12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

Chris and I talked on the phone. He came to visit once. It went well. He had
found a job at an auto-parts place. He was trying to make things better. He
was OK at that point. But it didn’t last. I didn’t see him in Boston again.
Almost ten years later—the night before Chris’s fortieth birthday, as it
happened—he called me again. By this time, I had moved my family to
Toronto. He had some news. A story he had written was going to be
published in a collection put together by a small but legitimate press. He
wanted to tell me that. He wrote good short stories. I had read them all. We
had discussed them at length. He was a good photographer, too. He had a
good, creative eye. The next day, Chris drove his old pickup—the same
battered beast from Fairview—into the bush. He ran a hose from the exhaust
pipe into the front cab. I can see him there, looking through the cracked
windshield, smoking, waiting. They found his body a few weeks later. I
called his dad. “My beautiful boy,” he sobbed.
Recently, I was invited to give a TEDx talk at a nearby university. Another
professor talked first. He had been invited to speak because of his work—his
genuinely fascinating, technical work—with computationally intelligent
surfaces (like computer touchscreens, but capable of being placed
everywhere). He spoke instead about the threat human beings posed to the
survival of the planet. Like Chris—like far too many people—he had become
anti-human, to the core. He had not walked as far down that road as my
friend, but the same dread spirit animated them both.
He stood in front of a screen displaying an endless slow pan of a blocks-
long Chinese high-tech factory. Hundreds of white-suited workers stood like
sterile, inhuman robots behind their assembly lines, soundlessly inserting
piece A into slot B. He told the audience—filled with bright young people—
of the decision he and his wife had made to limit their number of children to
one. He told them it was something they should all consider, if they wanted
to regard themselves as ethical people. I felt that such a decision was properly
considered—but only in his particular case (where less than one might have
been even better). The many Chinese students in attendance sat stolidly
through his moralizing. They thought, perhaps, of their parents’ escape from
the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and its one-child policy. They
thought, perhaps, of the vast improvement in living standard and freedom
provided by the very same factories. A couple of them said as much in the
question period that followed.