Downhill Fast

Humanity was getting ugly. 'Not open to any agreement' might as well be the preface to just about anything. Plastic straws, guns, pipelines, climate change, politics, there really wasn't any topic that didn't divide people into stubborn, unaccommodating, insult hurling camps. Faced with obvious evidence of their error, they jump to the next 'unassailable' argument – seemly convinced that finding middle ground or conceding a point is tantamount to failure. Facts slowly ebbed away from debate, as feelings on points became the sole motivating factor. There became a threshold where there was literally nothing accomplished by communicating, except to advertise where you stood on an issue. The online environment had basically dissolved into either echo chambers or open warfare.

His optimism had been so high he could see everyone – eventually – living in harmony, had since rushed out till he saw 95%+ deaths as the only route to a society that didn't pull itself apart at the seams.

Mental Framework

Over the years he had re-written how is mind worked. The limits of possibility were not based on what had happened to him, or to others, but from a framework of nothingness to everything or anything. It made relating to others difficult – not to mention being able to communicate the scale he was considering. There was no common vocabulary. It was the difference between working with a dozen wooden blocks, or a ton of sand. After a while he didn't want to bother to dealing with the wet blanket of non-possibility that most people seemed to be – he'd rather rebuild the whole universe in his mind.