You wake up in the morning, you crawl towards whatever drug helps you come alive completely, and then you turn on your computer to check: has the world ended while I was asleep? No? Tough luck. Maybe in 2012. Meanwhile, you satisfy your craving of doom with whatever you can find: a bomb here, a volcano there, a flooding, a mysterious new disease, Chinese or Muslims taking over. Anything will do, really.
There is a whole subculture on the internet (ah, the internet!) dedicated to the trading of doom news and predictions. Every time the sun burps a little these guys are already predicting the fall of civilization in maximum half a day (or how long it takes for solar wind to reach us). They watch 24/7 webcams to see when Katla (volcano, for those who are not up to date with their doom) will be gracious enough and explode already. They twist and turn and interpret bible quotes and Nostradamus quatrains and tribal prophecies until they find what they need: we’re surely going to die. The Hopi Indians said so. The Mayans did too. Who are you to contradict the Hopi Indians?? Nibiru is coming.
Ok, this is indeed a niche thing. Your regular 21st century person may not look up to see if Nibiru is really coming, nor will they lose sleep trying to find a numeric code in the Bible that tells the exact date at which the Antichrist will be arriving (and whether Obama is in fact the said Antichrist or not). But we as a culture are obsessed with doom nevertheless. The media know that and they feed it to us and we consume and love every second of it. It’s like we’re a culture of sociopaths, really.
Is it out of boredom? Have our lives become so void and purposeless that we’d actually enjoy seeing it all go to hell? Have we had so much Hollywood cheap thrills that we reached saturation and only the end of the world could still give us a rush? Are we so afraid of dying alone, without anyone giving a crap about it, that we’d actually prefer to go down in a blaze of glory, taking the whole humanity with us? Are we so ill adapted to our own environment that instead of going to work next Monday morning we’d rather be Mad Max-ing around in a post-apocalyptic society?
But the world is ending; look at the signs, volcanoes, earthquakes, diseases, financial crisis, pollution, terrorism, bla-bla. Even the Hopi Indians said so!
Might be, no one can tell that for sure. What I do know for sure is that other generations had it worse. This is not by far the most fucked up situation in which mankind ever found itself. Think about that generation who was unfortunate enough to live through both World Wars. First World War comes, 15 million die, genocides (yeah, they had them back then too), starvation, empires fall. To celebrate the end of the war, Spanish flu kills between 50 and 100 million people (biggest natural disaster in the history of mankind). Then they get 10 years of the Great Depression. They see the rise of National Socialism and Communism. WW2 starts, I don’t wanna go into that, but we’ll just say it was kind of ironic that they were calling WW1 “the Great War”. At least 60 million die. Probably more, not to mention those that died in the aftermath of the war. Famine, Holocaust, atomic bombs. Europe virtually destroyed. Then, if they’re truly blessed, the survivors of all that still get to experience the Cold War and all that madness.
Seriously now, are we really entitled to complain that we’re doomed, or are we just jealous ‘cause others before us had it REALLY rough?
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