No Time to Die

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about James Bond. Specifically, the title No Time to Die. It’s a great phrase—furious, heroic, suggesting that the protagonist is simply too busy saving the world from a nuclear briefcase or something like that to bother with mortality.

My personal relationship with that phrase is slightly different. When I look at the state of the world, my brain doesn't think No Time to Die because I’m busy saving it. It thinks: I literally do not have the time or the emotional bandwidth to cope with dying in an apocalypse, so could we please prepone death?

Whenever the global news cycle gets particularly dark, I find myself indulging in a highly specific, deeply comforting form of cosmic nihilism: the desperate hope that I will simply exit stage left before shit hits the ceiling. Let the next generation figure out the radioactive super-mutants and AI overlords; I’d quite like to bow out before you are required to pay a subscription fee to access your brain or watch unskippable ads before you can open your eyes in the morning.

But lately, I’ve started to realize that this is a terribly lazy way to panic. There is literally no good time to die, mostly because of historical FOMO. If you leave the theater twenty minutes before the credits roll, you miss the punchline—or if you’re corny like Marvel, the post-credit scenes. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that humanity never goes out with a dignified, cinematic bang. We usually trip over our own shoelaces, fall into a pile of poop, and somehow, against all odds, stumble into a bizarre new era (emphasis on new; better or worse is up for debate) instead.

Take our current existential dread about technology. We think we are unique in our terror of AI wiping us out. But humans have always been utterly petrified of their own creations. When the telephone was invented, people genuinely refused to touch it because they thought the wires would transmit deadly diseases or literally explode in their faces. When the bicycle became a trend in the 1890s, doctors warned of "bicycle face"—a permanent, bulging-eyed expression of pure horror supposedly caused by the unimaginable, ungodly stress of trying to balance on two wheels.

Imagine living through that. Imagine being absolutely convinced that the bicycle was the vanguard of the apocalypse, only to realize a while later that equations and big red buttons would almost get the deed done. And even after those stupidly fortunate turns of events, we have no time to die; even more ridiculous things are yet to come.

On any given Tuesday, my brain likes to flip through a Rolodex of catastrophes. On a global level, I worry about massive, rogue asteroids. Scientists tell us they track them, but let’s be honest: space is entirely too big, and our tracking equipment is basically just a bunch of fancy binoculars—and it does not help that math is always prone to error. I lie awake wondering if a giant rock is hurtling toward us at thirty thousand miles an hour, ready to turn the Earth back into a molten soup or a squished brownie (I sometimes wonder which would be the case). Not today, I think. My Amazon package is getting here on Thursday. There’s no time to die via space rock.

But then, because the human brain loves a local flavor of anxiety, my mind pivots instantly from global asteroid annihilation to a uniquely Malayali brand of fear: the Mullaperiyar Dam.

If you didn’t grow up in Kerala, you cannot understand the sheer, load-bearing weight this 120-year-old structure holds in our collective subconscious. It is the ultimate regional boogeyman. Every monsoon, when the rains start hammering down, half the state enters a state of high-alert existential dread. We are convinced that this ancient wall of limestone and whatever the hell they mixed in those days is finally going to give way, sending a tidal wave of biblical proportions down the hills. It’s a fear so ingrained that I’m pretty sure Malayalis check the damn dam water levels before they go to bed in July.

So, on any given night, I am caught between a cosmic rock from outer space, a century-old wall brought to us by the same geniuses who gave us the McMahon line, nuclear armageddon, old men in diapers calling shots around the world, and—if the day is festive enough—the sheer amount of violence humans are capable of. And as I lie there thinking of more imaginative ways for the world to end, I suddenly remember that I forgot to take the trash out and set an alarm to take it out before it's too late, just in case none of those catastrophic things happen. I mean, I really don’t have time to die by my sister’s hands for not taking out the trash; I think I’ll hold out for something better.

And the sun comes up. The asteroid misses by a number that would probably make you say that's not a lot of million miles. The dam holds for another monsoon. A young, seemingly not-too-evil guy takes office. A dictator slips on a banana peel or something ridiculous like that. And like the young, naive baboons we are, we hope against all odds. We prepare for a grand, ideological showdown, and instead, history gives us a weird, bureaucratic anti-climax.

Maybe that’s the real secret of being human. We think we are defined by our grand ideologies, our rigid borders, and our fierce differences. But when you look at the macro-level history of our panic, we are all unified by the exact same ridiculous, stubborn resilience.

In fact, the human condition reminds me entirely of a 1990 Toyota Camry. The wing mirrors are held up by an ungodly amount of duct tape. The windshield is definitely cracked. Bumper stickers cover dents amassed over the course of time as this piece of beautiful machinery got passed down the family tree after surviving multiple student drivers. The seats are dirty beyond redemption, the radio doesn't work, and sometimes you need to turn the heater on so that the car won't die on long drives. Yet the Camry lives on, even after multiple doomsday predictions from mechanics of different ethnicities. I have seen this marvelous, lucky feat of engineering giving the latest BMWs a run for their money on interstate highways across the US.

The shit has been hitting the ceiling since the dawn of time. The Camry survives on routine oil changes, wishful thinking, and, in extreme scenarios, prayers. Humanity, much like the Camry, always finds a way to power through whatever new catastrophe is prophesied to be its end.

So I’ve decided to rethink my exit strategy. I don't want to die before the chaos peaks. I want to stay. I wish to suffer and be entertained with everyone else as we see whatever absurd solution humanity stumbles into next to solve a problem they created. Who knows, maybe I would be able to place a bet on Polymarket for what would be the eventual end of humans. I think I will go with snakes—they have always creeped me out.