Member-only story
An Apology to the Grandchildren I’ll Never Have
We made ourselves machines so the machines could replace us
Sorry, kids
We didn’t mean it. We didn’t think this would happen. Like every generation of humans before us, like our stunted grandparents with their malnourished hearts, we did our best.
Just like you, we didn’t choose the circumstances we were born into. The only thing we got to choose is the only thing humans ever get to choose: how to act in a world we didn’t create and can’t control.
But perhaps you’ll forgive us. Perhaps you shouldn’t.
We abdicated from the ancestral challenge we were handed. The wild salt-scoured cry of sea-eagles, the haunting howl of wolves carried across the dark spaces of the forest to raise our own shaggy fur in recognition of our true family, our true home. The call to make a home in this brutish bloodthirsty world, carved out of the chalk with deer antlers and the shoulder blades of oxen.
We didn’t do that. We didn’t think we had to. Our ancestors fought so that we wouldn’t have to. Never knowing that if we didn’t, we’d turn into this.
We turned our backs on the world. We stopped hearing the wolves, the eagles, the whispering sea. We built ourselves another world to live in…
