I was swimming a giant man-made lake in Anuradhapura and I felt like such a moron. They built this tank (Abhaya Wewa) 2,500 years ago and we can't even imagine such big things anymore. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants. We've fallen below their armpits.

During the Anuradhapura civilization (-400 to 1000) they dug up lakes and piled the earth into giant stupas, with gems and treasure piled underneath. Sri Lanka received a sapling of the original Bo tree and preserved it after the original tree (and Buddhism in India) deceased. That tree—the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi—is 2,300 years old and still living. It's a living connection to the Buddha. This was all preserved by our ancestors. Their irrigation works still feed us and their religious works still enlighten us. These were men among gods. We are merely children at their feet, playing with a gun we found. And so our modern civilization dies predictably young.

I was walking through Ely Cathedral near Cambridge, which takes a while. It's enormous. Obviously built by better men for a bigger God. Jesus was but a Son of Man, but God knows we've embellished things. In our imagination he's a giant, and this is his giant building.

Giants used to walk the earth, you can feel it if you walk around. The Ely cathedral ceilings are nine-storeys high, and richly illustrated with 900 stories. We used to think a thousand years ahead and a hundred meters above our heads. Now we watch 3-second videos on our phones and are bored.

Religious buildings are often this big, and big buildings are often religious. The tallest towers used to be dedicated to the most high, but now they're dedicated to our basest instincts, and the worst among us. Walk around any modern city and the tallest towers are banks, or corporations, money, in short. That's what we worship, and that's how we build. Disposable towers that will depreciate to dust within centuries. Soon the pyramids will reign again, undefeated.

The pyramids were the tallest buildings in the world from -2500 to 1300. Sri Lanka's stupas were the tallest in Asia for centuries. Churches were the tallest things in Europe. If you look at ancient civilizations, they were capable of lasting for thousands of years and their works lasted for thousands more. They don't make 'em like that anymore, because They have quite literally left the building.

If we're being scientific and data-driven, modern industrial civilization is a failed experiment. In terms of longevity (which is what counts, in the end) we're far from the best and nearer the worst. The Romans crashed in around 1,000 years, the Greeks, Chinese, and Mesoamericans in 2,000s, the Egyptians took over 3,000. We are obviously getting worse at this, not better. What we call progress is a literal vanity metric, what we think of ourselves in the rearview window, as we hit a wall, historically.

Progress was a gun, fossil fuels loaded it, and we promptly blew our brains out. Like a kid bringing his daddy's gun to school, it was all very impressive, until it was terribly depressing. Industrial civilization, we hardly knew ye, you died on the playground.

Civilization—every single civilization in human history—has a distinctive curve, a rise and fall. Tainter laboriously mapped this across many civilizations, but it's obvious to any Tom, Dick, or Ozymandias if they look around presently. The fate of every creature that claims existence is to lose it, all creatures great and small. Impermanence is the only permanent phenomenon. Our permanent structures used to reflect this, but we've lost ourselves in our phones and missed the message from the pyramids.

Darwin didn't say that it's not the biggest, the strongest, or the best that survive, but the most adapted to change. Ancient civilizations exhausted their immediate environment, but we've exhausted the whole planet. There is no concept of progress in evolution because the baseline is always changing. There's only adaptation (adapt or die) and we have fucked this so bad there's a mass extinction.

I stick my head underwater to clear my thoughts. These are useless thoughts, especially projected in from the future. Thinking too much is the most thoughtless thing you can do, that's the first rule of meditation (which I forget religiously). I don't know if I believe in God, but I do know that I fear Them. It doesn't require any faith for this, just visit the houses of the holy and see how big They are. If you see a big doghouse, there's generally a big dog.