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

by Mark O'Connell

Any kind of major disaster, Rawles insisted—a mass outbreak of contagious disease, a nuclear attack, an economic collapse—could easily lead to people deciding not to go to work in the morning, and the shelves of Walmart consequently not being stacked, the delivery trucks staying off the roads. “Crops will rot in the fields and orchards,” he

This is a prediction of the future that could be offered only by someone who was never fully convinced by the idea of society in the first place.

What he was offering was, in this sense, not so much a prediction of the future as a deeply political interpretation of the present.

“I was raised to not rely on anybody,” as one prepper puts it, in a more or less representative statement of the movement’s politics. “Don’t rely on your government, don’t rely on your neighbors. You count on yourself first.”

Preppers are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies.

The New York Times in 1961, the anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested that anxieties about nuclear war and urban crime had caused a mass retreat to the suburbs, where middle-class Americans were hiding from the world and its darkening future. “The armed, individual shelter,” she wrote, “is the logical end of this retreat from trust in and responsibility for others.”

According to New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs, in the two days following the 2016 election, the number of Americans who visited its website to inquire about the process of gaining citizenship increased by a factor of fourteen compared with the same day in the previous month.

Reading about these billionaires and their plans to protect themselves and their money while the rest of us burned, I felt an almost visceral revulsion for these people, and for the system that afforded them such disproportionate wealth and power.

Liberal democracies will die out and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states.

this ideology laid bare: these people, the self-appointed “cognitive elite,” were content to see the unraveling of the world as long as they could carry on creating wealth in the end times.

It was not the building of bunkers beneath private land that would allow us to survive the catastrophes we faced, but the strengthening of communities that already existed.

I wondered how it was that so many Americans—educated, intelligent Americans—seemed to genuinely believe this stuff.

The only thing that seemed to me to explain the conviction also fatally undermined it: the fact that from cradle to grave every American was subject to a relentless barrage of propaganda about the special freedom guaranteed them by their citizenship.

Someone else’s right to own the ground beneath my feet, the right to remove it from under me at any time: What sort of freedom was this?

Mars’s low-gravity environment would present significant problems for physiological development.

But was it so unacceptable that humanity should eventually run its course? Why was it so unthinkable that we ourselves—not necessarily tomorrow or the next day, but eventually—follow the same well-beaten trail toward oblivion as the dodo, the black rhinoceros, the passenger pigeon, the Javan tiger, the sea mink, the great auk, the Yangtze river dolphin, the monkey-faced bat, the Aru flying fox, and all the countless other species whom we ourselves had driven from the face of the Earth?

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.

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.

little was ever said about building “communities” on Mars: the concept of community involved thinking of other people as more than burdens, or resources to be exploited, or rational actors with whom you could trade.)

At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.

“So this is something that has happened to you, in your own life, as a person? Actual snakes that are on fire have leapt towards you from vegetation that is also on fire.” “Yeah,” she said, and chuckled happily.

“Nature will reemerge from this, and recover, and it will be beautiful. On some level we are a cancer, and the world will cure itself of us. I want to enjoy the life that I have left. I want to sow good seeds.”

He couldn’t understand, he said, why I would be okay with humanity as a whole ceasing to exist.

By the time the first Europeans arrived in 1722, soil degradation and deforestation had caused a total collapse, and the population of the island was down from its peak of ten thousand to a few hundred. Caroline was convinced, she said, that what had happened on Easter Island was what was happening right now, what we were doing to ourselves. Our whole planet, she said, was Easter Island.

“The way we build our gods,” she said, “is the way we build the apocalypse.”

if civilization did collapse these men would be entirely useless to themselves, and worse than useless to everyone else. What they didn’t understand, she said, was that the thing that would allow people to survive was the same thing that had always allowed people to survive: community. It was only in learning to help people, she said, in becoming indispensable to one’s fellow human beings, that you would survive the collapse of civilization.

An airport is a place in which time and personal autonomy are suspended, in which the only freedom you possess is the freedom to make purchases.

The oppressive space of the airport—the junkspace, to use Rem Koolhaas’s unimprovable term—is the architecture of the future itself.

to grant at least some grudging admiration to the humbler parasites, on the basic game-recognize-game principle. Their attitude toward us, after all, is strikingly similar to our own approach toward the world in general.

To watch a close-up video of a mosquito biting a human—separating

extraction—is to witness something weirdly reminiscent of a sophisticated mining operation.

everything in the world was moving all the time, how nothing was ever still for even a moment.

This wilderness reserve, this place ostensibly dedicated to the undoing of human damage, was also a training arena for war.

Five million of them, fleeing the terror and chaos of their ruined country, meeting the cruel machinery of Europe and its borders. It was always the end of the world for someone, somewhere.

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck”—which seemed to me to encapsulate perfectly the extent to which technological progress embedded within itself the prospect of catastrophe.

The taking of pleasure in ruins, perverse though it may be, has been a popular pursuit of centuries. (The Germans, of course, have a word for it: Ruinenlust.)

In the closing stretch of the Bible, in the Revelation, appear these lines: “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” Wormwood is a woody, bitter-tasting shrub that is used throughout the Bible to mean a curse, the wrath of a vengeful God. In Ukrainian, and in other Slavonic languages, the word for wormwood is chernobyl. (The plant grows in lavish abundance along the banks of the River Pripyat.)

For the second time in three months, the government had issued a Status Red weather warning, this time for the risk of wildfires.

The Swedish government was appealing for help from other EU countries to deal with rampant wildfires in the Arctic Circle.

I thought about the term “Arctic heat wave,” an absurdity that threatened to short-circuit thinking altogether.

If you asked me how I was, how things were going, I should only have been able to honestly tell you that there were wildfires in the Arctic Circle, because that was really all that could be said about how things were.

“I feel like we’re fucked,” I said. “Are we fucked?” Though it was not a sentiment she would want to share with her corporate clients, she conceded that we were fucked. The only way she could conceive of our species doing what needed to be done to halt our progress toward catastrophe, she said, was the imminent establishment of some kind of benevolent global dictatorship whose sole purpose was to limit the amount of carbon we released into the atmosphere. This seemed an unlikely prospect, she said.

People often asked her, she said, about Ireland’s prospects when it came to climate change. What she told them was that we were extremely lucky in a lot of ways, that we were in a very small group of nations—New Zealand being another—that were unlikely to suffer catastrophic effects from melting polar ice caps, a hotter and drier climate.

In those days, people were always using the phrase the New Normal, though it was unclear how it could ever be normal for the world to be on fire.

With two, if there was ever some kind of emergency situation and they needed to leave quickly, they could grab one child each and run; with three you were much less mobile. They were sort of joking, but also sort of not.

I understood that my fear of the collapse of civilization was really a fear of having to live, or having to die, like those unseen and mostly unconsidered people who sustained what we thought of as civilization. The people who grew the coffee beans for the flat white I bought as I strolled to my office. The factory workers in some gigantic Chinese city, whose name I would never need to know, who made the smartphone on which I listened to leftist political podcasts as I walked, drinking the flat white. The countless homeless people I passed as I walked, for whom civilization had already collapsed, and had perhaps always been so. The end of the world, I knew, was not some remote dystopian fantasy. It was all around. You just had to look.

And the truest fact of all is the damage we have done, are still doing, to the world.

There is no way of contemplating the catastrophe of our way of life from the outside. There is no outside. Here, too, I myself am the contaminant. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak.

Lines like these, from “On the Suffering of the World”: “In early youth we sit before the impending course of our life like children at the theatre before the curtain is raised, who sit in happy and excited expectation of the things that are to come. It is a blessing that we do not know what will actually come. For to the man who knows, the children may at times appear to be like innocent delinquents who are condemned not to death, but to life, and have not yet grasped the purport of their sentence.”

How could it be that after more than a year in search of vistas of devastation, intimations of the end, I no longer feel such despair about the future? I am tempted to say that I cured myself of my apocalyptic anxiety by means of a kind of exposure therapy.