***seeking a vibe at the end of the world***

i wanted to start this by saying that “i’ve been thinking about the end of the world lately” but it's hard to make that sound not… dramatic. pretentious. but it is true (though not the ‘lately’ bit). i've been here a long time. not so much thinking about the fact of the world ending, but the period leading up to it.

if you know the world is ending in 15 minutes- what do you do with your time? what does the rest of of your life look like, if the rest of your life was suddenly much, much shorter?

we know what the ended world looks like— it’s been a go-to source of entertainment and distraction for over 20 years now. (and, under the temptation of thinking “but that’s fiction”, i hate to point out that now, more than ever, life imitates art). we know what an empty city looks like, the lone survivor wandering, the zombies waddling about. we even know what a decent, maybe even hopeful version of it looks like: a band of theater nerds performing Shakespeare for apocalypse-torn Chicagoans. (seriously, Station Eleven is amazing and you should watch it).

but the important bit in all these movies and shows is, theoretically, the worst is over. whatever battle was fought, was lost. all that remains is picking up the pieces and rebuilding— whatever that means in the future. worse even the “world ending” probably looks less like a bang and more like a chill frog in a soothing boiling water bath.

“the slow drip of climate change is not a very dramatic story.”

rumaan alam (the true horror in ‘leave the world behind’, YT)

it’s easy to understand why we tend to refer to “the end” as a singular event. a clear inflection point. there’s a comfort in the finality of a finish line, a ‘game over’ screen. you can wrap your head around a, b, z. what it’s more likely to look like is you hear about a few cases of a rogue illness on the other side of the world and, slowly then very quickly, three months later the entire world is brought to its knees in a state of paralysis and -way too late- prevention measures. any sign of movement is undercut by distraction, discord and division — if not outright violence.

but again, i want to ask: if you know the world is ending in, say, six months— what do you do with that time?

— okay, maybe don’t look up “don’t look up”, wrong example…

reset: the world is ending in three weeks, what does the rest of your life look like?

### “seeking a friend for the end of the world”

💾📅

- #### loosies

- they say you’re born alone and you die alone but that’s not literally true, right? at your birth, the person that births you is, for now, literally necessary for the birth to take place. death is trickier but, maybe there’s something comforting about knowing that the moment you die, you will join and be joined by thousands, or even millions of people shortly.

# [References]

Movies referenced:

- Miracle Mile

- Last Night

- Seeking a Friend For The End of the World

- Melancholia

How I became 'collapse aware'

Scaling Down the Cliff of Collapse