Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to the people of 2088 also applies to the people of 2020. ‹ Literary Hub

This week, I stumbled upon some very good advice Kurt Vonnegut set out, in 1988, for the citizens of the world of 2088. Sure, it was part of a Volkswagen ad campaign for TIME, but it still counts as salient advice from one of our great literary minds—and though it was supposed to be for people living 100 years after he wrote it, almost all of it applies to those of us trapped in 2020 as well. (And if not, well, at the very least, I got a laugh out of “bag ladies and bag gentlemen.”) Here’s what Kurt thinks we should be doing to save ourselves:

It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

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