Relax… We’re All Doomed Anyway

A lesson from Conan the Barbarian

Photo by Chris Thompson on Unsplash

When I was a schoolboy, I went through a phase of reading Conan books. Long before Arnold Schwarzenegger made his appearance as Conan the Barbarian in the 1982 film of the same name, the giant, swashbuckling meathead (Conan, not Arnie) was fighting, drinking and wenching his way through volume after volume of trashy paperback novels, penned by a range of different authors.

I remember one particular scene where Conan has been snatched up by a giant bird of prey, who is carrying our hapless Hero back to the nest to feed her chicks. Always one to seize an opportunity, and seeing no point in struggling or stressing when there was nothing to be done about the immediate situation, Conan takes the opportunity to snatch forty winks and falls asleep in the talons of the flying bird.

This chapter came back to me recently as a fitting metaphor for my new life philosophy. Much of my adult life has been spent to varying degrees in a state of angst, trying and largely failing to convince people of the error of their ways in terms of their use and abuse of our environment and the other animals we share it with.

While it’s true that in recent years we’ve seen a massive increase in both veganism and concern for the environment, it still amounts to ‘too little too late’. In my…