‘What if?’ Two little words that can reshape the stories we tell ourselves

● Even if we don’t always like it, we need people who challenge popular arguments

Being a writer plunges your head into other realms and worlds. You are constantly asking the question: What if ? What if the bomb explodes on the bus or what if the woman discovers her husband in bed with a chicken or what if the world is about to end?

Last week’s “What if ?” was about a male teacher who has given his all to a cause, but finds it is like hitting his head against a brick wall.

He is a climate activist and has sacrificed everything — his wife and son, time in jail and his career — but to no avail. They are still burning fossil fuels. Things are getting worse every day. Climate targets are consistently not hit.

The evidence is there in front of us all, but the world’s leaders continue to ignore it.

So our man is at the end of his rope. He’s at the tail end of his 40s — a depressing age. Or at least I found it to be a stagnant, confusing time in my life. A tunnel. Stuck in a rut and wondering was this it.

I would walk aimlessly along the canal between Harold’s Cross and Rathmines and think about the pointlessness and emptiness of my life. So, should myself and my co-writer just continue to make this man push himself to the hilt in a useless exercise of trying to fight the impossible?

This “What if ?” led us to reading stuff about the Dark Mountain project and its manifesto, launched in 2009 by environmentalists and writers Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine.

They felt environmentalists were not being honest with themselves. It was increasingly obvious that climate change could not be stopped, that modern life was not consistent with the needs of the global ecosystem, that economic growth was part of the problem and that the future was not going to be bright, green, comfy and “sustainable” for 10 billion people, but was more likely to offer decline, depletion, chaos and hardship for all of us.

Yet everyone keeps pretending that if everyone just carries on campaigning as usual, the impossible will happen.

The manifesto was a clarion call to those, like them, who feel they are not going to save the planet. The planet is not theirs to save.

The planet is not dying, but our civilisation might be, and neither green technology nor ethical shopping is going to prevent a serious crash.

Kingsnorth argued that civilisation was approaching collapse and it was time to step back and talk about how to live through it with dignity and honour.

He says: “The movement is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it.”

Kingsnorth now lives in rural Galway with his wife and children and they aim to be self-sufficient. They have a compost toilet and think we need to stop relying on and trusting technology to fix everything and that if there is a collapse, things will be different. Not better or worse, just different.

So maybe our man, our character, should just stop his activism. The definition of madness is to repeat the same actions over and over, hoping for a different result.

Maybe he should become an advocate for this Dark Mountain philosophy? Or should he? Ah, Jesus… my head was spinning.

I needed a break. I needed another realm. I wanted the past when things seemed simpler and youthful energy abounded with hope and ignorance.

I started to read the Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies, which is set in 1986 and is essentially about male friendship between the narrator and Tully, his larger-than-life pal.

I was immediately drawn to them and their friends as they journey from Glasgow to Manchester to a music festival headlined by The Smiths, New Order and The Fall — my favourite bands of the time — and they swap film quotes, which really endeared them to me. I could have hung out with these lads.

Tully called the narrator Noodles after the De Niro character in Once Upon a Time in America — a great favourite of mine when I was that age. A tough, magisterial film about memory and time with one of the great Morricone soundtracks.

The adventures of Tully and his pals reminded me of that time in the 1980s when, although nuclear war was a possibility, there seemed to be more hope than there is now.

Back then, the cavalier free market espoused by Thatcher and Reagan hadn’t wreaked as much harm. The world didn’t seem so polarised. But maybe there is still time to change things. Maybe there is hope.

Paul Kingsnorth and his manifesto say: “What’s the point in hope. It only kills you… it comes from a place of powerlessness. Get real.” Maybe they’re right.

I’ve had pals like Tully, fellas that led you on adventures that you’d never normally have embarked on.

Lads that brought out the Divil in you, and although they could annoy the f **k out of you, the experience was always worth it. You had lived. You had chanced something. It mightn’t be comfortable, but it ignited some little change inside you.

Lads who thought outside the box. The outliers who over time kind of exhausted you, but who absolutely affected your life and how you saw the world.

Outliers who weren’t afraid to go against the popular arguments. People like Paul Kingsnorth, who will divide opinion and be called nihilistic and dangerous by some.

But they ask questions. They rewrite the perceived stories we have told ourselves. They say hold on a minute… what if ?