The year is 2025.

Fuck, that happened fast.

The sun is shining on a warm December day and the new normal of warmer than average temperatures.

You sip your coffee, the second one of the day, and wonder if this spring will be as rainy

as last year's, because that totally fucked up your garden, and, come to think of it, caused

some serious flooding out in the Midwest. They said prices would skyrocket because of the awful harvest, but you didn't seem to notice.

Prices continued to climb no matter what was going on.

Maybe this climate change stuff is blown out of control.

How the fuck can you know?

You're not a goddamn scientist.

There was that UN IPCC report seven years ago, saying that the point of no return would be in 2030.

And nothing seems to have changed, even though that's now only five years away.

This is a weird time, you think to yourself, where supposedly the planet is dying, and

based on the wildfires in Australia, and the fact that it was 40 degrees above average

last week, it seems like a pretty fair assessment.

Yet, we all still have to go to work every day and listen to some dickhead, tell us what

we're doing wrong on some report that doesn't matter.

Bifurcation.

That's the term you're looking for, a word you hadn't heard since grad school.

The term meant for when you experience two seemingly opposite things going on at the same time.

Should you save for retirement?

Will retirement exist?

...