It never stops. The problems never seem to leave me alone, they follow me around all day, from morning to evening, from sunrise to sunset. They have been doing so for a long time, but tonight is different. Now, they even follow me into my dreams.

I have been going to bed late for a while, not by choice, but because the heat in this city is unbearable. The warmth incapacitates my body and mind: everything seems slower, each minute longer, every movement heavier. There is yet another heatwave in Paris, one of those that used to be unusual but have come to seem normal, or at least familiar. The heat exhausts me. I am tired and need to sleep, but as I close my eyes, my heartbeat speeds up. A tingle runs through my arms into my fingers, as my chest tightens and my neck stiffens. I am not sure which came first, the feeling or the thought, but I know this: the problems have caught up with me. The breeze that was supposed to calm me down has triggered the alarm bell. The fan I cannot sleep without turbocharges my energy consumption, emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in yet more heat. Cooling my body down has its price: a cost probably first and most violently paid by somebody else, most likely somewhere in the Global South.

I turn over and glance out through the small crack between my curtains. How do the couple living across the road, under the metal roof, manage? Their flat is small, even smaller than mine, with only one window, making it almost impossible for the air to circulate, and I doubt if they have air conditioning. They must be suffocating in there.

Wherever I fix my gaze or turn my imagination, I recognize the disturbing trails of my own being, its activities and doings.

It seems the Anthropocene is not a nice place to sleep. Even if I am exhausted, I suppose I could make the most of it and work, as I normally do when sleepless, but as I roll over and prepare to get up, I remember that this part of my life too has become haunted. Yesterday morning, I realized that what I always wished for – having my name on the cover of a book, displayed in some Parisian bookstore – sends me hundreds of miles away and plants my feet straight in some ancient woods, contributing to deforestation. With each word printed on paper in black ink transported from afar, volatile organic compounds are released into the atmosphere. [1] With every single page of the book I write, the more deeply intertwined I become with the issues; maybe just a little, but enough to be an active participant in the unfolding of a planetary emergency.

Sirens grow louder and then disappear as an ambulance races along the street below. I am now wide awake. Sitting up in bed, hands locked between my thighs, it seems that the only stable structure left is the wall supporting my back. I lack a sense of direction and have lost my bearings: behind me, in front of me, alongside me, up in the sky and below my feet, I see nothing but signs of this mess. Wherever I fix my gaze or turn my imagination, I recognize the disturbing trails of my own being, its activities and doings. My sight blurs in the dark and I begin to feel short of breath. These problems dog my footsteps; no, worse, they are my footsteps. How can I aspire to anything when all possible points of view remind me of the points of life I disturb? How can I dream at night when my last thoughts are moral vertigo over the cost of my sleep? How can I dream during the day if what wakes me in the morning further implicates me in the catastrophe?

These issues do not go away. They accompany me every morning when I read the newspaper and learn about yet another manifestation of climate change. This afternoon, it might have been 43° in Paris, but in California it was 54°. In Central Europe, hundreds of people are dead because of flooding, and in Indonesia dozens are still missing after a cyclone struck a few months ago. The problems fill up my basket when I do my grocery shopping at the supermarket, item by item, each one wrapped in plastic that ends up in the ocean somewhere. I stopped eating meat, but the avocados and quinoa I opted for instead cause soil degradation and water shortage where they are grown. In the mornings, the coffee I need to wake my mind destroys soils and discharges waste and pollution into foreign rivers. The problems even splash onto my shoulders when I take a shower, with each minute under the streaming water releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere. But when I step out and dry myself off, new problems accumulate with every piece of clothing I put on, products of an industry hugely responsible for the global emissions of greenhouse gases. These issues are not easy to digest, they cannot be washed away or covered up. Every day, I learn how another aspect of my life is interpenetrated with these problems, and how my being in the world entangles me in these troubles. [2] Every day, I realize that the problem is me.

Beings

I barely recognize myself. The image of the human species seems to have been transformed, [1] and I am mutating along with it. I feel this transformation every day, the change inside and out, as most of my personal actions or habits mirror these global patterns. Like some planetary Faustian bargainer, holed up in the dark of my bedroom, I am paying the ethical cost of my own affluence. Silently lying in bed, I hear the echoes of a thousand remote voices. Almost no matter what I do, the extensions of my livelihood pull traces after me, leading directly back to distant calamities. The material footprints of my life always situate me elsewhere, far away, most often a place where my presence is hazardous.

I am here, there and everywhere, and this is why the problems never disappear. A colleague recently found a way to frame this dispersion [2] by distinguishing between the world I live in and the world I live off. My livelihood was always somewhere else, as the threads weaving my life together never fail to displace my being in this world. For me to live and thrive, I have to set foot on the lands of others. Yet I still do not have a language that captures the experience of me breathing heavily in my bedroom while my boots are buried deep in someone else’s livelihoods. In high school, I learned that when meeting a person, a bit of their destiny was in my hands. This is different: now, what I do has effects in places where I have never been and probably never thought of visiting; it concerns people I have never met, and whose lives I can only vaguely imagine. However, there I am, in the midst of their livelihoods, affecting their possibility of eating, drinking, breathing and living. And it is all due to my being, my freedom and my own way of life. My life at the expense of theirs, on a summer night during this heatwave.

The temperature does not drop, but I feel frozen, fixed, immobile, afraid of my every movement. Somebody seems to have installed Chateaubriand’s Chinese Mandarin button underneath my feet, [3] and it is triggered by each step I take. As I grope for solutions, it strikes me that if this is suffocating and confusing, it is probably because it reshuffles certain existential clues, forcing me to reconsider them anew. Shoulders hunched, I crawl out of bed and begin browsing my bookshelves until I find first the book, then the page, I was looking for:

This is what I need, and this is what I strive for. A man must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else. Not until he has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does life gain peace and meaning. [4]

Now, what I do has effects in places where I have never been and probably never thought of visiting.

Bewildered, I swiftly close the book, as if it has done me more harm than good, aware that I can probably never open it up in the same way again. Being Danish, I know this page of Kierkegaard by heart, since it used to offer me guidance when asking myself what something was and was meant to be. Yet tonight it no longer resonates: travel- ling deeply inwards does not assuage the dread and anxiety that beset me since they are caused instead by the outward traces my being is leaving behind. It is as if my existence has flipped to the outside, and so I flip the pages in turn, but in fact nothing in this book equips me to frame, phrase or fathom the contours of my being. In the dark, my silhouette looks the same, but the shadows it casts are different. My very existence in the world has changed, and trying to reassemble its different pieces puzzles me, to say the least.

If I cannot sleep, it is because I have been transformed into a weird monstrosity of a species that I do not particularly like, that my mind hectically tries to grasp, but I lack the words and expressions to understand. The insights from the existentialist tradition I was fond of as a teenager no longer hit the spot. They fail to describe or explain the being I am tonight, and will continue being tomorrow when the sun rises again. Existence probably still precedes essence, [5] but this new existence is definitely another sort of being, one that is constantly fleeing home. It is not just that I exist for myself, as if I was lodging in some private hotel room full of mirrors. Rather, it seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them. As I weave my silken threads, my being and its trails constantly borrow from, overlap with and obstruct the continuous being of other entities: some of them close, some of them far; some of them human, some of them non-human. Intermixti, ergo sum: I mix and interfere, therefore I am, and continue to be. I am living in a doorless house, and beyond my exhausted limbs my being extends, leaves traces, sets traps and forms trails that other beings are forced to travel by. It is not merely that my existence unfolds as a continuous making of meaning. Rather, it appears to fold as a process of negotiation between me, the entities that allow me to live and the beings that my existence touches and is entangled with. [6]

Yes, if these walls could speak, they would probably tell me how I have become a peculiar sort of broker, settling business where I have none, clinching deals where I should not, negotiating where I have no diplomatic rights. At least that is how it feels. My being may unravel as a construction of identity, but inseparably so from the destruction of another entity. I am earth, wind, fire and water, perhaps, but I am also soil depletion, hurricanes, wildfires and sea pollution. The nausea that keeps me from falling asleep is due not to the eternal, inescapable depths of my freedom or endless corridors of my own subjectivity, [7] but to its recurrent, external traces in the world. Here lies my bad faith, not in social conformity or subjective inauthenticity, but in the immeasurable, destructive social and natural vestiges that my actions entail. This is what seems impossible to escape – not freedom as such, but the material cost of it.

Like a bedridden patient, obsessed with understanding his own diagnosis, my condition remains a riddle to me. Yet the more I dwell on the topic, the more it seems the fundamentals of the existentialist question have changed shape. What worries me is still ‘being’, but the question is no longer the meaning or purpose of humans and their existence, but rather which beings allow other beings to remain in existence or prevent them from doing so. Not only is my existence thrown into a world, [8] its vestiges are first tossed all around it before boomeranging back to me.

My being may unravel as a construction of identity, but inseparably so from the destruction of another entity.

Years ago, I spent sleepless nights searching for the meaning of my unique human condition. Tonight, instead, my fear sends me looking for the multiple sorts of earthly, material beings that condition human existence, that humans always co-exist with, at a moment where such conditions for life can no longer be taken for granted precisely because of humans’ way of being.

As I notice how my sweating body is sticking more and more intimately to the bedsheets, my mind flips between the two sides of this newly tossed existentialist coin. On the one side is the realization of the many different beings and existences I depend on in order to be. On the other side is the understanding that I, a human rely- ing on these entities, am now engaging in the annihilation of such beings – and therefore the livelihoods of other humans. This is my new human state, penetrated by the planetary scale of my species’ actions, converting it into its terrestrial condition. Existence has become a lot more complicated, unfolding in a new geography blurring the local and global, and including multiple sorts of beings, their appearances and disappearances. [9] The existential task today is how to situate oneself in relation to these processes.

In more than one way, the question of existence has become decentralized; yet, sitting up in bed, I remain at the very centre of it.

Notes

Problems

1. See Cem Aydemir and Samed Ayhan Ôzsoy, ‘Environmental Impact of Printing Inks and Printing Process’, Journal of Graphic Engineering and Design, Vol. 11 (2), 2020, pp. 11–17.
2. See Emanuele Coccia, Métamorphoses (Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 2020), for an investigation of metamorphosis as a general metaphysics of being.

Beings

1. Again, this is why geologists call the era we live in the Anthropocene: the Earth System has been transformed as a consequence of human activities, and the human individual has been modified along with it, becoming a different species, a new sort of being, another kind of existence. As described in Clive Hamilton’s Defiant Earth (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), this novel actor wields a double-edged sword of power and impotence. On the one hand, the human species has gained an influence it never thought achievable: it now has the power to change the natural forces it was never supposed to alter. On the other hand, it seems more powerless than ever before: with nature spinning out of control, the earthly conditions humans need to survive are threatened. In other words, the new image of the human is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between pettiness and grandeur. See, in addition, Sverre Raffnsøe, The Human Turn (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 2015), for many useful reflections on this new figure.
2. See Pierre Charbonnier’s Abondance et liberté: une histoire environnementale des idées politiques (Paris: La Découverte, 2019), especially Chapter 3 on the ubi- quity of the moderns and the distinction between the territory one lives on and the territory one lives off.
3. See, e.g., Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21 (1), 1994, pp. 46–60. Chateaubriand asks the reader how they would act if they could, by a simple act of will, without leaving their room or ever being suspected or caught, kill an old mandarin living in China whose death would bring them some benefit.
4. Quote from Søren Kierkegaard’s diary entries headed ‘Gilleleje, August 1, 1835’, as quoted in Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (London: Penguin Books, 2020), pp. 107–8. This gaze ‘inwardly’ towards existence was a fundamental trait running through Kierkegaard’s work that would later influence existentialist phi- philosophies immensely. See, e.g., the introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (trans. Carol Macomber; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
5. While this argument is at the heart of all existentialist philosophies, it was made immortal as a phrase and slogan in Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism.
6. See Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), for a pluralist ontological treatise, in which ‘diplomacy’ becomes a metaphysical principle of being, and Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (trans. Robert Bononno; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Cosmopolitics II (trans. Robert Bononno; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), for a cosmopolitical philosophy of diplomacy.
7. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (trans. Robert Baldick; London: Penguin, 1965).
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson; Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), Division 1, Chapter 5.
9. On the question of scalability, see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s work, not least The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

With permission from the author and his publisher, we bring you this excerpt from Land Sickness.

NWCC give thanks to Nikolaj Schultz for these texts!

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Nikolaj Schultz is a Danish sociologist who works on the implications of climate change for social theory. Together with Bruno Latour, he co-authored ‘On the Emergence of an Ecological Class’ (Polity Books, 2022), translated into 11 languages. Earlier this year, he published ‘Land Sickness’ (Polity Books, 2023), translated into 6 languages. In a recent profile on his work, Die Zeit called him ‘the rising star of sociology’.