“We have to do something” they said again and again, we are told. Back when it was already too late, they said “we have to do something”.

They had already reached some tipping points in the 2020’ies, but they kept going without changing much.

I understand them, I think. Their world had grown too big. There was too much, there was too many things you had to know, too much you could do wrong. Too many little decisions, that in the end, weren’t even up to the individual- like buying organic. So much focus on the little things, while the big wheels seemed unstoppable. Until they had nothing more to put in the machine, and it all broke down. The apocalypse actually did happen, but a lot slower than the movies from the few years before it happened suggested.

Mostly it was war caused by famine. Mass migration from fires and floods. Climate chaos.

Now, we are fewer than ever. “Humanity”. In a way, you did actually cause your own extinction. Now, we are no longer “humanity”. We are humans. Much like the sparrows are sparrows, and the birches are birches.

There is no common goal, and no right or wrong way to be human. There are wrong ways to act, you can do wrong by a tree, by a cow and by your friend. But you can’t do being human wrong, there is no “progress”. We we are beyond history. History broke, and now we are here.

In my tribe, we use the old trees for gracing cattle and nurturing fruit and nuts. A few hundred years ago it was difficult, burning or flooding often. Then came the cold snap, and now, it has calmed down. We have calmed down, too, I have been told.

Apparently it was normal to work 40 hours a week for other people. We work for us, for our animals and families. Why would I work for my neighbor or another tribe? We have enough in our forest, and when we don’t, we hunt.

We call ourselves the Kesh, and have found something like a text to live by. We know the story’s written and not told by the many. But we still use it to live by, because it was passed down to our founder, and when the book could no longer be read, it was told again and again from memory.