The Coming Apocalypse

Reflections on the approaching death of everything we know

I read The Population Bomb in the early 70s, a few years after its publication in 1968. I was considering having children, wondering whether I should or not, and author Paul Erlich’s answer to that question would have been an unequivocal no. The world was awash with people; that was the premise of his book. We were multiplying like rabbits, and the population would soon exceed the earth’s ability to feed us. We had to act immediately to curb population growth or face mass starvation.

Cheery outlook, eh?

Sadly, my own wasn’t much brighter. I was hesitant about bringing children into the world for what I felt to be good reasons. For one thing, I knew I wasn't going to stay married, and I knew divorce was painful for kids. I’d been one myself when my parents divorced, and I was still hurting when I read Erlich’s book, even though I was grown by then.

I was also a bit of a nihilist. Giving birth seemed like an exercise in cruelty, even for happy couples. Why bring small, helpless beings into the world just so they could suffer and die?

And die they would, possibly not of starvation within the next couple of decades as Erlich was predicting, but inevitably, nonetheless. They would share that fate with everyone on the planet. We are created to be destroyed. My parents would die. I would die. My husband would die. My marriage was on its last legs already.

Nothing could be counted on. Nothing was going to last. This was my frame of mind when I read The Population Bomb, and I believed every word of it because I was ripe for such a message. Don’t you wish you’d known me then? I was a laugh a minute.

The next book I read, The Jupiter Effect, was no more optimistic. It was about an upcoming astronomical event — the alignment of the planets in a way that combined their gravitational pull. The force was predicted to be strong enough to increase solar activity and disturb the earth’s rotation. Earthquakes would erupt; California would finally experience its long-predicted “big one.” Cities would be leveled. Chaos would reign.

On the positive side, that would occur in 1986; it was right around the corner from an astronomical perspective. So maybe we wouldn’t have to starve to death after all.

I had some Christian friends then, not many, but some, who interpreted every news event through the lens of the apocalypse described in Revelations. These were the end days, they said, pointing to the Hong Kong flu, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the numerous false prophets, the diminishing influence of the church, the rise of the drug culture, the gas shortage, inflation, abortion, the pill. You name it, it was a sign.

And even though I wasn’t a fundamentalist, it was easy for me to get caught up in their mixture of anxiety, which I had enough of already, and schadenfreude, which I didn’t feel because I knew I wouldn’t be able to lord it over anyone. When the rapture came and the faithful were sucked up into heaven for their just rewards, I’d be left behind, dealing with the tribulations. And I’d be handling them on my own since I’d probably be divorced by then and almost certainly, childless. My parents would probably be dead.

I’d be completely unprepared. While soldiers in The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord stockpiled weapons in the Ozarks and the monks of Heaven’s Gate prepared to ditch their human nature and transcend as immortal alien beings, I went about business as usual.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the world was about to end. I thought it probably was. I assumed the groups and individuals who were predicting our demise knew more about where we were headed than I did. They sounded so sure of themselves; I was convinced by their conviction. I just didn’t know what to do about it. So I waited on tables, attended classes at the local community college, hit the discos, danced.

The apocalypse is within

One of youth’s key disadvantages is the lack of a long view. I knew a little about history from what I’d been taught in school. Columbus discovered America. Indians showed our ancestors at Plymouth Rock how to plant fish and corn in the same hole. The United States was a melting pot. That sort of thing.

But I hadn’t lived long enough to know this historical fact— there are always people who believe the world is about to end. The apocalypse is an archetype, an inborn aspect of our human nature. It wouldn’t show up on an MRI, maybe, but it’s still as visible as a kidney. Just ask people for their opinions, and you’ll see what I mean. The eyes are not the windows to the soul; words are. And when you peer through their panes you can easily see the archetype of the apocalypse, the tragic, terrifying death of everything we know.

The apocalypse archetype gets activated by different events in different people. COVID-19 activated it in some people, the COVID-19 vaccine in others. It ranges from visions of planetary destruction to more metaphorical mass deaths — of democracy, of family values, of our way of life.

The housing bubble is about to burst. Or it never will, and the era of middle-class homeownership will be gone forever. Retirement is dead; now you’ll have to keep working until you are, too. Or you soon won’t be able to work because the immigrants are coming for your jobs. Everyone has their story about the end times.

Archetypes are inside us because they’re true

End-of-the-world stories are never true because no one knows what our final days will be like. But they’re always true, as well, because some sort of apocalypse is always headed our way. Everything that now exists will end.

Forms of government change. Religions change. Cultures change. Climates change. The boundary lines between countries change. Species evolve or become extinct. This is the way of the world.

And we’ll all have our personal apocalypse too, the death of our bodies, which will effectively destroy our worlds. All we cherish, all we create, all we care for during our lifetime will someday turn to dust. Maybe it’s the sense of foreboding we feel about this that makes it so easy for us to swallow more global narratives of destruction.

The personal apocalypse

My father died last year, and part of me died with him. I’m still a daughter, but I’m no longer the daughter of a living father. His house, the one I spent so many hours in, has been sold and remodeled, the bookshelf he built, ripped out, trashed. I can’t feel the warmth of his hugs anymore, but I still see him in dreams, in photographs, and in my mind’s eye. In this way, as a father-image, he will continue to live on throughout my life and the lifetimes of my siblings and their children.

But who will remember me? It’s a question my friends used to ask, back when we were young, back in our childbearing years. They were pregnant, nursing, carrying little ones in slings around their midsections, holding hands, wiping noses and butts. And I was growing ever more resolute in my decision to remain childless.

Who will take care of you when you’re old? they'd ask. Who will support you, grieve your death, remember you after you’re gone? Ironically, my decision not to have children limits the time that memories and mental images of me will survive. I did not give my children life, and they cannot give it to me.

Still, I was lucky to have had the choice. The FDA’s approval of birth control pills was a game-changer for my generation of women. But if we were freed from the mandates of our biology, we weren’t free of the influence of our culture and our friends and families. They encouraged me to do what young women have always done — be fruitful and multiply. Replenish the earth.

And we weren’t free of people like Erlich, who said that now that we could bring our procreative powers under control, we must do so or face the bitter consequences. I was drawn to works like Erlich’s because they seemed to justify the sense of impending doom that accompanied my anxiety. The feelings were rooted in my temperament and my history, but they needed a narrative to explain them.

Apocalyptic stories provided that. Strangely, they made me feel more in control because even if I couldn’t do anything to stop future predicted catastrophes, at least I knew their nature. We were about to starve to death. The earth was spinning off its axes. The asteroid known as Icarus was headed our way.

I read about this last apocalyptic threat in a popular magazine, one in a stack of discards I’d brought back home with me after a visit to my mother. Icarus, the article said, was an asteroid that swoops around the sun in orbits that bring it close to the earth every 9 to 19 years. And wouldn’t you know? Its nearest approach ever was expected on June 14. It would come within 5,270,000 kilometers of the earth, a hair’s breadth in planetary terms. At least that’s what would happen if NASA’s calculations were right.

They might not be. Icarus could be a hit instead of a near-miss. And if that happened, the impact would cause giant tidal waves if it hit the water; coastal cities would be inundated. If Icarus hit land instead, it would raise a cloud of dust big enough to block the sun’s light. Crops would die, resulting in mass starvation. Life on earth would be obliterated. Holy crap.

But when I shut the magazine, my fears of Icarus melted away. The date on its cover was January 1968. It was 1975, and nothing bad had happened. Icarus had made its approach and hurtled back into outer space totally outside of my awareness.

Something about that experience desensitized me to apocalyptic fears. The archetype settled down and receded into my psyche. My fears of starving in an overpopulated world, falling into a crack left by separating earth tremors, or being left on the planet alone when everyone else was getting raptured up into the clouds dissipated. I continued to be anxious, but my anxiety began to spur me forward in more adaptive ways. Fear of cancer made me quit smoking. Fear of living off tips made me finish college and embark on a career. Fear of missing out on the life I wanted made me take a pass on raising a family.

I’d find other ways to participate in the human drama, and they wouldn’t be all that different from the ways I engaged with life when I was young. Work. Learn. Dance.

Yes, the end is coming. It’s coming for us all. But now is our time to live.