Jens Liljestrand

“... there is a difference between reading about the end of the world and actually seeing it with your own eyes. Watching a kingdom, drunk on sugar and youth culture and hippie nostalgia and reality TV and porno dreams and Hollywood lies, shrivel up and fall apart; it's like watching Alexandria and Constantinople and Rome and Athens all crumble to ash. Rising poverty. The annual migration inland, as the unemployment and homelessness and hopelessness on the West Coast spread like poison through a society that hadn't yet recovered from the pandemic. And on top of that, the forest fires that began earlier and ended later each year, meaning that a period that had once stretched from June to September now spanned April to November. Some parts of California were now more or less uninhabitable, there were places the insurance companies refused to cover, with homeowners unable to renew their existing policies, and I knew enough to understand that once the money starts leaving a place, the people follow.”
― Jens Liljestrand, Even If Everything Ends

“Life is running away from us, and it would be one thing if we had something to look forward to, if you and I could enjoy a bit of luxury once we're fifty or sixty, but that's never going to happen, is it? This is what life is like now, and it's only going to get worse. All of it. The best we can hope for is that we die before it becomes completely unbearable. With the heat, the water, the food. That we can keep society functioning for a few more years, until the next pandemic shuts everything down again. That we don't have to eat insects. That the racists and lunatics don't take over even more of the world. That there's still coffee in the rest home . . . And ultimately it doesn't really matter all that much, the fact that humanity is collapsing isn't a problem, not from a cosmic or evolutionary perspective, the planet will still be here, life will go on, for millions of years I'm sure, it's just us that doesn't have a future . . . So I want to enjoy myself. I want to live life to the max. I want to burn through every last krona. I don't want to waste a single day on a life I'm not happy with. There's no point waiting for things to get better, because nothing is going to get better. This is the world we live in now. Don't be ashamed to be human, be proud."

- Didrik”
― Jens Liljestrand, Even If Everything Ends