Collapse Letters: Finding Religion

Maybe that’s the punchline: the whole time, we were all privately convinced our burdens were singular, when in truth they were just the early tremors of the same collapse.

It’s a good question.

I don’t know what I believe, anymore.

When things were going south, I admit I didn’t think at all about god or religion or anything like that. All I could think about was humanity, and how different things were going to be. But since then I think about a god every day. I don’t know how one couldn’t after all that.

With so many dead, the contemplation originally started with the afterlife. What happened to all of those that didn’t make it? Were they all up there looking down on the disgusting state of affairs they’d left behind? Did they resent us, or pity us? But those thoughts quickly faded, because ultimately what did it matter what they thought?

But now most of my god thoughts are prompted by the more mundane. When I find something interesting that really shouldn’t have survived the collapse, was it provenance that brought it to me? In that way sometimes it brings me some hope. But more often than not, I find god in the negative. I usually confuse it with bad luck. Maybe it’s not a confusion.

It’s random stuff, like when I stab my hand on a tree branch while cleaning the yard or dropping something on my foot not once, not twice, but three times in one day. Roof starts failing a day before the rain arrives.

Like I said, at first I was like man, this is just really bad luck. But then it became months of bad luck. I remember my therapist used to say that we recognize these patterns when our brains are primed. So maybe it was just easier to consider all the cascading bad luck when in reality it was just normal life. Or was it god, continuing to take it out on me?

Maybe it wasn’t just me. Looking around at what’s left of us, I realize a lot of us probably thinking we were and still are the unluckiest ones. Maybe that’s the punchline: the whole time, we were all privately convinced our burdens were singular, when in truth they were just the early tremors of the same collapse.

I remember my grandfather would often reveal that he felt life an unfair slog. He was often depressed and felt like everything was against him. I used to think he was unbearably bleak, like someone who’d forgotten joy. But now I’m beginning to wonder if he simply saw the world clearly, without the layers of noise and convenience that kept us numb. Maybe he wasn’t depressed; maybe he was just ahead of the curve.

The truth is, I don’t want to believe in God. I don’t. It feels like surrender, like admitting defeat after a life of insisting everything was random. But how else do you explain the strange symmetry of our misfortunes? How whole nations slid into the same pit, how families failed in parallel, how the sky itself seemed to conspire with our mistakes. It’s hard to call it chaos when it moved with such eerie coordination. Especially when it feels specific to you.

Maybe it’s only now without screens, schedules, and constant clatter of a world pretending it was on the right track, that I can sense something like the divine quietly humming underneath everything. We used to say religion was invented to explain natural phenomena, that ancient people filled in gaps with stories. But what if they weren’t naive? What if they just knew how to listen? What if they understood nature better than we did because they actually experienced it.

Sometimes I wonder: if we had to start religion over, what should it look like? It wouldn’t be a list of rules or threats in a book. It wouldn’t be a competition for whose god has the best real estate in the afterlife. I think it would begin with humility. Like an admission that we’re small, that we’re just guests here. It would teach people how to live with the world instead of on top of it. It would maybe sanctify patience, and kindness, and the quiet work of tending to what remains and what could be again.

I suppose it also means an appreciation of these cycles. Growth, stagnation, decay, rebirth seems a natural thing to revere.

I don’t know. Maybe this is just the mind involuntarily chaining my frustration and reaching for comfort while in a time when comfort is scarce.