‘End of the World Vibes’: Why Culture Can’t Stop Thinking About Apocalypse

The signal fact about the end of the world is that it has not happened yet, despite numerous predictions.

Contemplating annihilation can certainly be a valuable means of reckoning with death, loss, abandonment and a capricious universe, but one can also detect the rumbling of a bad conscience – a dark suspicion that the end might be richly deserved. Usually, a writer will pass some kind of judgment on the world that is in peril. It is not hard to tell ... See more

The corpus of end-of-the-world stories is immense and ever-growing. In the past decade or so, we have seen dramas (Melancholia), horrors (It Comes at Night), war movies (World War Z), comedies (This Is the End) and satires (Don’t Look Up); sitcoms (The Last Man on Earth), animations (The Mitchells vs the Machines) and songs (Phoebe Bridgers’ I Know

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As Frank Kermode argued in his classic 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, we resist the idea that we live in the middle of history, unable to know how it all ends or to be a part of the climactic drama. To make sense of life, Kermode wrote, “we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the int... See more

In 1919, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote that it was “bad form to praise the world and life openly. It was fashionable to see only its suffering and misery, to discover everywhere signs of decadence and of the near end – in short, to condemn the times or to despise them.”

These are the questions that make the genre fizz: do we expect the end of the world? Do we deserve it? Do we secretly long for it? What would we miss and what would we love to banish to oblivion?

“Such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick,” complains the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel Herzog. “We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it ... Things are grim enough without these ... See more

In her 2021 novel Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler pokes fun at what she sees as a propensity to wallow in self-loathing and impotence: “the popular turn to fatalism could be attributed to self-aggrandizement and an ignorance of history, history being characterized by the population’s quickness to declare apocalypse finally imminent despite its permanen... See more

Through movies that make the unthinkable enjoyable, wrote Sontag in her 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster, “one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities and the destruction of humanity itself”. Contemplating annihilation can certainly be a valuable means of reckoning with death, loss, aband

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We love to talk about the death of this and the fall of that, and to boast that we are there to witness it. We do like to feel special.