This is Michael Holden’s ATTENTION CASINO column, and is taken from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue. You can buy the individual issue, or subscribe and get 4 issues delivered to your door each year.
1. THE ‘EXTRA TIME’ HYPOTHESIS
What if the much trailed End of the World were not just imminent but overdue?
Thinking this way is not a cue for panic but an invitation to glory, since it would mean we were living in extra time. One need not be a sports fan to appreciate the implications. Extra time is when the real heroes are forged. The dying minutes of the game cast all concerned in a context of heightened rather than reduced possibility. Players deemed over the hill, too young, injured—you name it, this is where reversals happen, so take hold of your worst expectations and see if they might instead be a prescription for greatness. You might not even need to do that much. Actions that would scarcely have mattered earlier in the game take on an immense gravity (see point 7) in extra time. Don’t worry about defusing the doomsday machine, at the end of human history, politely holding the door open for someone will be sanctifiable. OK, no one will remember it, you will be applauding your way off the pitch with whatever’s left of your hands to a stadium full of skeletons—but what a way to go.
2. OK, YOU’RE ON THE TITANIC—BUT WHO ARE YOU ON THE TITANIC?
While the social order of 1912 is no longer in overt effect, the idea of having a certain role in life has a timeless allure that cannot be undone even by neoliberalism’s best attempts to reduce us and our planet to an incoherent, zero-hours stress ball. If the ship is going down, the key might be to know who you are. In a post-iceberg world maybe you are manning a lifeboat, or maybe you are playing in the band. This is not just that a ship’s officer might lack musical ability or a musician physical courage, but disaster requires that we recline into our talents, and accept that the myth of infinite multitasking might have been causal to the collision.
To do what’s required in itself requires acceptance; do not drain energy from your ‘A’ game wishing that something else was going on. The Titanic analogy was borrowed in part from the writer Joan Tollifson whose book, Death: The End of Self Improvement, is an extended sermon in these matters. Whilst invoking the wisdom of the elders, an honorable mention is also due to Timothy Leary’s former psychedelic ally turned spiritual thinker, Richard Alpert, aka ‘Ram Dass.’ In one of his (abundantly online) talks he suggests—as far back as the 1970s—that living in these times might require an understanding that one was, in effect, midwife to a dying culture.
The infant might not have a long life ahead of it, but it should still be treated well.
3. IT COULD BE WORSE
Consider that the world we live in might be an incredible achievement. Nuclear weapons have been waiting for us to lose our minds for 80 years and we have still, just about, avoided it. This is not nothing. Granted, it’s not optimal, but it might be something to consider as the sirens wail. Picture civilization as someone taken ill in their own restaurant, who managed to make it part of the way to the bathroom before they collapsed. Well done, mate. At least you tried.
It is not fatalism to acknowledge that it is only the luxury of our own survival which permits the idea that things could or should be better than they are. Yes, some things are demonstrably worse than they used to be. But any perspective on events is a kind of privilege in itself given that it needs only the slightest shift in history for anyone to have never existed at all. No matter how bad it gets, we will never be acquainted with anything worse than what actually happened. There is a timeline in which we never even made it this far, where there is nothing to see and no one to see it.
A good proportion of our suffering is rooted in our belief that things should not be so. The psychiatrist and neurologist Iain McGilchrist in one of his enormous books asks, “How do you know that the world that passes is inferior to an imagined world in which nothing passed?” We don’t, we cannot, and wishing otherwise will only prove a hindrance to making the most of it.
“No matter how bad it gets, we will never be acquainted with anything worse than what actually happened”
4. ‘MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES’
A curse disguised as a blessing, “May you live in interesting times,” is surely due for some kind of late-life reversal (see point 1) in which the blessing wins out. When Robert F. Kennedy used the phrase in a speech in 1966 as he conceded that the world was in just such an era, he added, “But they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind,” and that “comfort” was part of the problem. Now, as our sense of discomfort abounds and the combined creative energies of history are (sort of) at our disposal through generative AI (that still can’t draw hands), what are we waiting for?
The roots of the word “apocalypse” mean to uncover or reveal, and we are present at the revelation. Granted, the back end of the New Testament doesn’t look like much fun—beasts, boiling seas, the whore of Babylon, and so on—but if you have spent your life suspecting that you missed out on the 60s or the 90s, then this is surely good news. You have a ticket for the final! Alright, it’s Altamont not Woodstock, but still. Staying till the last whistle is the mark of the true fan (point 1, again). Are you not entertained?
5. THE ‘TERROR SEX’ ARGUMENT
There is ample data to suggest that in End Times it is many people’s reaction to get their own ends away. A writer I know spent 9/11 working a phone sex line and the demand was unrelenting. The term ‘Terror Sex’ emerged in an article after the attacks in reference to the upswing in unguarded sexual behavior sweeping New York City. So, if points 1 & 2’s assertions about the elevated status of the everyday leaves you unbearably restless, then you are unlikely to be alone for long.
6. IGNORE IT / SAVOR IT
There is nothing intrinsic or authentic about feeling awful, per se. Blessed with imagination, we are free to forget, repress, and neglect reality as we see fit. Empires are worlds of a kind and the end of the British one offers numerous examples of how to act in stunning defiance of the status quo. This has seldom been better satirized than in the closing scenes of the 1969 film Carry On Up the Khyber, in which the defenders of the Raj persist with a formal dinner while their building collapses under attack from the indigenous population, played by white British actors in heavy make-up. While the casting and reliance on innuendo are of their time, there is a timeless lesson here as well: an appointment with fate is no reason to rush a good meal, quite the opposite. Make every meal a death row dinner, and don’t worry about the washing up.
“A writer I know spent 9/11 working a phone sex line and the demand was unrelenting”
7. JUST DO IT
The theologian Martin Luther is lumbered with more than his fair share of unverifiable quotes, but the one we need here is that he (supposedly) said that if the world were ending tomorrow, he would plant an apple tree today.
This is really point 1 distilled. The thing that you do? Keep on doing it. We do ourselves few favors by endlessly scouting around for things that are demonstrably ‘right’ or ‘better.’ This is not a treatise against aspiration but a parting plea to do what you do as if it mattered, because it does. Not for nothing, I suspect, have so many people found themselves enchanted lately by Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days—a meticulous study of the life of a meticulous public toilet cleaner. The realest revelation (point 4) might be who you really are, and that might be more about how you do things than what they are. Just because the end of the world means the end of workplace reviews is no reason not to make a good job of it.
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This column is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here.
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