The Adults Aren't Coming
By Nume for Nume's Blog on
A personal essay for anyone who sees the size of the problems and is told they are making too much of it. It describes a suicide attempt. A fifteen-minute read.
When I was a kid my parents drank together in the garage. My father would sometimes get drunk enough to lose track of which door was the bathroom and end up urinating in my bedroom closet while I was in the room, sometimes with a friend or cousin over. I asked him more than once to stop. He said it was his freedom, and that I was making more of it than it was. My mother smoked in the car with me from before I can remember until the year the province made it illegal with a child under sixteen in the vehicle; the day I turned sixteen was, near enough, the day she started again.
They were not monsters. The ordinary story, where bad things are done by bad people, does not reach this one. They knew what the drink and the smoke were doing, to the marriage and to me, and they kept going. The drink was doing a job — it got them through evenings they could not have got through sober — and that it did a job did not make it answerable to me. That the drinking was his to choose did not make what it did to us stop counting. They wronged me, knowingly, for years, and they were not monsters while they did it. Neither fact cancels the other.
The room
Most of us carry a background sense that somewhere the serious problems are being handled by serious people, that there is a room with adults in it who have the whole picture and are doing what it requires.
Go looking for that room and you find a great many people each fairly sure the adults are in a different one. The scientists have said their part and are waiting on the politicians. The politicians can read a poll and are waiting for the public to want it badly enough to make acting survivable. The public is waiting for an instruction that never arrives in a usable form, and mostly waiting to be told it is fine.
The mechanism is not cowardice. In 1968 the psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley sat people one at a time in a waiting room that began filling with smoke. Alone, three in four got up to report it. Put in the room with two others who glanced at the smoke and went back to their forms, about one in ten did; the rest stayed put, each reading the others' stillness as evidence there was nothing to report. A responsibility spread across everyone rests on no one, and you get people waiting, in good faith, for an adult who is also in the room, also waiting.
There is no separate room, and no separate kind of person. "Adult," in the sense that matters here, was never a population. It is a posture, and the only question is who takes it up.
The distinction that matters is between being in charge of something and being answerable for it. To be answerable to someone is to owe them an account of what you did and to stay open to them about it. It takes no authority and confers none. You can be answerable to someone you have no power over and will never have to face, because your conduct landed on them and that is enough.
Set against that is jurisdiction: installing your judgement as a standard others have to meet while you answer to no one. The people under it are load-bearing, not parties it owes anything. Almost everything we call "the adults" is built this way: the ministry, the seat of government, the boardroom. Each has a department for issuing the standard and none for being held to it.
It's my freedom is a jurisdiction claim at domestic scale. My father was right that the drinking was his to do. What the sentence smuggled in was that its being his to do also settled what it did to the rest of us. It did not. "It's my freedom." "I was only doing my job." "This is just how the system works." The same move at three sizes.
The one actor that ever moved, in my childhood, was the province, when it made the car a place my mother could not legally smoke in with me. It was real, it was protective, and it came with an age written into it. On my sixteenth birthday the government's interest in my lungs lapsed on schedule, and everyone treated that as the natural end of the matter.
Years later I got the fuller version. Through 2019, in London, Ontario, my mental health was coming apart, and I was in the regular care of a psychiatrist, the person that situation is supposed to route you to. Partway through, I learned he had been publicly tied to a Canadian ultranationalist party whose founder was later charged with wilfully promoting hatred against Jewish people. Something in me gave out when I learned it. I decided to die, and the police reached me first, and I spent two weeks on a psychiatric hold. He kept practising, a few floors down, adjusting other people's medication, while I sat upstairs. The verdict, delivered between a shrug and an apology, was that there was nothing to be done, that this was simply how the machine was arranged. Everyone in the building was doing their job.
Who it lands on
The people the largest harms land on are, overwhelmingly, in no position to say so. An infant is owed things it cannot ask for. Someone downwind of a decision made on another continent is owed an account they will never be in the room to hear. The person who does not yet exist is owed the world we hand them. (I am an antinatalist: I do not think that person should be made at all.) And animals are owed in numbers that dwarf all of it: the land animals killed for food come to more than seventy billion a year, and the fish, counted rather than weighed, to something in the trillions. None of them can collect.
Answering a party like that is what a decent trustee does for someone who cannot instruct him yet: find out what is good for them rather than what is convenient to assume, keep a record you would be willing to show them, and do not spend their share just because they cannot object. Applied to a chicken, it rules out almost everything we do to chickens. Applied to someone alive in 2075, it rules out spending the atmosphere as though the account closed when we did.
We talk about the climate, the biosphere, the future, the species, as though each were a patient owed a rescue. None of them is. Add a billion animals together and you do not get a bigger animal who can be wronged or made whole; you get a number, and you cannot apologise to a number. The obligations are real, but each one runs from a particular party to a particular addressee, and that is the only place they run.
This is why the institutions cannot do what we are waiting for them to do. They take in totals and put out totals. Ask one for the account owed to a single hen and it has no field for the answer. Hannah Arendt, in On Violence, called bureaucracy the rule by Nobody, and thought it, for that reason, potentially the most tyrannical kind of rule: there is no one left of whom you can even ask an answer.
The objection is that plenty of obligations are collective, that a ban or a tax or a treaty can close millions of accounts at once, far more than any person acting alone. That is true, and worth wanting. But the ban still has to answer to the parties it is for, and the bodies that would pass and run it are built not to. Reform, where it works, discharges the obligation the way a person does: to specific parties, one at a time, only faster. So "it doesn't scale" stops being much of an objection to anything. Nothing here scales.
Most of us were handed a version of this as children. A man walks a beach where the tide has stranded thousands of starfish and throws them back one at a time, and someone tells him the beach runs for miles, that he cannot possibly make a difference. He throws another: made a difference to that one. I read it in grade five. It lives on classroom walls now, which is one way to make a serious idea harmless. The Loren Eiseley essay it was flattened out of, "The Star Thrower," is stranger and darker: the thrower keeps casting them back against the whole indifferent machinery that stranded them. The voice telling him to stop is the aggregate talking.
Oliver
We have a cat named Oliver. He is six, and since last November he has been living on the edge of heart failure. We keep him going with four drugs on a schedule that structures our days, and we have spent more than five thousand dollars on scans and bloodwork. There is a surgery that might help him; no surgeon I could find performs it on cats, or we would have paid for that too. We have assumed responsibility for him, and there is almost nothing within our means we would not do. We are also not sure, on any given day, that we love him or speak for him as well as he is owed.
When he goes into respiratory distress he plants himself in a breathing stance, mouth open, and starts to drool, which is a thing cats do when they cannot get enough air, and it is one of the worst things I have watched. We stop everything, get the emergency medication into him, and keep him calm. The drive to the vet frightens him enough that it could bring on the heart attack we are trying to prevent, so we ride it out at home now, never sure we will not lose him.
You can buy a whole chicken — someone's entire life — from Costco for under ten dollars.
The distance between what we will pour into the one animal we have named and what we do to the ones we have not is the whole subject. A kinder barn answers the question how much did she suffer. It does not touch the question was she yours to breed and kill, whether the arrangement should exist at all. Oliver cannot lodge a complaint, and we move the earth for him, because we decided to be the people who answer to him. The chicken cannot lodge a complaint either, and nobody signed up to be those people, so her account never opens. Same kind of claim, opposite treatment, and the only variable is whether anyone took the other end.
I have sat beside those trucks at a red light on the way out of the city, close enough to see an eye moving at the gap between the slats. Then the light changes and the truck goes one way and I go the other. It is the nearest I have come to meeting one of them, and it is not near at all.
No clean hands
Judging an arrangement is not judging the lives lived inside it. A practice can be rotten while the people staffing it are decent, and often they are the only ones who know the affected parties as individuals at all. Contempt for them is a mistake, but it is not the same mistake as letting them off. There is a difference between two kinds of person. The first had their options narrowed until the wrong one was the only one left: the borrower taking a payday rate because the alternative is collections, the worker who cannot afford to quit, the people an arrangement has turned into infrastructure. The second has seen the argument, at leisure, with alternatives within reach, and buys the chicken again next week because thinking about it is unpleasant. The first is being squeezed. The second is answerable, and mostly not answering. My parents were the second kind. On the days I let myself off with "the industry is bad," so am I.
The not-answering has a favourite shape. The Carbon Majors research attributes most industrial greenhouse gas since 1988 to about a hundred fossil-fuel producers, so what I do is a rounding error. The figure is real and the anger behind it earned. But the mirror version, that it comes down to your personal carbon footprint, is no less a deflection for pointing the other way. The company that dug the oil up and sold it to you also built the calculator you use to feel bad about burning it; the personal carbon footprint was pushed into wide use by BP's own advertising in the mid-2000s. Demand does not turn innocent by standing downstream of supply, and supply does not turn innocent by blaming the demand it paid to manufacture. Every party has a true-sounding place to point: the firm at consumer choice, the consumer at the firm, the government at both and at other countries. A system where all the blame aims one step outward is one with nobody left in a position to make it stop.
I have cut what I can find to cut: no car, vegan, no children. I can feel the pull to recite it like that, and reciting it is the carbon-footprint move at household scale, aimed at myself. The cuts are worth making. The tally is the part that misses the point.
My job is selling personal loans to Americans and taking the servicing calls. I work in software; the industry is bad, my ADHD made a hard stretch harder, I was unemployed for six months, and this is the job I got. By the test I used on the payday borrower earlier, that makes me the squeezed kind; by the one I used on my parents, I saw the shape of it and took the work anyway. The people who take these loans are usually desperate, usually covering a bill a real health system would have absorbed, and the interest costs them years. For certain customers the website is worse on purpose, so the application drops to a phone call, where it can be slowed down and worked. Turning people into infrastructure is the product, and I am one of its moving parts. I do it forty hours a week so my family makes rent and Oliver keeps his cardiologist. A person telling you the adults aren't coming is also, on a headset, part of why.
The smoke
There is an unofficial policy nobody votes for and almost everyone obeys: better not to look too hard. "Ignorance is bliss" is the only proverb that admits, mid-sentence, that you already know. The sociologist Kari Norgaard spent a year in a Norwegian town where everyone had the facts about the climate and had quietly agreed, all the same, on how much of it was normal to say and feel, so that daily life could keep its shape.
A lot of the not-looking is manufactured, by people paid to manufacture it. From seventeen to twenty-two I smoked a lot of weed, the exact customer that apparatus is built for, and I kept buying it after I had worked that out.
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The town is doing at village scale what Zapffe thought the species does everywhere: we are over-equipped, able to take in the whole of our situation without being built to carry it, and we get through the day by holding the knowledge at arm's length. The person who cannot stop feeling it is not broken. One of the dampers just failed early.
What it feels like, day to day, is the urge to talk about it for an hour and then the flat place at the end where there is nothing more to say. It is giving up, over and over, and accepting that I will not change how human brains or human cultures work in the time I have, or in the time that is left. And the harder part: the case against being here at all is not one I have refuted. When I was younger the clarity itself was part of what made me want out, and it still has a pull on a bad night. What I have done is decide, and keep deciding, that the argument does not get the last word.
Whether a life is worth living is a judgement that belongs to the one living it, and nothing decides it from outside. If you are young, and seeing this clearly, and being told to wait it out: you are not misreading anything. The seeing is not the dangerous thing. Being told for years that there is nothing there is more dangerous than what you have noticed. If the clarity has the pull I have described, the move is to stay, to get the help that keeps you here, and to refuse the argument as an instruction. It was never one. The people who handed it to you as one were wrong about that the same way they have been wrong about the rest.
It may be worse than personal. We cannot seem to stop sorting into sides while the house fills with smoke, and I have come to think that is nearer to what we are than to a fault we could train out. From there, some reach for a switch: one painless act that ends all of it at once, nobody left to be hurt. That is the ministry's move at the largest size it comes in. It runs the sums for every living party and imposes the total on all of them, and not one of them is asked. Whatever the arithmetic says, no one is owed being ended, and no one is left in a position to answer for it. Nothing in any of this licenses a hand laid on anyone. Not the switch, not forced sterilisation, not so much as contempt for the person buying the chicken. The argument is about what you owe, not about what you may make someone else do, and the moment it becomes the second thing it is the posture it was written against.
The conclusion that does answer to someone concerns just one party, and it is the one I have come to. The last party still entirely in my power to answer to is the person who does not yet exist, and the answer is not to make them.
Everywhere else in this essay, a party who cannot collect is a reason to act as their trustee: to answer on their behalf and keep the account you would show them. The person not yet made is the one place that does not apply. The hen and the person alive in 2075 are on the board whatever I choose, and trusteeship is the only move I have toward them. A child is on the board only if I put them there, and not putting them there wrongs no one. What is left is whether making a person, and then answering for it as well as anyone can, is good enough. I do not think it is. The making settles the whole of a life for a particular person who will live inside it and could never have been asked, and no answering afterward gives them back the say they never had. That last step is a judgement and not a result the rest of the essay produces, and a reader who does not share it is not making a mistake I can correct from here.
From the made person's side it is a wrong done to them; from the other, the wrong done to everyone a new life would land on, in a species that cannot seem to stop doing the thing this essay is about. What it does not do is take anything from a person who already exists, and that is the whole of the difference between it and the switch. If everyone arrived at the same place the line would end, and it would end with no one having had it done to them. That is the only ending I would have standing to want, and it is not mine to bring about.
Almost everyone I have looked to has disappointed me, and I have stopped treating that as a run of betrayals and started treating it as information. Alan Watts, whose talks I lived inside for a year, turned out to have lived very little of what he said. The lesson is not that everyone is a fraud. It is that "find the adult and follow them" is the wrong move, because the adult is a role and not a person, and whoever you put in it steps out of it eventually, in a direction you did not see coming.
I do more than keep my own account. I moderate a community of hundreds of thousands, build tools, and keep federated infrastructure running for people who want off the big platforms. One larger swing, a movement with a name and a manifesto, went wrong enough that I had to shut it down myself, and I have not fully trusted my own certainty in front of an audience since. The rest of it is smaller and unglamorous. In July it meant banning someone who had announced a plan to slip an abortion pill into her sister's food. Weeks later, Playboy ran a piece on the community under a headline that had every one of us hoping humans go extinct, and the distinction I spend my time enforcing did not survive the summary. What I have stopped believing is that the small, unscalable things are a warm-up for the real work. They may be the real work. I have spent years on the other kind, and this is what is still standing.
What is left is to stop waiting, stop looking for the adult, and keep the account yourself, at whatever scale your hands reach. It does not feel like authority. It feels like staying on the hook for something everyone around you has agreed is settled. On an ordinary Tuesday it looks like almost nothing: the cat's medication, a game with a friend in New Zealand who only ever wants to talk about the game, nothing taken from anyone in either direction.
A person who cannot stop seeing this is usually told the seeing is the problem: a phase, an attitude, something to grow out of once there is a mortgage. It is not. If there is a comfort here it is company: other people who never closed the same account. They are quieter than the ones telling you to relax, which is why from inside your own head it looks like there are fewer of them than there are.
The comfort in this essay is a human privilege. I built it around the voiceless and it reaches none of them. There is no version of it that reaches Oliver.