The more I think about it, the more I feel like people seem to have some level of desire to see “THE END”. Call it morbid curiosity. Call it nihilism. Call it death anxiety. Whatever. It seems like with all the effort people give to thinking about “the downfall”, there must be some fascination with it.
There’s so many forms of it. Doomsday preppers. Prophetic apocalypses. Global warfare. Climate disasters. The rise of fascism. People see “THE END” in so many different ways. And with the world not becoming any less precarious any time soon, we can only expect these mass-anxities to continue. (And the rich guys certainly have a vested interest in the end of everything. They get to keep their High Score.)
Or maybe not. Maybe human civilization (in at least some form) will continue for millennia more. Maybe we’re far off from the end. But one thing is certain: for each and every one of us walking this earth, the end is at most a century away, give or take a few decades.
“How grand would it be to witness the end of everything!” cries the mortal pretender. For it is not just his death, but the death of all that he knows – and he gets to bear witness.
I think it’s tempting to imagine a definitive end, especially one that’s over with quickly, as opposed to a slow crawl where things gradually get worse for the people who don’t deserve it.
Look at climate change, for example. People have started dying from extreme weather, but it’s not the people causing it, it’s the little guys just trying to live their lives. It’s safe to assume that an extinction event would play out the same way, with the people on the bottom going out first, and painfully, because they aren’t protected.
And people don’t want to imagine that, but they can’t muster the optimism for anything better than going out with a bang.