The more I think about it, the more I feel like people seem to have some level of desire to see “THE END”. Call it morbid curiosity. Call it nihilism. Call it death anxiety. Whatever. It seems like with all the effort people give to thinking about “the downfall”, there must be some fascination with it.
There’s so many forms of it. Doomsday preppers. Prophetic apocalypses. Global warfare. Climate disasters. The rise of fascism. People see “THE END” in so many different ways. And with the world not becoming any less precarious any time soon, we can only expect these mass-anxities to continue. (And the rich guys certainly have a vested interest in the end of everything. They get to keep their High Score.)
Or maybe not. Maybe human civilization (in at least some form) will continue for millennia more. Maybe we’re far off from the end. But one thing is certain: for each and every one of us walking this earth, the end is at most a century away, give or take a few decades.
“How grand would it be to witness the end of everything!” cries the mortal pretender. For it is not just his death, but the death of all that he knows – and he gets to bear witness.
I think it’s ego personally, we have to think we’re here for a reason, and want to think we’re seeing something important. Even with the disasters, it’s important to remember this planet will keep on spinning for milennia to come. No matter what we do, life will continue and we will be a very tiny irrelevant blip. Even if all life ceases to exist - it’ll only be temporarily.
And before people jump down my throat, it’s just part of the human condition. Look at the Christians, they’ve been saying it’s the end times for hundreds of years now. We want to believe we’re lucky enough to be a part of something big, to be there.
I’m not saying we won’t go through hard times, we probably will, in fact it’s looking probable. But life is going to be fine. The earth will be fine. Humanity will probably (in the scheme of thousands of years) be fine. Even if we aren’t life in general will be.
For some reason that gives me comfort too. Even if everything goes wrong, their anger and hate is such a tiny insignificant thing in comparison to actual time. It will all be forgotten. It’s all just dust and echoes.
yep this is precisely the thought that gave birth to this post. and i think i share the broad worldview that you couched this in: that “we”, or at least something resembling “us”, will be fine in The End. but it’s almost more exciting for us to think that we get to see it all! it’s like getting to see the ending of a movie that everyone else so far has had to walk out on. it’s that ego