In his essay, "We're Doomed, Now What?", Roy Scranton argues that humanity must "learn to die," or abandon its damaging way of life, in order avoid fast-approaching environmental crisis, writing, "Accepting the fatality of our situation isn't nihilism, but rather the necessary first step in forging a new way of life."

We need to come to terms with our damaging, economically-driven practices as a global society in order to build a more sustainable way of life, which means dramatically changing not only the way we live, but the way we think about life and create meaning as a global society.

The relationship between humans and the natural world shifted as mankind acquired the power to fundamentally change Earth's natural composition, making way for a geological age in which human activity has a lasting impact on how Earth's natural systems operate. The Anthropocene presents a challenge to the idea that Earth's most essential processes are immune to human intervention by recognizing that mankind's environmental impact escalated to the point of permanent damage as early as the industrial revolution.

In order to "learn to die" we must accept that we are living in the epoch of the Anthropocene and understand that, in this age, our decisions contribute to structures that permanently alter the future of mankind.

The Anthropocene is frequently misunderstood as an age in which the power of human creation and technologies have surpassed the systems of nature. In reality, the Anthropocene is only one epoch: a tiny dash inside of a larger period that is part of an even larger era that is only a section of an eon.

We are a speck.

The mindset that humans are killing the Earth is both arrogant and incorrect because it assumes that mankind is far more powerful than it is. We are not destroying the Earth, only its ability to sustain human life. Finding humility by recognizing our smallness in a gigantic biosphere is vital because humans must internalize the idea that their needs and desires are secondary to a greater good in order to create a more sustainable society.

A capitalist, economically-driven society requires its participants to constantly move forward when met with an obstacle or challenge, so the natural reaction to environmental issues is to simply continue to move, work, and innovate in the same pattern that led to the Anthropocene. Dying is the exact opposite of moving forward; it means interrupting the movement of the masses by stopping to consider where "forward" leads. Scranton does not intend to resist progress, but redefine it. Moving forward in our current society means continuing to contribute to an unsustainable, colonized system by constantly working towards the accumulation of wealth.

In order to escape the assembly line, we must accept and deeply deliberate the idea that ultimately, its progression can only end in our demise. Only then can we fully comprehend our own programmed perception of progress and how our way of life impacts the Earth and the rest of its inhabitants.

The victor's discard the "losers" of history: those who cannot move forward in the race to accumulate capital. They assume the universality of a definition of progress that benefits them, ingraining that definition into our collective consciousness so that we consistently undermine our own interests in the name of becoming "productive" members of society. This speaks to Scranton's larger idea of how we as humans make meaning in our lives and how this inexplicable drive that led us to our current predicament will actually be what saves human society.

"Learning to die" means consciously ceasing to define our worth and that of others on productivity, perhaps even altering our view of what productivity means, so that we can define humanity and what our lives "mean" with more sustainable, ethical terms.

At first glance, changing our mindset does not seem like a viable, practical path towards sustainability. This type of thinking, however, is exactly what we need to dismantle. Even when it is clearly sending us to our demise, humans cannot help but search for a way to "move forward," grasping at things we find useful, practical, and productive as a way of understanding our place in the world. We must abandon this instinct in order to stop participating in a system that can ultimately produce only its own destruction.