APOCALYPSE
Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling.... See more
The Really Big One
A peer-reviewed 2021 survey of people aged between 16 and 25 around the world found that 56% agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed”.
Dorian Lynskey • ‘End of the World Vibes’: Why Culture Can’t Stop Thinking About Apocalypse
The expectation of the apocalypse may be the occasion for a radical disaffiliation from society
Susan Sontag • The Imagination of Disaster
Useful for “The Settled.”
The movies condition us to imagine survival as a response to a singular, calamitous event: a pandemic virus, a zombie invasion, a plane crash, aliens, government collapse. But it’s more realistic to imagine that we are already living in the midst of a slowly unfurling cataclysm whose effects we encounter in succession, like the waves of an ocean.... See more
J Wortham • My 10-Day Crash Course on Surviving the Apocalypse
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... See more
Dorian Lynskey • ‘End of the World Vibes’: Why Culture Can’t Stop Thinking About Apocalypse
The world “apocalypse” is born of the Greek apokálypsis , meaning revelation, or hidden knowledge. The etymology suggests a divinely ordered retribution, a punitive conclusion, a Judgment Day when all will be revealed. It carries the idea that some mighty righteousness will organize our madness and impose justice on all the awful things we witness... See more
J Wortham • My 10-Day Crash Course on Surviving the Apocalypse
Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out
... See moreAs 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... See more
Dorian Lynskey • ‘End of the World Vibes’: Why Culture Can’t Stop Thinking About Apocalypse
The survival I came to know on this trip was about something completely different. It was, above all, about letting yourself be affected by the changing world around you. Not just riding it out, but adapting, molting. Not succumbing to the luxury of despair, but keeping a foothold in possibility. Not blocking the world out, but letting it in.