The euphoria of the dying is well known but little understood. Stories abound of people who have been languishing toward oblivion but just before the end rally briefly with a burst of energy and optimism that astonishes their families. It has been proposed, although whether with any scientific credibility or not I do not know, that when the organism comprehends its imminent extinction it floods itself with dopamine, buoying the mood of the dying. It has also been speculated that people facing violent death, in a plane going down, for example, or at the hands of a murderer, are anesthetized by the dopamine rush and experience their final seconds as a kind of peaceful lark.

I don’t know if this dopamine hypothesis is valid, but it is comforting to believe it, whether we are contemplating our own end or that of a loved one. Taking the suffering out of the equation, once the end is at hand, would be, to say the least, helpful. As Shakespeare said in a slightly different context, it would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I am wondering if the same thing happens when a civilization, say for example western industrial civilization, reaches its expiration date. How else to explain the irrational exuberance of American consumers, investors, brokers, politicians and Uber drivers as they stride confidently toward what any rational mind can see is imminent destruction. They’ve gotta be on something.

I’m not talking here about the opioid, crack, meth, alcohol and other related narcotic epidemics currently raging, although they may be part of the syndrome; they are surely spawned by hopelessness and are often used to ease one through the final hours of life.

But I mean here something larger and more vague, a quietly raging giddiness bubbling through our entire lives. When we are shown that climate change is about to turn our farm fields to deserts, to sink our cities beneath ocean waves, to burn our forests down and unleash the four horsemen of the Apocalypse — and then we see it starting to happen — surely the appropriate response is not a giggle. Or a shrug. Such responses are those of people who are on something.

The drinking water is almost gone, so is the soil and the oil and the breathable air and the fish. Out-of-control debt is strangling our country and almost all of us. And yet we seem collectively happy. The consumer confidence index has seldom been higher, we hear every day that our economy is terrific and the stock market is stratospheric and America is Number One.

Perhaps the whole organism, sensing that it’s almost time for lights out, is burping dopamine to that the final throes will not bother us, the gathering darkness will not frighten us, and we can keep watching football until the screen goes to black.

It would make far more sense than what I hear people saying about their situation: that there’s no reason we can’t keep growing our economy forever, that technology will replace the cheap energy that oil can no longer give us, that there are unexpected upsides to global warming, that Trump is a good president because he “tells it like it is.” Wait, that also sounds like people who are on something. I rest my case.

Excuse me, I have to go. I feel like I’m going to start giggling for no reason….