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

by Mark O'Connell

The view of Auckland and its surrounding islands was indeed ravishing—though, in retrospect, it was no more ravishing than any of the countless other views I would wind up getting ravished by over the next ten days. That, famously, is the whole point of New Zealand: if you don’t like getting ravished by views, you have no business in the place. To travel there is to give implicit consent to being hustled left, right and center into states of aesthetic rapture.

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. That same week, The New Yorker ran a piece about the superrich making preparations for a grand civilizational crack-up. Speaking of New Zealand as a “favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm,” Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, claimed that “saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.”

the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn.

To read The Sovereign Individual was to see 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.

from cradle to grave every American was subject to a relentless barrage of propaganda about the special freedom guaranteed them by their citizenship.

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. —

Mars, the planet closest to our own, is no particular distance away. Because the two planets are elliptically orbiting the sun at different rates, the distance varies from 33.9 million miles at its shortest to 250 million miles at its longest. In

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.

When a moth enters a room I am in, or when I enter a room in which a moth is already established, it has long been my custom to swiftly withdraw. I cede the territory, no questions asked. What is it about these small, defenseless creatures that so overwhelms me with elemental fear and disgust? I find their blunt, furred bodies and twitching wings unpleasant to look at, certainly, but it is the manner of their movement that I find especially horrific: the total randomness of it, the indiscriminate courses of their flight. A moth will dart in one direction and then, for no good reason, just switch trajectories and double back the way it came. If your face happens to be positioned at any point along that trajectory, chances are the moth will blunder into it. And to be touched by such a thing, to have its body in contact with one’s skin, seems to me a prospect beyond the realm of the thinkable.