by Dylan Evans
Was Nick exaggerating for effect? Or was I already that far gone?
4. HOSPITAL
In hospital, I was beginning to ask some tentative questions about my real reasons for doing the Utopia Experiment. The blind panic and utter incomprehension that had precipitated my crisis still raged through my mind most of the day, but there were occasional moments when I calmed down for long enough to think slightly more clearly.
In these moments, I began to probe for the first time my ulterior motives for embarking on my bizarre project. From conception in Mexico, through the months of preparation, and right up to those terrible days in May 2007 when the scales fell from my eyes, I never paused to ask myself what psychological forces or personal issues might be propelling me along this strange path. I was completely focused on what I saw as the objective facts, the external, rational justifications. The world was in a terrible mess, not me. Civilization might collapse. The experiment would be a way of finding out how the survivors would cope. My motives were entirely noble – curiosity, adventure, and a desire to raise awareness of the looming threats to the environment and global civilization.
Now, I wasn’t so sure. Beneath the veneer of my official story, I could dimly perceive other motives, not quite so admirable. Was I simply seeking a way out of a job that I wasn’t qualified for, and had no reasonable prospects of excelling at? My PhD was in philosophy, but I had somehow managed to talk myself into a job in robotics, despite having no background in engineering or AI. I’m a fast learner, but I was soon way out of my depth, and it was becoming clear that while I could probably tread water for another year or two, I would never become an expert in the field or a leading researcher. Was the Utopia Experiment merely a cover story to help me stage a graceful exit from a path that was going nowhere?
Maybe. But why concoct such an elaborate cover story? There had to be more to it than that. In the course of my conversations with Dr Satoshi I began to touch on other reasons why I might have become so preoccupied with the collapse of civilization, worries that had nothing to do with the state of the world out there, but were of a more subjective nature.
I recalled a conversation I had had with a veteran of self-sufficiency, a man called Mick, who had lived for many years in a very remote area in the West Highlands. It was late in the evening, a few days after I had arrived in Scotland to start the experiment. Mick and I were sitting at a large kitchen table in Romay’s house, each nursing a glass of whisky. Mick was deep in thought, digesting what I had just explained to him about the Utopia Experiment.
‘It’s a simulation,’ I had told him, when he asked what it was all about. ‘I’ve recruited some volunteers via my website, and we’re going to act as if we’re living in the aftermath of a catastrophic failure of global civilization.’
I explained we were going to live in yurts, since they would keep us warm in the cold winter months. But Mick wasn’t worried about the practical details. He was thinking about the hidden motivations and fears he suspected lay behind my rather unusual idea.
‘The end of the world, eh?’ He took another sip. ‘That’s always just another way of pondering your own mortality,’ he said.
A psychiatric hospital is a blunt instrument for treating mental illness. You take someone whose life has disintegrated and put them in a building with other lunatics. Once or twice a day you give them some medication, and once a week the doctor pays a visit. That’s more or less it.
That leaves a lot of time for doing nothing. It’s probably necessary to have some time for just resting, for not doing the crazy manic stuff that is likely to make things worse. But since mental illness often involves the loss of any daily routine, it is also important to try to rebuild some kind of structure. The nurses did their best to help me construct a rudimentary timetable, prodding me out of bed in the mornings, and taking me for occasional walks outside the hospital.
One time, a nurse spotted me pacing frantically around the courtyard, and came over to see if she could calm me down.
‘Don’t worry, Dylan. Things aren’t so bad. What’s the worst that can happen?’
Perhaps the nurse thought I would conclude that the worst wasn’t all that bad after all, and cheer up. But this isn’t a good question to ask someone who has spent the past year worrying about the collapse of civilization. It immediately prompted a cascade of rich visual images, culminating in a picture of me suffering a particularly horrible death.
The fictional scenario I had written to set the scene for my experiment in futurology had ended on a positive note, as the survivors returned to a more humane way of life, free from the curse of modern technology. But the past months had unmasked that fantasy, and shown me how bleak life would really be in the aftermath of global collapse. When I looked back on that narrative from my hospital bed, I wondered at how I had conjured some blissful rural idyll out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare. When it came to acting my scenario out in the real world, the transformation was precisely the opposite.
The nurses wouldn’t let me ruminate for too long, however; they nagged me into signing up for a variety of activities, from cookery classes and tai-chi to gym sessions and art therapy.
Art therapy turned out to be rather fun. The teacher was a carefree woman who played classical music on her stereo while four or five of us dabbed away at large sheets of paper with watercolours. When she asked me if I would like to choose a CD to put on, I rifled through her collection and picked out one by Vivaldi. I can’t remember what was on that CD, because the moment it started playing all I could hear was another piece by Vivaldi that I’m pretty sure wasn’t in her library.
Sum in medio tempestatum
quasi navis agitata,
conturbata, inter horridas procellas.
Hinc horrores, hinc terrores,
fremunt venti, nescio portum
nec amicas cerno stellas.
I am in the midst of a storm,
like a ship which is tossed about,
rocked amidst terrible waves.
Horrors from this side, terrors from that,
the winds rage, I know of no harbour
and I cannot see the friendly stars.
As the voice of the soprano soared up and down in my head, I clumsily painted a crude picture of a boat in a storm, a not too subtle metaphor for my troubled soul. And my mind drifted back to that time, a year ago, when I had set out from the Cotswolds, bound for Scotland, my heart bursting with enthusiasm for the adventure that lay ahead of me.
When my mother came to visit me, a few days later, I was at a loss for words. All I could think was to show her the pictures I’d painted. I spread them out on my bed for her to look at. There was something childlike about them, with their crude watercolour images and amateurish brush strokes – the first paintings I had done since high school. A portrait of one my fellow patients. The picture of the boat caught up in Vivaldi’s tempest. And an eerie, sad self-portrait with suitably vacant eyes that quite by accident captured my disconnected state of mind.
My mother looked at the pictures stoically, as if this was all perfectly normal, and I did my best to keep up the pretence.
We hugged as she wiped away a tear; I smiled weakly. She had flown up from England at Dr Satoshi’s request; it wasn’t strictly necessary, but she had been happy to do whatever she could.
‘Dr Satoshi has asked me to make some notes for him,’ she said. ‘Anything I can think of that might throw some light on your condition. Stuff about your childhood. Anything that struck me as unusual about you when you were younger.’
I tried to smile again, but I was too sad. I could picture myself as a small child, running through the long grass in the fields near our house in south-west England, while my mother and my sister strolled along behind me. My mother could never have imagined then that, almost four decades later, she would be visiting her boy in a psychiatric hospital, looking more helpless and fragile than he did all those years ago, in the Gloucestershire sunshine.
Is
that when it started, my madness – if that is what it was? Was the Utopia Experiment merely the first visible shoot to spring from seeds planted long before, waiting patiently for the right moment to germinate and spread their silent roots through the dark soil of my imagination? Were those seeds planted in my childhood, or in my genome, some black inheritance from my father perhaps? Was I born that way? Did I come into the world with a fevered mind? These were the questions that Dr Satoshi wanted my mother to answer, but though she searched her memory for any possible clues, she couldn’t find any smoking guns. There was the time, when I was eight, when I had jumped out of a window at our house in Kent because I couldn’t bear the sound of my parents arguing. But although the gesture seemed dramatic to them, I had a pretty good idea I wouldn’t injure myself. The drop was about ten feet, and there was grass below, so I didn’t even get a bruise. It clearly left a lasting impression in my mother’s mind, but it didn’t provide the key to my mental illness.
The truth was, my mother never realized how gloomy I was when I was a kid. She saw that I often spent time alone, but only because my head would be buried in a book. I myself don’t even recall feeling glum in my younger years, and it was only when I looked through my childhood diaries, many years later, that I uncovered the unmistakable traces of persistent sadness that foreshadowed the bouts of depression from which I would begin to suffer in my early thirties.
‘So when did you first get depressed?’ asked Dr Satoshi.
‘It was in the winter of 1996, I think. I was in Buffalo, upstate New York.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘I was studying for a PhD,’ I said. ‘I was really unhappy. It was cold and snowy, and I was really missing my friends in London. But the gloom was deeper and darker than anything I had experienced before, and I began to suffer from horrible panic attacks. Things got a bit better when I left Buffalo and went back to England to do my PhD at the London School of Economics instead. But it returned a year later. That’s when I went to see a doctor.’
‘And did that help?’
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘I was lucky. The antidepressants worked pretty well. I came off the medication after six months, and I was fine again for a couple of years.’
‘And then?’
‘I had two more episodes of depression in the following years, but they also cleared up quite quickly when I went back on the pills. I was pretty sensible about it. I would head back to the doctor as soon as I spotted the early warning signs.’
‘And what were they?’
‘The first sign was usually a loss of energy. I would begin to feel much more tired than usual, and I would start sleeping during the day. But then I would wake up very early in the morning, feeling panicky and upset.’
‘That’s quite typical,’ said Dr Satoshi. ‘Early morning waking.’
‘Then things that previously seemed easy, like going shopping or delivering a lecture, would begin to seem much more difficult and intimidating. And, gradually, life would begin to seem less meaningful. My everyday interests, usually so absorbing, would lose their significance, and everything would seem – well, just pointless.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. It’s strange, but I would begin to notice dirt more often, especially dirty bits of my own house. It was as if the whole world was decaying, and could never be cleaned up, no matter how hard anyone tried. And I would burst into tears for no apparent reason, suddenly and unexpectedly, at random moments during the day.’
‘Did you ever have suicidal thoughts?’
‘Not until the past couple of months,’ I said. ‘In all my previous episodes I never made any plans to kill myself, but I did wish I was dead. I would sit around and long for an early death.’
‘And did you experience these same thoughts and feelings in Utopia?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘all of them.’
‘So why didn’t you go back to the doctor right away, as you did before?’
‘I don’t know.’ I scratched my head. ‘Maybe I wanted to be true to the scenario we were acting out in the experiment. There wouldn’t be any doctors or antidepressants after civilization collapsed. And maybe it was because I thought depression was just a symptom of modern civilization, and it would go away naturally if I was living in a natural environment.’
‘But it didn’t.’
‘No, it got worse and worse. I slid further down the slope than ever before. And by the time I did go to see a doctor, I was in a terrible state.’
‘Yes,’ nodded Dr Satoshi, ‘you certainly were.’
My mother had bought me a few books to read in hospital. One of them was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The title captures the idea that believing in God is as mistaken and bizarre as thinking that you are the emperor of China or that aliens have removed your brain. But when I caught a few of the nurses eyeing the book suspiciously, I realized it could be interpreted another way. Did they think it was about people who believed that they were gods? Did they think I was one of those people? But maybe there was something to the idea. A week before I left for Scotland, I had an argument with my friend Caroline on the phone. She had tried to warn me that I was taking on too much, but I dismissed all her qualms with arrogant complacency.
Then she asked me what I hoped to achieve by doing the experiment.
‘I want to inspire people!’ I said.
‘What makes you think people need inspiring?’ she asked.
‘Most people lead such shallow, drab, hopeless lives. They are craving for something more, some sense of adventure. I want to show them they don’t have to settle for bourgeois mediocrity. They can do greater things!’
‘What, like giving up your job and living in a field in Scotland?’
‘They might realize civilization is going to the dogs,’ I said. ‘They might start living in a more sustainable way. They might even come and join me!’
Caroline went quiet for a bit. Then she breathed a sigh of exasperation.
‘Listen to yourself, Dylan!’ she said. ‘You’ve got a fucking god complex!’
5. ADAM
As the spring of 2006 turned into summer, and the time to leave for Scotland drew nearer, I was becoming more of a committed doomer. I was devouring books by new doomsayers with impeccable scientific credentials. In Our Final Century (2003), Martin Rees argued that humanity only had a 50 per cent chance of surviving to the year 2100 – and he was the Astronomer Royal, no less! In The Revenge of Gaia (2006), the renowned ecologist James Lovelock painted a terrifying vision of a ‘hot arid world’ in which a few survivors ‘gather for the journey to the new Arctic centres of civilization’. In Collapse (2005), Jared Diamond described how many former civilizations had committed ‘ecocide’.
It was at this point I sketched out the fictional scenario that would set the scene for the experiment, and posted it online. I drew heavily on the work of Thomas Homer-Dixon, a Canadian political scientist who argued that ‘tectonic stresses’ were accumulating deep underneath the surface of the global order. The increasing scarcity of conventional oil was just one piece of the puzzle. There was also growing economic instability, increasing environmental damage, and climate change. Together, all these stresses were combining to create a perfect storm.
I was so keenly aware of the omens that presaged global disaster that I entirely missed the warning signs of my own personal one. I completely failed to spot the ambiguity in the title of an article I wrote for the Guardian in December 2005: ‘A risk of total collapse’. I watched Donnie Darko, and ignored the obvious psychological interpretation; to me, Frank wasn’t a figment of Donnie’s diseased imagination, but a real giant rabbit, with genuine information about the end of the world.
The experiment was now becoming, in my mind, more than just a simulation, a way of imagining what life after a crash might be like; it was becoming a preparation for the real thing. The more I contemplated the idea of global collapse, the more it became not just a possibility, but a near cer
tainty. Whereas at first I had been surprised if anyone took my worries seriously, I was now amazed if they didn’t.
I remember picking up the phone one evening and calling my sister to tell her about my plans.
‘Hey, Charlotte, I’ve got a great idea!’
Charlotte had heard me say that many times before. ‘What now?’
I recognized the slightly tentative note in her voice. She’s always been sceptical and sensible, but I couldn’t imagine her not getting excited about this.
‘I’m going to set up an experiment.’
‘OK. What kind of experiment?’
‘An experiment in post-apocalyptic living.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
I was amazed by her failure to grasp the importance of the project, and worried that she would be stranded in London when the crash came. I remember urging her to buy a horse so that she would have some means of transport when the oil ran out. If only she could find a paddock near her flat in Notting Hill, to keep the horse in, she might be able to ride up to Scotland to join me and my fellow survivalists, and so escape the nightmarish last days of London, as the city imploded in a frenzy of looting and disease. None of this seemed odd to me at the time, and I was puzzled by the fact that Charlotte seemed to find it so.
On the other hand, my fictional scenario struck a chord with many of the people who wrote to me to volunteer. Even David Ross, the no-nonsense former Royal Marine, emailed me enthusiastically to say that he shared my views about the likelihood of global collapse. He was skilled in making boots and rucksacks, and offered to clothe and shoe the community. He also admitted to being handy with a chainsaw and a scythe.
David would turn out to be one of the most practical and helpful of all the volunteers. In fact, with four or five Davids, things might have turned out very differently. But that wasn’t the point. I wanted to see how a random bunch of survivors from a modern high-tech society would cope when there was no more electricity, no more oil and no more government. A bunch of former marines would have been cheating.