Michelle’s Reviews > The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet > Status Update

The problem was never 86th and Ditch, which turns out to be a great American intersection. The problem was me.

Living in a tiny apartment in New York City where we could never quite eradicate the mice, I had romanticized home ownership. But now that we actually had a house, I hated it.

INDIANAPOLIS

To google would have been to know, one way or another.

But even though less of our lives belong to us and more of our lives belong to the companies that host and gather our browsing habits and hobbies and keystrokes, even though I am revolted by how easy it has become to scroll through the lives of the living and the dead, even though it all feels a bit too much like an Orwell novel... I can’t outright condemn the googling of strangers.

GOOGLING STRANGERS

We live in hope—that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

...And it’s a statement that we are here, that a series of astonishing unlikelihoods has made us possible and here possible. We might never know why we are here, but we can still proclaim in hope that we are here. I don’t think such hope is foolish or idealistic or misguided.