Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

by Mark O'Connell

My wife—a person of unfathomable resilience and practical wisdom, to whom such fugue states of panic and epochal despair were essentially foreign—advised me to leave my apocalyptic obsessions at the door. The vibes were bad enough out there in the world, on the airwaves and the timelines, without my channeling them into the home. I was not John of Patmos, and this was not some cave of island exile: this was a house, and people were trying to live in it.

Preppers are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies. The collapse of civilization means a return to modes of masculinity our culture no longer has much use for,

The failure to acknowledge, or even to perceive, the lengthening shadow of the vast dramatic irony that attended this whole matter—namely that it was precisely society’s most marginalized and oppressed people who truly understood what it might mean to live in a postapocalyptic world, and who were therefore most fully prepared—seemed to me to indicate a total moral incapacity.

To be a prepper was to do everything one could do to avoid being one of the sufferers oneself, while contributing nothing to the prevention or alleviation of suffering in others.

He wasn’t particularly evangelical about these beliefs. He was mostly just putting them out there, it seemed, in the knowledge that apocalyptic unease was basically a volume game. If you didn’t like one terrifying dystopian scenario, he had another that might be more your thing.

Earlier that summer, the US government had published a five-hundred-page draft environmental impact statement, intended to justify its freezing of fuel efficiency controls. Embedded in the statement was an acknowledgment that, based on current climate trends, average global temperatures were likely

to increase by four degrees Celsius by the end of this century, an increase widely understood as disastrous by climate scientists. The statement’s position, though, was not that something needed to be done about this, but rather that regulating emissions for new cars was an essentially frivolous exercise, given that a coming climate catastrophe was already a given. This was something far uglier than the denial of the reality of climate change. This was an acknowledgment of its likely catastrophic effects, and an insistence that there was now no point in trying to mitigate them through government intervention; an argument that it was better at this point to continue the destruction unimpeded. Because there were still things to be bought and sold, money to be made. Because there was still time.

The kind of freedom that was being invoked here was the freedom from government, which meant freedom from taxation and regulation, which in turn meant the freedom to act purely in one’s own interest, without having to consider the interests of others—which seemed to me the most bloodless and decrepit conception of freedom imaginable.

Among the many other things it is animated by, abstract and concrete, America is animated by a foundational imperative of expansion. And this much it has in common with another of its great animating forces, capitalism, which exists and thrives through expansion of its own frontiers, through a relentless force of deterritorialization. And it is running out of frontiers; running out of boundaries to obliterate, nature to exploit. The legacy of its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap resources is a devastated planet that may soon be unlivable for vast numbers of its inhabitants.

He was a sight to see, though nobody was paying him the least attention.

I wondered what opinion of me he might have formed up there on his crag, before realizing that deer probably did not have opinions about things, and that they were much the better for it.

Vika laughed, turning toward me, and I chuckled as though I, too, found this amusing, though I did not. I was unsure what to make of the tone of all this. Igor and Vika’s inscrutable jocularity sat oddly with the task they were charged with: to guide us around the site of the worst ecological catastrophe in history, a source of fathomless human suffering in our own lifetimes. And yet some measure of levity seemed to be required of us.

“I’m trying to fathom that prophecy. Everything has been predicted, it’s all written in the holy books, but we don’t know how to read.”