Dreaming of The End Of The World

The apocalypse is just another escapist fantasy

“Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.”
― Jim Butcher

People talk about the world ending so often that I’m surprised I don’t go outside and see more necks craned up toward the sky. Waiting. For a meteor or a nuclear bomb. For the sky to shake and bleed, spilling out, boiling the rivers and turning the waves of the ocean as gray and necrotic as dead skin.

For thousands of years we’ve scribbled prophecies, and taken ritualistic drugs while babbling about death, and drawn calendars with definite end dates, and written stories, and prayed to gods about the end of the world. Yet the world continues to persist despite our best efforts. 

End dates come and go. Every battlefield soaks up the blood. We rebuild on top of bomb damage, after the smoke has cleared, after green sprouts push through the rubble. The gods seem to get bored of their own deadly visions. Life goes on despite our best efforts.

I used to wonder why we were so obsessed about the world ending. I didn’t understand why we wanted to see thousands of years of human progress, with its libraries and coliseums and skyscrapers and knee surgeries swept away. Why did people want to lay down in a soft bed and have their eyes burned out? Why did our stomachs growl with hunger at the thought of returning to dust. Why did so many people want a world reduced to bones?

 But now I understand that after years of cleaning dog vomit out of the carpet, and scrubbing the mildew out of the shower, and failed relationship after relationship, and little disappointments that leak into your stomach and wear away the lining, that it can all start to feel a little tiresome. What is it all for, if you just fail over and over again? What is the point of cleaning the mildew out of the shower if it just regrows, again and again, a taunting thing, yellow that always manages to pierce through the pristine white?

At least if the world was ending that meant you’d have something to do. If the angels showed up with trumpets that caused earthquakes, and the demons broke through the crust of the earth with their mouths ringed with magma and blood, you wouldn’t have to clean the shower anymore. You wouldn’t have to sit in traffic anymore. You wouldn’t have to go to court because your baby daddy refused to pay child support, and you wouldn’t have to keep throwing away the rotten fruit you never ate, and you wouldn’t have to sit through another pointless meeting on Zoom, listening to the sound of your hair growing through the drone.

If the world ended you wouldn’t be frazzled, confused, bewildered, numbed out.

Doomsday cults and suicide prophets and apocalypse grifters resurface again and again to popular support because it seems like doom is better than what we have now.

This isn’t just something that stupid people or the uneducated fall for. According to a 2020 YouGuy survey, 3 in 10 Americans think there will be an apocalyptic event in their lifetime. A plague. Environmental disaster. Nuclear war. Judgement day. An alien invasion. The “Revolution.” 

If the world ends that means you can stop trying. You’re allowed to turn your face away from the future.

If the world ends, that means you can continue to pop soft yellow pills prescribed by overworked doctors, crawl into your bed and smoke weed, drink alcohol until you puke. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to marry your girlfriend. Cheat on her if you want. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to get into shape. You don’t have to set a good example. You don’t have to make friends with the sun and the moon, and the earth around you. You don’t have to find anything agreeable. Sneer at nature itself. Look through every window with disdain. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to have children, because you’ll just be committing them to death and misery. 

What a relief that soon all of this will be muted and gray, crushed glass underfoot. It will be wonderful when this planet becomes something where nothing can grow. Flies will explode from the heat. Animals will lick the dust at the bottom of the lake before laying down to die together.

Listen to the tick of the clock. The second hand is on fire, and minute by minute we get closer to destruction.

But what if the world isn’t ending?

For some people that thought is unbearable. That means they have to keep cleaning the shower, and the dog vomit, and doing the laundry. They have to keep waking up to the wail of ambulances and the offending eye of the sun.

Remember, 3 in 10 Americans believe the world is going to end soon. Just because you’re not living in a cult compound, dressed in linen white, high on acid, underneath the sway of a wild-eyed charismatic leader, doesn't mean you’re not in a cult. 

Doom is a powerful sedative. Not only that, it’s a money-making machine. It’s a tool of compliance. It’s a copacetic drug. It’s a warm dream. You can let go of your own responsibility if you think at any moment the sky is going to explode in fire.

But nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. Maybe the world isn’t ending. Maybe you do bear the responsibility of the future. Every technological advancement we have is because someone believed in the future. They saw the snarled, ugly, tangled branches of the wild and believed they could make a better world. One with less discomfort. Less death. Less bitterness.

Even if World War 3, or a nuclear bomb, or a deadly pandemic happens - it doesn’t mean the end of the world. We’ve recovered as a species from worse. We’ve recovered from the destruction of entire civilizations. The blood soaks into the ground. The sky clears. The buildings are repaired. We continue on.

If you stopped believing in the apocalypse, you’d have to learn to live in this reality. You’d have to deal with disappointment. You might have to try to find joy in even simple things that you used to hate, like cleaning the shower or getting up in the morning. You’d have to realize that this world is all you’re going to get, and you can either numb yourself to it or learn to live here. Because there are no singing choirs of destroying angels. There is no laughing demon. There is no promise of obliteration. There is no way out, not really.

If you stopped believing in the apocalypse, you’d maybe, actually, have to learn how to be happy instead of waiting for a God to come down and crush you.

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