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

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.”

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

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

... 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

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?

In this way we attempt to take the mess and mystery of the future, which has always been frightening because it is the ultimate unknown, and tidy it into a story.

In a 2020 YouGov poll, nearly one in three Americans said they expected an apocalyptic event in their lifetimes, with the Christian Judgment Day relegated to fourth place by a pandemic, climate change and nuclear war; zombies and aliens brought up the rear.

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