“I’m disgusted to be a human”: What to do when you hate your own species

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

We claim to cherish the natural world. Yet every great achievement, story, and cup of coffee has done nothing for any other creature but ourselves. So when the existence of the human race is at the cost of everything else, when the hypocrisy is open and we all know… How am I supposed to look anyone in the eye or feel good about participating in a world where every human act is at the expense of the natural world that birthed us?

I’ve lost the will. I realize this sounds infantile. But the numbers are in, and I’m no longer sure what we think we’re doing as a species other than trying to create the perfect consumer, the world be damned. We’re addicted to “self,” and I’m frankly disgusted to be a human.

Underneath the hard feelings you’re feeling — disgust, anger, loathing — are probably much softer feelings: Disappointment. Sadness. Fear about the future. It’s hard to stay with those because they make us feel vulnerable. It’s so much easier to bypass them and go straight to hate. Standing in judgment over your own kind is not exactly fun, but it does give you a feeling of moral elevation.

So I’m not surprised that, throughout history, countless people have looked at the human species and responded with a big “yuck.” As early as the 17th century BCE, we’ve projected our disgust with ourselves onto the gods, imagining that they find us so awful that a Great Flood is needed to wipe us off the face of the Earth. Only a handful of us are decent enough to be saved, for example, in an ark — Atraḥasis’s family in the Mesopotamian version of the story, Noah’s family in the Bible’s later retelling.

Since then, anti-humanism has enjoyed resurgence after resurgence. It’s often popped up at times of civilizational-scale catastrophe — from the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the 14th century to the Wars of Religion in the 17th century to the Atomic Age in the 20th century.

And now that we’re living through a human-induced climate crisis, anti-humanism is once again in the ascendant, especially among a vocal minority of environmental activists who seem to welcome the end of destructive Homo sapiens. There’s even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which advocates for us to stop having kids so that humanity will fade out and the Earth will return to good health.

You describe your own loathing for humanity as “infantile,” but I’d use a different word to describe it, given what a popular response it’s been over the millennia. Frankly, it’s a little…basic.

And deep down, you know it makes no sense. Those humans that you’re so angry at? They didn’t just come from nature, as you noted, they’re part of nature — the nature that you love so much. We’re all natural organisms.

I think what you’re really chafing against is not humanity, but one particular way of relating to the world — a highly extractive way — that some humans leaned into at a particular moment and that happens to be having its time in the sun right now.

The dualistic intellectual tradition that tells us we can be separate from nature — and that we should treat the natural world as an object to be exploited for human gain, rather than as a subject to be communed with and respected — is a Western tradition that took off in modernity. We can trace it back to 17th-century philosophers like Descartes, who argued that the soul is totally distinct from mere matter (and that only humans have souls), and Francis Bacon, who developed the scientific method.

Before thinkers like these came on the scene, most spiritual and philosophical traditions around the world — from the ancient Greeks to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, from Hindus in India to followers of Shintoism in Japan — believed that all living things had some degree of soul in them. Many believed it of non-living things, too (think: mountains or rivers). This led to lifestyles more in balance with the rest of nature.

But after the 17th century, it became increasingly common to try to turn everything in nature into a commodity, even past the point of sustainability. Today’s hypercapitalism feels like the culmination of that trend.

Knowing the history here is helpful, because it reminds us that our current paradigm isn’t set in stone. Unfettered hypercapitalism wasn’t always the norm, and anti-humanism wasn’t always the reigning mood.

And in fact, if we peer back just a little before the arrival of Descartes and Bacon, we find a flowering of just the opposite: Renaissance humanism, the tradition that emphasized just how beautiful and wonderful human beings can be.

Here’s the 16th-century humanist philosopher Michel de Montaigne writing in his Essays:

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

To Montaigne, human life was a gift from God. And when someone offers you a gift, the worst thing you can do is despise it. “We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it,” he wrote.

The best thing you can do? Enjoy it. Cultivate it. Here’s Montaigne again:

I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us…I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do.

When I first read this quote, in Sarah Bakewell’s delightful history of humanism titled Humanly Possible, I wondered why Montaigne specified that he feels proud of himself for loving life. Is that really something to be proud of?

But the more I think about it, the more I see that the answer is yes. It’s hard to be a human. It was hard in the days of the Renaissance humanists, when plague, famine, and hostilities between political factions decimated communities. And it’s hard in our day, too.

It’s painful to see pictures of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch full of our throw-away plastic, to watch huge swaths of rainforest being cut down to graze cattle for our hamburgers, to lose billions of birds that once added color and song and ecosystem services to our world. It’s painful to know that so much of that is being done to satisfy our greed.

Yet that doesn’t mean humanity is the cancer of the planet. Remember: Humanity can’t be a stain on nature — we are nature. (Also, nature itself isn’t some pure idyll — it is often “red in tooth and claw” — and other animals also act in their own interests, reshape ecosystems, and drive species extinct!) The more accurate description of humans is that we are an unusually clever ape with unusual capacities for both cooperation and greed, currently leaning way too much into the latter.

So what should you do with all of that? First of all, just let yourself feel the pain. Feel the disappointment, sadness, fear, and all the other soft feelings.

It can be so overwhelming to really tune into the incomprehensibly large suffering of the natural world that you’ll be tempted to run away — to retreat into a fatalistic “ugh, we’re the worst.” Resist that impulse. That lets you off the hook too easily, because it expects nothing of you. Stay with the damn pain.

And then notice that the fact that you’re feeling this pain is actually giving you a beautiful piece of information: You have other capacities too — for cooperation and care and compassion. You wish for us all to do better. If you didn’t have those capacities, that wish, you wouldn’t feel the pain.

According to the Buddhist scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macy, this process of “honoring our pain for the world” is essential: When we learn to reframe our pain as suffering with or feeling compassion for the world, we see it as a strength, and as evidence of our interconnectedness with other life-forms.

Once we’ve shifted away from dualistic thinking and appreciated that we are not separate from nature, we’re ready to move into what Macy calls “active hope.” We usually think of hope as a feeling, which you either have or don’t have, depending on how likely you think success is. But Macy says that’s wrong: Hope is a practice. It means that you commit to act on behalf of the things you love, regardless of the probability of success. You’re not betting on outcomes; you’re choosing what kind of person you want to be and how you want to show up for the world, without requiring a guarantee that you’ll succeed.

The no-guarantees bit is part of the ethos of Buddhism, which recommends that we act without attachment to outcomes. That doesn’t mean we don’t have goals and don’t try to use the most effective methods of achieving them. It just means we have the courage to act even while knowing that we can’t fully control what ultimately happens to the things we love.

In my experience, that’s really hard to do: When I love someone or something, I desperately want to be able to protect them, to know with certainty that they’ll be okay. So every time I manage to practice active hope, I really do feel Montaigne-style proud of myself. I hope you will too.

Bonus: What I’m reading