Those who know me also know how intrigued I am by human self-extinction. I find it darkly funny and so compelling that I am building a career around it. Furthermore, I am studying human brain chemicals and structure for the novel I am writing; therefore, further research into pollution, and swimming in a sea that feels and looks strange to me, different somehow, led me to write this piece today.

Somewhere behind the sentence you are reading right now, lodged in the frontal cortex currently doing the reading, there is very probably a fleck of polyethylene. Not as metaphor. Autopsied brain tissue sampled in 2024 carried measurably more plastic than the same tissue sampled in 2016, and more than the liver sampled alongside it, more than the kidney. Which is its own small horror, tucked inside a much larger one. The organ you like to imagine as the seat of you turns out to be the most absorbent organ in the building.

Prediction: if we carry on like this, in 2050, copulating with a plastic/silicone doll would feel like actually fucking a human, right?

It is in your blood, at concentrations someone has already bothered to average to two decimal places, because someone always does. It is in your placenta, if you are growing one, across a range wide enough to make the average number look almost decorative next to it. It is in your testicles, if you have them, running at roughly three times the concentration found in placental tissue in the studies that bothered to compare the two, which is a sentence I did not expect to write and you did not expect to read before breakfast. It turned up this month in a toddler's nappy contents, reported without a flicker of embarrassment. Kidneys. Liver. The lot. Worldwide, not regional. Not a postcode problem you can solve by moving house.

There ought to be a name for a species that builds its comforts out of a material engineered specifically never to break down, then discovers the material broke down anyway. Just smaller. Just inside. I am calling it Disposable Humanity, not because the phrase is elegant, but because it is accurate, and because somebody ought to say it plainly before a marketing department gets there first (they will arrive eventually, and they will call it something gentler, something with the word "legacy" folded into it, watch).

The warehouse

Picture the brain as a warehouse. For most of its working life it took deliveries and processed them, memory in, memory catalogued, a reasonably competent logistics operation for a species that prefers to think of itself as considerably more than plumbing. Now the warehouse is also, slowly and without anyone signing off on the change order, becoming the packaging it used to only store. The shelving is turning into the boxes. Nobody voted on this supply chain. Nobody ever does, that is rather the point of a supply chain, the not voting.

Polyethylene is the polymer of the carrier bag, the crisp packet, the thing you take from the shop and forget about somewhere between the till and the car. It does not politely stay in the bag. It travels. It crosses barriers your body spent several hundred million years building for the specific purpose of keeping foreign matter out of the brain and out of a placenta. Some things are only supposed to get in with permission. Nobody asked. It settles in regardless, unbothered, permanent houseguest energy.

Nobody has fully worked out what it does to you once it's in there. The people studying it say so themselves, carefully, in the tone of professionals who can see a headline forming before the study is finished, fair enough frankly, given what happens to careers that get ahead of their own data. But an absence of proof is not the same as an absence of plastic, and there is, undeniably, plastic.

Prediction: Will plastic surgeons run out of business? I see redundancy!

The next batch

Here is the part that moves this past body horror and into something closer to species-level bad manners. The same polymer turning up disproportionately in the testis is not merely colonising the body that already exists. It is getting ahead of the body that has not been assembled yet. Quality control, applied retroactively, to the next batch off the line.

This blog runs on the word extinction in its tagline, and most weeks that word is doing decorative work, a provocation, closer to a T-shirt slogan than a diagnosis. Not this week. This week the extinction, if it is one, is occurring in the specific and thoroughly unglamorous location of the epididymis, and nobody involved intended a metaphor, and somehow that is worse than if they had.

I was about to end that paragraph with a line about extinction being democratic, plastic as the great equaliser, rich testis and poor testis alike. It's the kind of sentence a philosopher-provocateur is contractually obliged to reach for. I'll spare you. It wasn't going anywhere new, and neither, it turns out, is the plastic.

The Packaging

Recycle the bottle. Compost the bag. Feel briefly, gorgeously virtuous for about four minutes. Have children anyway, if you can still manage it, and hope the batch came out fine. Plastic was comfort's finest hour, weightless, cheap, endlessly obliging, the one material that promised to ask nothing of you in return. It turns out it was invoicing you the entire time, quietly, and the currency it chose was tissue.

Disposable Humanity was never a design flaw. We built the packaging to outlast the product by several centuries and it turns out the product is us, and the packaging appears to be winning the argument, one skull, one testis, one placenta at a time, without once raising its voice, the smug bastard.

Anyway. Bin's full. Someone take it out.