Hal was concerned about the future. He came from enough money for the leisure of concern, but not enough to be unconcerned. As he watched civilization fall with greater and greater rapidity towards destruction, his primary worry was the impossibility of salvation. How can you get a militantly ambivalent society, poisoned with extreme polarization around manufactured differences, to enact radical change? How had a greater degree of communication only further stifled people’s ability to organize around anything effectively? 

It seemed obvious to him that humanity strongly favored displaced anxiety over sensible anxiety, and that the increased ability to communicate had only enabled the indifference of self-delusion. Everyone is angry about the same thing, yet no one can agree on what to do about it or even what it is. 

From what he could understand, it seemed that mass mobilization would only begin when it was already too late. The people would only try to seize power once there was nothing left to have power over. We are to live in the ashes, Hal thought, inhale the mold, and fight over the decaying corpse of something that never really existed. And tragically, we will only realize this once everything real has died. 

The lies we hold sacrosanct and their corresponding narratives, the division they engender, are so powerful that they will kill us and the world before we recognize their falsity. How can a world be saved when its illusions are more powerful than its realities? Conscious or unconscious lies have almost always run the world, but these timeworn/age-old/historical falsehoods have never approached their contemporary counterparts’ power to destroy. 

The manipulators (the weavers of lies) are aware of their manipulation, but are themselves so delusional that they pretend not to smell the stench of death in their decidedly finite wake. In this way, the charge towards annihilation is as leaderless as the leadership of the leaders. It is true that from nothing comes nothing, but it is deadly to believe nothing can change anything, because everything already exists, and nothing is consuming it all.

These were the thoughts that occupied Hal’s mind as he drank frozen margaritas on the blisteringly hot beach. Like anyone with an allegiance to life, he believed there was a path away from death. But, for all his intelligence, he could not distinguish the direction. 

Many understood what Hal understood, but would continue to imbibe on the beach if the option remained, regardless of the possibilities for profound and positive change. Then there are those whose poverty and resulting anger or single-minded dedication to change spurred them towards suicidally impossible paths. Hal was neither of these. 

He imagined himself incapable of complacency when action was possible, and disinclined to action destined to failure. And it was this aversion and the subsequent acceptance of apathy that most plagued him. He knew that every great change seemed impossible until it was enacted. He knew every revolutionary was suicidal until they won. 

History proves that generations of martyrs must die for generations' worth of change to happen in weeks. But there were no generations left to sacrifice. Humanity had run out the clock on delayed martyrdom. Doom had caught up with hope. Soon the world would be drowned and burned beyond recognition or saving. No matter how selfless or extreme, martyrdom without immediate results would be meaningless. One cannot die for a cause that no longer exists. One cannot change the minds of those who have been robbed of theirs. But, one can drink on the beach as long as there is sufficient infrastructure for ice, tequila, and beach chairs, as long as there are people who will serve you food instead of killing you for it, and as long as one has  enough personal capital to pay for the last strands of a doomed luxury. 

It pained Hal to know that luxury was an illusion; it was one of many lies born from the rapacious lie of scarcity. If the greedy did not monopolize luxury, then all could partake in it. However, Hal could be comfortable for a little longer than the already deeply uncomfortable. 

His joy was too marred by guilt and fear to be substantially savored. Hal found solace in this despair as his self-disgust seemed to assign a moral quality to his apathy. If he was aware of his complacency and its terrible consequences, then at least he was better than those who ignored theirs. So, he continued to drink on the beach. 

Some days, he was locked in dejection, self-hatred, fury, and fleeting fantasies of retribution and revitalization. On other days, he consumed happily, orgasmed upliftingly, and bantered joyfully. The possibility of the latter consistently negated the terrifying necessities of the former. 

It is impossible to know if the cause of Hal’s inaction was because he continued to drink on the beach, but there is no doubt about his dire predictions. We either serve drinks at the beach or we consume them. But, we are on the precipice of neither the drinks, nor the beach, nor the service and its insufficient returns, and the customers and their desperate attempts to find something in nothing, irreversibly disappearing. 

The human urge to dominate, superseding a human imperative to love, the triumph of power over fulfillment, ambition over preservation, will last only as long as nature allows, and nature is almost out of patience. If you truly believe that fire is water, then thirst will go unnoticed until all you have left is a mouthful of ash.

Equality will be brought about by misery, so Hal drank on the beach, hoping for a movement that would allow everyone to do so, hating himself for it, loving it, and imagining the rapidly decreasing possibility of an equality of happiness rather than an equality of deprivation. His greatest and most suppressed wish was that he would not live to be one of the inevitable martyrs of the all-consuming nothingness he sadly enjoyed. 

Sad joy is better than no joy. Occasionally relenting nothingness is better than the irreversible nothingness of death. So, Hal drank on the beach, secretly hoping he would be the last generation to enjoy the dying vestiges of pleasure before all are martyred to catastrophe. There is something poetic in seeing the end without enduring it, and, more than anything, Hal hoped to remain a poet, so he drank on the beach.