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

by Mark O'Connell

had come to think of my phone as my eschatology handset, my streaming service of last things. The world would end neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a push notification—a buzzing I wasn’t even sure I’d felt, but figured I’d better check anyway, to see if it was real, and what it might portend.

This book is about the idea of the apocalypse, but it is also about the reality of anxiety. In this sense, everything in these pages exists as a metaphor for a psychological state. Everything reflects an intimate crisis and an effort at resolving it. I went out into the world because I was interested in the world, but I was interested in the world because I was preoccupied with myself.

I thought about America’s twin obsessions with a frontier past and an apocalyptic future, and of how these were ominously fused like the Janus-faced calf at the Pioneer Museum. What was Vicino offering in this place, after all, other than a return to the life of the old frontier, a new beginning in the wake of the end, one that retained as many consumer-facing luxuries as possible?

I had this much in common with Musk’s most fervent fans: I saw him as a mythical figure. But the myth I had in mind was one of my own imagining, in which a perfect simpleton had, out of some unknowable Olympian whim, been singled out by the gods and granted the threefold gifts of intelligence, ingenuity, and money, which gifts he employed in precisely the manner a simpleton would: to pursue a civilization on Mars, for instance, and to launch luxury consumer goods into outer space with a rocket.

These apocalyptic anxieties of mine—the incessant reading of signs and portents, the perverse fantasies of disaster and collapse—were enfolded in a complex fabric of guilt and self-contempt. Because wasn’t the impulse to catastrophize, to imagine the collapse of one’s world, only the pursuit of a mind shaped by leisure and economic comfort? What did I really mean by the end of the world, after all, if not the loss of my own position within it? What was it that made me anxious, if not the precariousness of the privilege I had been born to, had passed on with doubtful hands to my own children? In the end, 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.