Children of Men is a provocative book that was turned into an equally, of not more, thought provoking film with Clive Owen.
The basic plot is that the world has become infertile, and the youngest person on Earth is 16 years old. Our inability to reproduce has turned the entire world upside down. People harass the elderly and some elect to committ mass suicide. Young people treat their dogs like babies (sounds pretty familiar). Many parts of the world have decended into anarchy and the remaining intact nations are totalitarian regimes. The protagonist discovers a young woman who is pregnant, and he must race to find a way to protect her and enable someone to hopefully discover the secret to her pregnancy.
Oddly enough, it was this book that first had me really thinking about climate change. I had of course been learning about the Climate Crisis by working at Bowery, but it was this book that situated my thinking in a more philosophical place.
By introducing a world in which children no longer exist, Children of Men forces the reader to actually introspect about purpose and motivation. After all, it does seem intuitive that if there is no future, that society might decay right? Our entire economic system is built off of future earnings. We purchase things and get an education so as to create a better future for ourselves and our children even when we don’t have any children to speak of. Even though the future of humanity is almost never present in any of our day to day decisions, pondering this fictional future does bring into focus how the continuation of us actually undergirds everything. When there is no future, everything loses meaning. Everyone is motivated in some capacity by the prospect of future and living on before we die, and everything in our society is built on this belief.
Despite it being a fairly dire framing going down the climate rabbithole, it was effective motivator to kickstart (and sustain) my interest.