End of days – when you’re ashamed of the world your kids will inherit, and lost as to what to do about it

Today, I read about white rhinos going extinct, a lion killed by a psychopathic dentist and alligators being hacked to death in the name of luxury goods. I’ve never been an activist, or considered the need to be vegetarian; hell, I’ve even worn vintage fur with the shame chagrin I wear leather shoes. But today, I gave myself a long hard look at the ways in which we all contribute to this hellish misery. This barbarism makes me want to put the humans that perpetrate these vile crimes through the same misery and torture to which they subject these animals. Aspiring to a Birkin handbag might see vacuous women be skinned for their status seeking; trophy hunters would face a firing squad, and those that cause the economic conditions for selling trinkets made of rhino horn (which pretty much implicates all of us in the West) – should become extinct through mass starvation. But then, none of this is helpful.

There may be no divine retribution in the world, but if we carry on like this, there will be justice. With many thousands of species going or on the brink of extinction, we short-sighted humans are putting ourselves at grave risk. Perhaps that’s a good thing, given our ignorance, greed, violence and cruelty.

Surely there must be a way to prevent us spiralling into a hell hole of our own making – tighter regulations, heavier penalties, going without… But alas, it feels the only way, ultimately to stop our destruction of the inevitable eating of the hand that feeds us will be us scoffing it, and suffering the dire consequences.

We might pay lip services to the need to change, but capitalism, like a bloated toad, blinkered by the blind hand of the market, must either wither of its own accord or pop through its cyclical bubble of growth and collapse, creating in its wake a billion paupers for every billionaire.

It is a sign of society eating itself that here in London we have restaurants for dogs while thousands of displaced migrants from war torn and corrupt regions storm the barriers of our country with the vain hope of setting foot here.

I don’t want to come across all end of days here, but it sure as hell feels like it from where I’m sat. And I’m at the privileged end of the spectrum.

For fun this weekend, we’re heading to Camp Bestival, in the hope that we might become trendy by osmosis with a bunch of really rather well-off families pretending to rough it whilst spending a ridiculous amount of money on organic wheatgrass smoothies and craft cyder.

It will, no doubt be an experience for the kids – the really wild theme will no doubt be shoved in our faces through feathered headbands and proto-native decor (cultural appropriation, much?), while the closest thing we will actually come to a live creature will be a seagull scavenging for pulled pork. Already, I feel rather doomish about it, knowing my kids’ penchant for Minecraft skins rather than actual physical dressing up, and one to ones with life long friends on Facetime rather than group activities with strangers. 

I even went to Accessorize to see if I could buy them something tribal to help them get into the spirit of it, but in the seventh circle of hell that is Broadgate Circle, it all felt rather soulless and hypocritical – to buy culturally appropriated feathers that would look nicer on an actual bird, no doubt hand plucked by an orphan on less than minimum wage, as if they have such a ridiculous concept in Gujarat. And I doubt they’d wear it anyway. I do sometimes wish I wasn’t so fucking worthy. And most of the time I’m really not. Which is why, I like all of us, are part of the problem.Hey ho, there’s always booze, and Bestival seemed like a good idea at the time. But it does rather feel like there’s a lot of effort and expense in this type of overly westernised organised fun: the ultimate way to be lonely in a crowd. Organised fun is never really as good as the disorganised type – by which I mean building dens and camping in cardboard boxes in the garden with mates from down the road. My city children will never know the sort of childhood I enjoyed (I don’t even think, once my rosy glasses are off, that I did either), and it all feels rather bleak. But, at least they aren’t living in a cardboard box like many kids of Calais migrants, so I guess I should be happy about that.

But as they skitter towards adulthood, I’m increasingly ashamed of the world they will inherit, but I don’t know how to extricate myself for the cycle of consumerism and status seeking that got us here in the first place, except fantasy massacres of the type Jonah regularly enjoys on HALO. Such is the world we’re living in, perhaps this digital miasma really is our only form of escapism.