Giving the current ecological disaster that is our economic paradigm, isn’t it absurd to continue doing what we, as individuals, are doing in any way? The question feels almost rhetorical at this point, yet the machinery of everyday life keeps turning, as though our routines were somehow immune to the unraveling of the biosphere. Every day, the news cycle delivers new data points on our planetary decline: record-breaking heat waves, mass species extinction, collapsing coral reefs, soil degradation, plastic-choked oceans, and increasingly chaotic weather patterns. And yet, we wake up, commute, buy, consume, and scroll, as if the old world order were still intact. The absurdity is not in the question—it’s in our collective response.
Our current economic system is structurally dependent on growth. Every government policy, every corporate report, every market forecast is premised on the assumption that growth—continuous, unbounded, exponential—must persist. Yet the Earth, finite and fragile, does not share this logic. The biosphere operates on cycles, not on expansion; on balance, not on extraction. The more we pursue growth for its own sake, the more we cannibalize the very ecological foundations that sustain life. Forests fall to feed global demand for beef and palm oil. Rivers are dammed, diverted, and polluted to sustain industrial agriculture. The atmosphere itself is thick with the residue of centuries of burning fossil fuels. The cost of this “progress” is mounting, yet our economic indicators perversely frame destruction as success. When a forest burns, GDP rises. When an oil spill demands cleanup, GDP rises again. The measure of our prosperity has become a mirror image of our collapse.
To live as if this system were sustainable is to live in denial. But denial, of course, is easier than change. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as the saying goes. Most of us, even when we intellectually acknowledge the crisis, are trapped in the inertia of daily survival. We are told that our individual choices—recycling, biking to work, eating less meat—can make a difference, yet these gestures feel like drops in an ocean of systemic dysfunction. The deeper truth is that no amount of consumer “mindfulness” can offset an economy predicated on limitless extraction. When the rules of the game reward destruction, personal virtue becomes a form of quiet resistance at best, and a comforting illusion at worst.
Still, it would be a mistake to interpret this absurdity as hopelessness. Recognizing the madness of “business as usual” can be a radical act of awakening. To see the absurd clearly is to reclaim the power of choice. We cannot individually dismantle global capitalism, but we can individually refuse to let its logic define our inner world. We can choose to live in ways that align with life rather than profit, to build community rather than competition, to nurture rather than exploit. Change, if it comes, will not emerge from the boardrooms of multinational corporations but from the collective refusal of ordinary people to perpetuate the lie of normalcy.
Perhaps the most revolutionary act, in an age of ecological collapse, is to stop pretending that this way of living makes sense. To admit the absurdity is to begin imagining alternatives. We can redefine wealth as well-being rather than accumulation, success as regeneration rather than consumption. We can design economies that function within ecological limits, not in defiance of them. And we can cultivate cultures of care, humility, and interdependence to replace the brittle myths of individualism and domination that brought us here.
To continue as we are is, indeed, absurd. Yet the absurd also contains possibility—the crack where light enters. If we can see clearly that the system we inhabit is a disaster, we can begin to step outside of it, even if only in small and symbolic ways. The challenge is not to “save the planet”—the planet will endure—but to save our capacity for meaning, connection, and reverence amid the ruins of our own creation. In that sense, the end of the old world may not be the end at all, but the necessary beginning of something saner, humbler, and more alive.