Where were you when the world ended? If you were like most people—me included—you were tucked away in some corner of happy oblivion, maybe not so happy but definitely oblivious to the crude finality crashing down on everything.

How many times can you outrun the end of the world? There’s really no way to know for sure. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Or, depending on your viewpoint, billions?

Countless people die every day. Not countless because they are innumerable, but countless because no one bothers to count them. They become a statistic, sure, part of some calculated total deaths, fatalities, but not really a ‘real’ death. Not a real death like the ones that get written up in a newspaper real nice like.

And not even people, but animals, too. Plants. Does it really matter? Even if it did, how could we know; how many kinds of shrub, epiphyte, tree, vine wink out of existence every day. Even if we could definitively pinpoint how much of a strain we add to the unknown (or known) plants and animals of the world with each air-conditioned electronically smoothed mile of highway, who would care? If you knew that a woman by the name of Ana would die at the age of 26 due in part to toxins spewed into the air by your burning garbage, sent to its aesthetically hygienic fate at the incinerator, would you care? Your contribution to her death: one-tenth of one percent. How many seconds would you hesitate before wheeling your trash can out to the curbside, just like you always do. Five seconds? If you positively, absolutely knew that you would be one-tenth of one percent responsible for Ana’s death. Without a doubt. How long would you hesitate? Or would you be one of the idiotic conscientious ones who didn’t put your garbage out at all.

Like that’s going to save Ana. What lunatic optimism.

Or: how long would you hesitate if you were the only one who knew? Like this would make a difference.

There are no right or wrong answers. Most times there aren’t any answers. Sometimes there are attractive-sounding arguments that we’d like to think are answers (really, that we’d like to think are the right answers).

If you woke up in the morning and thought: today I can stay at home and prolong the existence of a particular species of songbird, or I can press a button, kill the species, and enjoy hot water, television, convenient personal transportation; would it make a difference?

If, if, if.

Where were you when the metals for your car were wrenched out of the ground. When the stone for your highways was dredged out of the rock ocean. When the materials used to make your clothing were deposited in a river, when the people who made them died, young.

Where were you when the world ended? I was probably worrying about something wholly insubstantial, like why am I not rich and famous, or maybe what do I want to eat for lunch, soup or a sandwich?