The end is nigh. This fall, it feels nigh-er than usual.
In the last three months, the drumbeat of end times seems to have grown louder. First, rumors of the Rapture. Second, harbingers — or at least one — of apocalypse. And palpable throughout, a thrumming sense of general unease.
This is both nothing new and worthy of note. While end-times predictions are perennial, so far, at least, they have all been wrong. So why do we keep indulging in them?
Within the last several decades, Americans have obsessed over potential disaster because of overpopulation (still yet to occur); nuclear war (as yet avoided); system breakdown owing to a computer bug (Y2K remains a blip); societal collapse owing to a global pandemic (not quite); and a still-looming climate crisis (results to be determined).
But today, whether it’s thanks to the extraordinary chaos of the second Trump presidency, alarming advances in artificial intelligence or something else, the spread between reality and apocalypse feels somehow less pronounced.
In September, rumors spread on TikTok that the apocalypse would begin in the second half of the month. More specifically, some evangelical Christian content creators predicted that Jesus Christ would return on Sept. 23 to take his true followers to heaven, leaving the unfaithful behind. Videos about the Rapture — some made in jest, some definitely not — got many millions of views before the appointed date passed. (Spoiler alert: The Rapture did not occur.)
Not to be outdone in panic, the billionaire tech investor and political influencer Peter Thiel spent the fall popularizing his long-held theory that Armageddon was on its way and perhaps already here. In a closed-door, four-part lecture series in San Francisco, Mr. Thiel shared with hundreds of listeners his musings on Bill Gates and international finance, speculations on the danger of a one-world state and his feeling that an “Antichrist-like system” was primed for activation “at the flip of the switch.”
Even in a nonreligious context, feelings of looming catastrophe abound: A poll from Brookings and the Public Religion Research Institute released last month found that 62 percent of Americans believe things in the country are going in the wrong direction, with 56 percent believing that President Trump in particular is a “dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.” If you think this is because of the second Trump administration, a 2022 Pew poll found that nearly four in 10 Americans believe that humanity is “living in the end times”; it is difficult to imagine that number decreasing after the distress that has marked the past several years.
And underneath it all has been a consistent drumbeat of doom from Silicon Valley, whence executives and researchers issue gloomy yet triumphant predictions that A.I. is on its way to overtaking humans and perhaps destroying us all. “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is the title of a new book from the A.I. researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares — not a comforting statement, considering the number of trillion-dollar companies seeking to build it as fast as they can.
Many of today’s end-times anxieties echo those from similar moments in the past: Rumors of apocalypse are often loudest at moments in history when one way of life threatens to overtake another. Dispensational theology, the literalist interpretation of the Bible that first popularized the concept of the Rapture, emerged in mid-19th-century Britain as the Industrial Revolution transformed society and found purchase in the United States after the chaos of the Civil War.
Explanations of the coming eschaton, or end, were an attempt to seek certainty in an uncertain time, a period whose parallels to this moment are straightforward: rapid social change, economic confusion, fears of conflict and historic technological shifts that left roles unsettled and the future up for grabs.
In previous centuries, apocalypse was mainly discussed in religious contexts — the Rapture, for instance, separating the righteous wheat from the evildoing chaff — while today the idea of mass destruction holds a certain mass appeal. However scary Armageddon might be, it would at least come for us all. The end result would be true justice being served, a terminus to the pain that our modern existence entails.
It could be that our thoughts turn to the end of things when it feels as though the current moment can’t be lived through: Events seem too chaotic, too unpredictable; the forces individuals are up against feel too large to tackle. The more hopeful among us are comforted by the idea that a rescue is on the way (perhaps in the form of Jesus returning to take up his chosen people, a very literal deus ex machina); the rest wait with anxiety, killing time by making predictions about what form the end will take. Either way, certain destruction can seem more bearable than limbo.
But that certainty — or at least pessimism — can be paralyzing. Why vote when a “dangerous dictator” is already at the helm? Why try to regulate a technology that is already assumed to be powerful enough to turn the world’s resources into paper clips (the thought experiment conceived by some of A.I.’s leading catastrophists)? Why try to improve the world if it’s ending tomorrow?
Apocalyptic predictions may actually serve as comforting fantasies, at which point our future freakouts become an excuse for inaction that ends up hastening the most feared outcomes.
It’s easier to assume the world is ending than to do the work needed to make sure that it’s not.
Christine Emba is the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,” a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing Opinion writer.
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