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

by Mark O'Connell

My footprint is as broad and deep and indelible as my guilt. My days are a procession of last things, seals opened. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak. That is the prophesy of this book.

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.

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

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.

The politics of the movement—the cringing fear of the poor, the dark-skinned, the feminine, the other—are reprehensible to me, but their sense of the fragility of the systems by which we live is, in the end, hard to dismiss as entirely paranoid, entirely illogical.

they concluded that if civilization were to actually collapse, they would much rather be dead than try to survive whatever cataclysm might be in store, because who in their right mind would really want to survive a nuclear holocaust or asteroid impact event anyway?

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.

“It’s about radical individualism,” he explained. “It’s survival-of-the-fittest, a belief in the rights of the wealthiest and most powerful among us to do whatever the fuck they want, including living forever. Thielism doesn’t necessarily represent a human apocalypse, per se. Humanity could still continue living under its conditions. But it’s an assault on the civilizational values I hold most dear, like creativity, empathy, love, freedom of expression, connection.”

I would argue that those who are most profoundly and indivisibly American are in fact those immigrants who are energized by a romantic understanding of the country and its foundational mythos of liberty and possibility. Americans are made, not born.

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

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.

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.

It was always the end of the world for someone, somewhere.

He went on to clarify that the fate of the small but thriving tourism business hung in the balance and depended, by general consensus, on the nationality of the first person to be injured or killed on a tour. If a Ukrainian died while exploring one of the buildings, he said, fine, no problem, business as usual. If a European, then the police would have to immediately clamp down on tour guides bringing people into buildings. But the worst-case scenario was, of course, an American getting killed or seriously injured. That, he said, would mean an immediate cessation of the whole enterprise. “American gets hurt,” he said, “no more tours in Zone. Finished.”

memento mori,

I thought about the term “Arctic heat wave,” an absurdity that threatened to short-circuit thinking altogether. That there were wildfires in the Arctic Circle felt like the most important fact in the world. This was a thing we should never not be thinking about, talking about. But something about this truth, and the endless deluge of other more or less equally horrifying truths, made it almost impossible to assimilate. The subtext of every news headline now, of every push notification, was that we were completely and irrevocably fucked.

“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.”