I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This.

Mr. McKibben is a professor at Middlebury College and the author of “Here Comes the Sun.”

Psychologists have claimed that evolutionary biology leaves humans ill-equipped to deal with giant, slow-moving problems. But suddenly we live in a moment when problems are speeding and piling up.

The climate crisis now consists of walls of water sweeping down Nepali rivers, obliterating entire towns in the blink of an eye, and wildfires that wipe out California neighborhoods in hours. And we’re confronting the birth and Bunyanesque growth of a new technology, artificial intelligence, that, according to some of its creators, is fairly likely to kill us all in the near future. We have to sit and listen as men worth unfathomable sums speculate about whether our species will survive their........

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