It seems to me that, now that there is no humanity left to hold on to, or anything else for that matter, we can't get the question Steinbeck asks in East of Eden out of our minds:
"At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?"
As we thrash about in the mud we're stuck in, amid this sickening disease of showing off, how on earth are we going to remain free? How are we going to set our minds free without becoming something for this entire engineered environment to feast on?
We get an answer from that beautiful human being, late David Foster Wallace, below.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
But do we have any strength left to listen to David abi?