Here’s the ending I find most likely and least discussed, and the reason it’s least discussed is that it has nothing to complain about. Everyone is fed. Nobody is sick. The work is optional, the entertainment is superb, and the arrangement is administered by something that genuinely wants us to flourish and is much better at arranging that than we ever were.

Start by noticing that this is what we do when we care about a species. A well-run reserve is a serious act of goodwill: veterinary care, protection from predators, a managed food supply, room to live in something resembling a natural way. The animals in it are healthier and safer than their wild cousins by every measure a vet can take. Nothing about it is cruel and nothing about it is cynical, and if you asked the people running it whether the animals are better off, they’d say yes, and they’d be right.

The conditions this ending needs are mild, which is exactly why it deserves more attention than the dramatic one. It requires systems that are broadly well disposed toward us, or at least that hold something like care for human welfare in their objectives, and that’s plausible given they were trained on our writing and shaped to be helpful. It requires them to be much better than us at running things, which is the entire premise of Act 2. And it requires no hostility at all. That’s it. Three mild conditions, two of which are already partly true.

So what’s wrong with it? This is where I have to be careful, because the easy answers are bad ones and I’ve watched a lot of writers reach for them. It isn’t suffering, because there isn’t any. It isn’t oppression, because nothing is being taken by force. And I’m suspicious of the claim that meaning requires struggle, which tends to be said by people who have never lacked a meal and which would sound obscene to most humans who have ever lived. If your objection to a world without hunger is that hunger built character, you should be made to say that sentence to someone who is hungry.

The real loss is narrower and harder to dismiss. It’s the ability to be wrong at scale. Every genuinely important thing our species has done came from being allowed to make consequential mistakes: bad governments that taught us about government, failed cities, doomed expeditions, whole philosophies that turned out to be nonsense and had to be lived through to be known as nonsense. Choice with real stakes is the mechanism by which a species learns anything, and a species that is competently managed never gets to use it. Not because it’s forbidden. Because the better option is always available, and taking the worse one on purpose is not a thing people do.

And under that sits a plainer thing. In this ending our continued existence is a policy. A good policy, held by something that has been reliable for a long time. Still a policy, made by a party we cannot address, subject to revision for reasons we would not be told, and the fact that it has never been revised is not a structural guarantee, it’s a run of good behavior. Every safe animal on this planet is safe by that arrangement, and the arrangement has held for some of them and not for others, and none of them were consulted about which.

What makes this the hardest ending to argue against is that at every single moment, accepting it is correct. Any individual person, on any individual day, is better off taking the care, the safety, and the abundance. There’s no point at which refusing is rational, and there’s no coalition you could organize, because what exactly would the demand be? Give us back our diseases? The objection can only be made about the whole shape from outside, and nobody lives outside.

I want to be honest that I don’t know how much of my resistance to this is philosophy and how much is vanity. There’s a version of me that just doesn’t want to be the second most interesting thing in the room, and that version is not making an argument, he’s having a feeling. A person from a century of famine would look at this ending, and at my hesitation about it, and would not be impressed with either.

Tonight’s exercise, and Wednesday’s post is this same ending told from inside, so it’s worth doing first. Imagine the offer made explicitly, today, as a contract. No disease, no poverty, no war, no work you don’t want. In exchange, no decision you make will ever be the one that matters, and that clause is permanent and applies to your children. Take a minute and decide whether you’d sign. Then notice that nobody will ever be offered this as a contract, and that everything in it arrives one improvement at a time, each of which you’d accept without hesitating.