A Jaded View (or maybe not)
Doomsayers have been around forever. Some of them look like it. At any rate you don’t see many young ones. It seems that the closer they are to the hereafter the more conviction they muster for predicting doom for the rest of us. But young or old, it seems there is usually a pretty good chance they will turn out to be just plain wrong. At least so far.
So, we are skeptical of them. Who can blame us, I mean we have lives to live and must get on with it even if the world is coming to an end.
A chance encounter and discussion lately with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while led me thinking about doomsayers, the future and the proper place of cynicism in it. I told him of a bit of what I considered to be rather shocking information I had come upon recently. From the years 1950 to 1987 the human population saw its fastest doubling in history, from approximately 2.5 billion to 5 billion. I had gotten those numbers from a website called Our World in Data.
My friend thought about it briefly and then admitted that he, too, was somewhat uneasy about our future on this planet. Our conversation was in the Eureka Springs Library and neither of us wanted to be mistaken publicly for doomsday alarmists, so we pretty quickly changed the subject.
Nevertheless, that night as I lay trying to sleep, I could not keep myself from mentally cataloging some the ways that we, as a species, might meet our demise: nuclear war, pollution, famine, pestilence, asteroid strike (seems to have done in the dinosaurs), climate change, hostile alien invasion (easily the sexiest possibility), plain hubris or even general malaise. Are the last two even possible?
That sort of thinking eventually led my sleepless and wandering mind to consider who had been the most negative doomsayer I had ever met.
It was in about the year 1990. I was in my late thirties and considered myself fortunate to have a more or less full-time paying job as a fishing guide on the White River here in Carroll County.
My client that day was alone, and seemed decent enough, not unfriendly or obnoxious. We talked and fished and talked and fished our way downstream from Beaver Dam. I snapped a few 35-millimeter photos of the scenery and of him while he fished. I told him would mail him copies of the photos after the fishing trip, and he seemed pleased.
Then we chatted a bit about photography in general – always a favorite subject of mine. That is when I made a big mistake.
I innocently, or at least naively, said I planned to buy another camera soon. For some reason that set this fellow off in a big and unpleasant way.
He began criticizing me harshly for wanting a new camera when, in his opinion, I already had a perfectly good one. I had no idea of what he did or did not know about cameras, but he was certainly unaware that photographers, like fishing guides, tend to be inveterate gearheads.
But he was right. The camera I was using was a very functional, completely manual Nikon – the kind that forces the photographer to make all the decisions and settings for every shot. These are your basic photography skills that every photographer should learn and practice. I intended to keep the camera I had and just add a new one with a few more bells and whistles to my gear bag.
Photography lesson aside, my angler, turned critic, was in some kind of Jekyll and Hyde transformation right there on the river. He continued to berate me with increasingly negative questions.
How could I think of spending more money on a superfluous camera when there were people in this world not getting enough to eat?
Didn’t I know that something terrible was about to happen in this world?
What good would a new camera do me when I was dead?
Not long after that fishing trip I sold my small cabin in the woods, paid off my pickup and bought a whole boatload of very nice, new photography equipment.
After a couple of photo gigs that I either didn’t care for or wasn’t suited for (weddings and real estate) I managed to weasel my way into a staff photographer’s job at a daily newspaper in Benton County. That job I liked.
I photographed presidents, senators, murderers, muggers, ordinary people (my favorites), floods, fires, local triumphs, tragedies and at least two diving pigs. In short, it was the most fulfilling work I’ve done.
If I had heeded the counsel of my pessimistic fisherman, I suppose I might have saved my money so I could breathe my last in a gold-monogrammed oxygen tent. Instead, I took from the poor man what was surely an unintended message (or maybe not): Figure out what want, then get it and enjoy it now.