Sorry, The Apocalypse Isn't Coming to Save You
You still have to pay your credit cards
People have been predicting the end of the world since the beginning of history, and I’m sorry to tell you but you aren’t getting out of it that easily. And that’s not to sound unsympathetic. At this point we’re all bone tired. We haven’t just been with wrestling with devils, we have now reached the point where we’ve collectively given in and said “Okay the devils can live in the spare room as long as they promise to keep it down while I watch The Great British Bake Off.”
The news does not stop coming. Now when my phone vibrates, I’m excited if it’s a credit card demanding money. If journalism is truly the first draft of history, then the news is a college junior on meth heavily influenced by Infinite Jest.
No matter what side of the political divide you set your easy chair on, there’s no denying that we all see a notification and say, “Now what is this idiot doing?” And lately, we’re all referring to the same idiot. So of course the idea has become attractive that a Giant Hand would reach down and shake the Earth like an Etch-A-Sketch to create a blank page for starting over.
There’s a chance that the end of the history might bring a world filled with less anxiety, which means we can sleep through the night. And let’s be honest. We all know that we’re on the correct side of history and the new world to come will be filled with people just like us.
People would love for history to take a break, just for ten years. We’ve lived through most of the Angry Old Testament God plagues - pestilence (COVID), locusts (late-stage capitalists), and the Kardashians. And that doesn’t even include uniquely modern bedevilments, like influencers. I’m sure that there are nights when He smacks Himself on His forehead and says, “Why didn’t I think of loosing millions of blank-eyed idiots in Ancient Egypt to film everything for TikTok?”
Look at the Jewish peoples’ historic cycle of suffering. They settled Jerusalem and built their temple there. Then Jerusalem was conquered and they were forced to leave. Then Jerusalem was conquered again, and they were allowed back in. At some point, like a Harvard student with rich parents after graduation, they moved to Europe and the cycle started over again.
And this repeatedly gave rise to a belief in apocalyptic messianism; the idea being that God had left for a while and devils were in charge but one day He would return and kick all their enemies’ asses, like God was a cosmic older brother. The fact that this has never actually happened stops nobody from believing in it.
America has a similar cycle, except we begin end times cult behavior when things are going well. In the ‘90s, a new generation that had never known catastrophe began cosplaying the apocalypse, as if hoping to manifest it into existence.
They built communities and lifestyles around surviving an imagined oncoming catastrophe, usually starting when representatives of the government come to take away the stockpiles of military grade weapons they had amassed to defend themselves against the day when the government was going to come to take away their stockpiles of military grade weapons.
By point of comparison, look at the Greatest Generation:
There was an entire generation that starved their way through the Great Depression and then fought a giant war in Europe to wipe the Nazi threat off the face of the Earth. By the time everything settled down, nobody had to pray for a global disaster because they’d already lived through several.
America has a unique way of dealing with the end of the world, by turning it into a major capitalist enterprise. Televangelists selling buckets of pig slop as shelf-stable food that could last an eternity. Right wing news networks hocking gold as an alternative to currency, and airing the ads between news stories designed to scare their elderly audience into believing that society was soon collapsing and all currency teeters on the edge of being worth its weight in Cracklin’ Oat Bran coupons.
The truth is this – only one generation ever got this prayer answered, and it was a generation of dinosaurs and you will never be as lucky as a dinosaur sorry to tell you. The rest of us will have to wake up tomorrow and go to work. No comet nor quartet of iconographic figures on horseback will save you from the fact that you decided to treat your credit card like it wasn’t real money and now you’re on a strict payment plan.
Members of apocalypse cults in the US sell their homes and quit their jobs and then wake up and find that they’re jobless and living in a cheap motel. The world isn’t ending, and while the sad news is that no deity will burn your enemies and their lives to the ground, the good news is you have a choice not to do the same with yours.
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History isn’t ending, so I’ll be here next week.