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

by Mark O'Connell

To read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn.

Where did it come from, this conviction that their country was somehow uniquely possessed of a divine spark of freedom, a national genius for personal liberty?

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.

“UNLESS someone like you / cares a whole awful lot, / nothing is going to get better. / It’s not.”

The future is a source of fear not because we know what will happen, and that it will be terrible, but because we know so little, and have so little control.