Committing (Planetary) Suicide ...In Style

When I was young and full of hope I always thought that if I ever met someone who was seriously contemplating suicide I'd give them the following advice:

                 Sell everything you have and travel.  

                 It doesn't matter where, 
                 just somewhere different than where you are now, 

                 but preferably as far away as possible.  

For a start, they'd have nothing left to lose and by the time they'd have seen a bunch of new things and gained some new and notable experiences, all from making a darkly brave leap of faith, they might have found they have changed their minds.  And if not, well, they have at least enjoyed the last moments they had alive as best they could.

It wasn't until I was sitting in a magnificent pancake restaurant in Prague, at the end of a one-month solo road trip through Europe that I realised, 20 years later, I had taken my own advice.  The only real difference is that humanity had decided to commit suicide on my behalf, only on a collective scale, via our continual abuse of the planet.  While I hadn't liked that collective decision, in fact I was and still am completely opposed to it, I nonetheless found myself at the mercy of the suicidal status-quo of our combined actions, and responding to it as if it were my own decision.  Hence, the holiday.  Why does our species so frivolously forgo its own future?  I have absolutely no idea.  But knowing that we are on a trajectory which we won't collectively survive is a slow-dawning fact that I fought vigorously against, but eventually... begrudgingly... came to accept.

When I finally did, life turned rather beautiful.  I felt unburdened, and found myself enjoying the time I have left, regardless of the Runaway Climate Change that we are on a collision course with.

To enjoy my life, while I'm still around to enjoy it, is why I'm sitting in a pancake restaurant in Prague. 

I would never directly commit suicide, of course. I'm too much of a coward for that, but it's an undeniably awkward situation to find myself in waiting for humanity to get on with its own grisly task of destroying itself, despite my best efforts against it.  The other reason that I could never punch out early is because I'm also far too morbidly curious to miss out on any of the gruesome details that this civilisation-wide catastrophocalypse has in store for us.  It's going to be quite a show, so... why not order the banana, chocolate, nuts & eggnog crepe?  And that's exactly what I'm eating right now as I'm staring out of the window watching the rain gently fall outside from this restaurant's warm and cozy atmosphere. What a beautiful way to live the last of my life.  ...as a Civilisation Tourist.

That's a term I just made up, by the way.  Much like the term, Eco-Tourist, where people flock to places of natural wonder before Climate Change sees that beauty vanish forever, a Civilisation Tourist sees the best of what human civilisation has to offer before we're reduced to fighting over water and eating our pets, trying to remember what fish tasted like, or when the weather used to be nice.

Mmm... These pancakes are excellent!