To Those Putting a Year on the Apocalypse

The potential for progress and its depletion

Everybody’s clamoring to know when their apocalypse will hit.

What was the talk of solidly fringe conspiracy bloggers, vloggers, authors, radio hosts and the like, 15 odd years ago, has turned into a shockingly commonplace agreement amongst Americans that the economic system our country has built all its vast wealth upon is unsustainable and will soon collapse under its own weight.

image by Gerhard Reus on Unsplash

There’s three main kinds of apocalypticism, as I see things (in the United States at least, being written by an American and all) floating most visibly around today.

The first is climate nihilism; the very widespread and pretty reasonable belief that the planet is on track to experience a severe and inescapable collapse of its most important environmental systems. There’s not really much new I or anyone else can tell you about the state of the earth’s ecosystems at this point, but the effects that a certainly worsening climate will have on people’s behavior may be a little less clear. Extremely common amongst Gen Z at least is an idea not all that far off from the Boomer’s sentiment in the 1960s that they are in some sense a last generation. It’s not that climate change is going to literally kill us all; it’s that climate change is going to make life for people worldwide so much harder that birth rates are going to so dramatically drop that Gen Z may be the last generation with any truly unified culture and Millennials may be the largest generation not just for now but in fact forever.

Writing this at a Lower East Side NYC café, I overhear two Gen Z women talking about the exact same topic (I came with them; I have headphones in because I’m like that but I take them out to beg them repeat what they’d said). One says that “children are the obstacle to freedom”. Another expresses her concern that she “doesn’t want to contribute to overpopulation”. The first says that there’s no scarcity of children at the moment so there’s no reason to be having them other than to have someone to pass your trauma onto. The other is rightfully floored. She then, enlighteningly, points out that the pandemic left us both with the sense of having aged prematurely and simultaneously of never having had the life experience of…