively, a full embrace of what is actually happening—constitutes our last best hope for rising to this occasion?

I was scheduled to give a talk in California to a group of activists on the topic of Averting Apocalypse. This was a few years ago—after Trump became president, but before Covid, if you want some sense of where we were on the…trajectory. I was just about to get on the plane when I got the news that an elderly family member was back in the hospital with pneumonia, and not likely to make it out. She had frightfully few loved ones with the means to attend to her, so I canceled my ticket and spent the long drive to the hospital making my apologies to the conference and cashing in a few favors to get a suitable replacement.

The hospital was cold at night. Hours at the bedside turned into days, as she went from talking to moaning to sighing to just lying there. There were just a couple of us so we each took turns sitting with her, in 6-hour shifts. I seemed to be the one there at two or three in the morning, watching her and listening to the beeping machine while ashamedly wondering why am I even here? I’m embarrassed to admit I resented having ended up serving in this way, for a woman who wasn’t even conscious.

Besides, I was saying to myself, there is nothing I could actually do here. The antibiotics hadn’t worked. Bloodwork showed that systems were shutting down. Morphine was maxed. I was sitting here in a cold hospital room, powerless to effect change, when I could be working on solutions with the people who might actually be able to do something about our collective descent into multiple catastrophic crises. Strategic interventions to eradicate microplastics, rising ocean temperature, economic inequality, species extinction, geopolitical conflict, technological disruption, and cascading emergencies.

There was no opportunity for intervention in that hospital room, and it pissed me off. I wanted to be out on the battlefield, not stuck here doing hospice, without WiFi. But as I sat there, hour after hour, alone in a room with this dying body, something changed. I slowly, reluctantly, surrendered to the moment. To not being able to do anything but sit there. And as I did, I began to see more than a comatose patient receiving oxygen from a tube while emitting beeps through electrodes to a monitor. I saw the person who had lived through 80-something years, and who was now both struggling to breathe and struggling to let go. Each exhale followed by a pause, as if her body was deciding whether to make the next gargantuan effort to try again.

I knew she was in a coma and unaware of her surroundings. At least that’s what the hospital people said. But I figured there was some chance she was still in there, somewhere, experiencing her stuckness between life and death. Or not even knowing exactly what was going on around her, where she was, what was happening…

I pulled my chair closer to the bed, and put my hand on hers. Just so that she’d know I was there. Someone was there. And I may have been overtired, but I wasn’t high on anything. I hadn’t tripped in years. I was quite straight and quite rational—yet I swear, I could feel her soul in there, taking account of my presence. It was as if she needed more than her own nervous system to make this transition.

It felt as if she was testing me, probing me, almost asking permission to enter me. Not physically, exactly, but even more intimately. I kind of…gave consent. And it was as if my nervous system became an extension of hers, metabolizing the fear and pain. She just came up and into me. It was not a subtle, metaphorical experience. It wasn’t scary for me, or painful. Not at all. In fact, I was feeling something closer to warmth, to bliss. I could directly, physically feel her coursing through my body, using me as a resource as she made the passage from this place and out of body to whatever is next.

And as that was happening, I realized what a profound gift I was being offered. This was, at least up that moment, the most profound experience I had ever had in my life. The same duty call I was cursing just hours earlier was now the greatest blessing and honor I could have ever been called to.

All of a sudden, I felt I understood the essence of what death doulas do. It’s not just making the dying more comfortable, although that’s certainly a part of it. But on a deeper level, the doula facilitates a more intentional and practiced form of what I had ended up doing almost accidentally. While doctors intervene to prevent a patient’s death, doulas show up to acknowledge and help metabolize it. They offer their sheer presence, as living organisms, to bear witness and exercise compassion in the truest sense of the word.

Only by utterly surrendering to the moment, giving up on the possibility of intervening in any way, was I able to be of service. And in doing so, I felt a profound shift stirring in my approach to my life and work. I was transforming from an agent of change to an agent of care.

I had spent the last few decades of my life as something of an activist. The WTO protests in Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, No Kings…strategizing climate remediation, alternative currencies, political campaigns, teaching social justice, theories of change, congressional hearings. Making a difference.

And at that moment, instead of leveraging all my hard-won research and experience to help young activists strategize how to save the world from its impending metacrises, I was simply sitting there, utilizing no skill, not saving a life or making any measurable contribution other than giving up. And in doing so, I was making the most substantial contribution to another human being I had ever made, in a way that registered for me in an immediate, undeniable way. I am not a woo person—or at least I wasn’t until that night—but this was as real as your own next breath.

It has set me on a different course. I don’t begrudge those who are in the trenches trying to change our political systems, tweak the economy toward justice, or rescue the rainforest from capitalism. Thank goodness for them. But most of us are simply watching the horror show on the TV screen or doomscrolling the metacrisis on our smart phones, occasionally casting a vote or standing up for a cause in a difficult conversation. We watch until the sad truth of inevitable doom makes itself abundantly clear, and then we distract ourselves under the false hope that every civilization thinks it’s the last one, or that some new technology will surely swoop in and rescue us from ourselves. It always does.

What if we took a different approach? Instead of avoiding the prospect of apocalypse, what if we stared right into its gaping maw and accepted what’s happening? How would you behave if you really knew this was it? The patient is dying. Might there be a value in entertaining the possibility, even for just the time it takes to read this piece? I promise, the metacrisis will still be waiting there for you when we’re done.

What if instead of looking for the next clever intervention to save this dying patient, we show some mercy and begin to offer palliative care? What would that look like? What if we began to care for one another as if we really were the last generations to enjoy the Eden into which we’ve been born? Instead of competing over the scarce remains, we give up. We meet our neighbors, take time to reflect, tend to our gardens, love our children, and do whatever we can to soften the impact of the impending collapse. As the Medieval Jewish poem Unetaneh Tokef offers, the outcome may be determined, but we can lessen the severity of the decree. We identify the most vulnerable in our communities; commit to checking up on the elderly after the next extreme weather event; consider what sorts of lives we want to offer children who may not make it to adulthood; choose whether to spend what hours we have left on social media feeds.

As we live and love more, we buy and compete less, reducing our consumption, extraction, and burden on the all-too-brittle corporate and government infrastructure. The abstract universes of finance and capital shrink and lose their power as people slow down and appreciate the places they inhabit and the people in their lives.

Back when my own father was sick with cancer and deciding whether to get hospice care, I remember how the visiting nurse reassured him, “just because you’re accepting hospice doesn’t mean you have to die.” In fact, if a majority of us assumed roles as agents of care, we may not only make the impending catastrophes less painful for many; we may just avoid some of them, or at least create the best conditions for recovery after they occur. It couldn’t hurt.

If there is no guaranteed future to optimize for, then the results of our actions come to matter less than the actions themselves. Revolution is no longer an ends-justifies-the-means battle for liberation, but the liberty and grace to prioritize our comportment in the living moment.

Over the five years since I made this shift, accepted what I believe to be the inevitability of collapse, and embraced real-time care over abstracted strategy, I have come to see our predicament differently. I discovered that what I have been so terrified of losing is not human civilization at all, but a brittle, anti-civilizational illusion with which we have been taught to identify. By letting go of this machine, we stop fighting death and instead rejoin the living world, recognizing that what the technocrats and the most well-meaning activists among us call “the end” may simply be the necessary, regenerative cycle of life.

By embracing apocalypse we are not accelerating an ending at all, but—as the word apocalypse literally describes—uncovering what is real. Yes, things may be ending. But not necessarily everything. The colonial, might-makes-right civilization currently toppling is not a civilization at all. It is the antithesis of a society based on care and mutuality. As archeologists and anthropologists alike understand, human evolution owes itself not to competition but collaboration: food-sharing and group cooperation formed the basis for what it meant to become “civilized” humans. Civilization can best be understood as our capacity to transcend violence and domination as the arbiters of flourishing.

Instead of trying to save this anti-civilization, we can serve as its death doulas, making its collapse as gentle as possible on the living systems it has been exploiting all this time.

We can also serve as birth doulas for the emergence of a more horizontal civilization of mutuality to take its place. This requires discipline, maturity, and—yes—spiritual development. This is not “spiritual bypassing” at all (that accusation of doing spiritual work as a substitute for confronting real world challenges). Rather, when we jump straight into “actionism” or big ego savior missions, we are running away from the terrifying reality of our limitations and our grief over what is already lost. We use “strategy” as a psychological defense mechanism, allowing us to look away from the suffering neighbor in front of us because we are focused on a grand plan to save a million hypothetical people tomorrow. That’s the “activists bypass,” just another version of “effective altruism” if it isn’t checked against in-the-moment comportment and real-time, face-to-face, body-to-body co-metabolism of the moment.

This fixing reflex is simply the old, industrialist mindset with a progressive intent.

The real, human work of accepting our mortality and sitting with grief is not a self-indulgent detour from the political struggle; it is the ultimate guardrail. It is what prevents our necessary rebellions from degenerating into the same ends-justifies-the-means control structures that are destined to annihilate us.

I ended my book about longtermist, transhumanist, tech-solutionist billionaires, Survival of the Richest, with the line “if you’re not doing it in the moment, you’re not doing.” Let me add to that: If you are doing it in the moment, you’ve already won.