Every generation believes it is standing at the edge of the abyss.
That conviction has survived empires, religions, and revolutions, always wearing the local // current costume of despair.
The Mesopotamians wrote about moral rot and ecological exhaustion along the Tigris. Romans declared that their golden age was already behind them. The medieval chroniclers found signs of apocalypse in comets and crop failures. In the twentieth century, the mushroom cloud replaced the four horsemen. I grew up in the shadow of that cloud, and I remember adults talking about it as if it were an inevitability.
Today, the apocalypse is more algorithmic: climate collapse, runaway AI, or societal decay induced by screens and tribal politics.
The plot barely changes.
We have a recurring human superstition that our age is the terminal one - that we, by either sheer coincidence or luck or divine will, are alive for the final act of the play. It’s a superstition flatters and terrifies us in equal measure. We feel chosen by fate, even if what we’re chosen for is ruin.
Why do we cling to that belief?
Catastrophe is cognitively sexy. It simplifies the world into a single narrative: things are bad and things are getting worse. That’s easier to grasp than the truth: that progress and regression coexist. Psychologists call this the availability heuristic: we estimate the likelihood of events by how vividly we can imagine them. A single wildfire broadcast for days can outweigh decades of unseen reforestation. The bias tilts our emotional scales toward collapse.
There is another, subtle bias - status-quo pessimism. When we notice that something familiar is eroding, we assume decline is the default. The things improving often do so invisibly. When cholera vanishes, no one holds a parade. When antibiotics lose potency, it becomes a headline. The asymmetry breeds fatalism. If you live inside the information storm long enough, you begin to mistake noise for trend.
History, meanwhile, has an irritating way of disproving these intuitions. The “world” does sometimes collapse - societies fall, cities burn - but even then, the ruins become compost for new beginnings. The collapse of Rome didn’t end civilization; it reconfigured it. The Black Death didn’t extinguish Europe; it triggered a new paradigm of medical curiosity. Every age’s apocalypse has doubled as someone else’s foundation myth.
Our catastrophes have a habit of turning into uneasy bargains.
That doesn’t mean optimism is justified by default. Some of the old fears were rational. The Cold War really could have ended the species. Climate models and AI forecasts may yet prove grimly correct. But the repetitive emotional pattern tells us something about ourselves. We are drawn to doom not purely because it might happen, but because it makes us feel significant. To believe that history culminates with us is to deny our own smallness.
I don’t think it’s an accident that apocalyptic talk feels louder in the age of virality. The internet is a global empathy machine that happens to reward panic. Each tragedy, each crisis, each existential risk gets live-streamed into our retinas. The scale of it feels unprecedented because it is - not in reality, but in perception. It turns seven billion local anxieties into one shared emotional weather system. The result is a civilizational case of main character syndrome: everyone scrolling through the end of the world, starring themselves.
There are mornings when I read the headlines and think, maybe this really is it. Maybe the arc of civilization finally snapped. Then I recall that a Roman senator probably said the same thing while complaining about grain prices. The illusion of terminal uniqueness is hard to shake. We stand on the timeline and mistake the horizon for a wall.
Part of what keeps the pattern alive is that doom gives us moral clarity. When the world is ending, your priorities sharpen. You know who the villains are. You know what matters. There’s comfort in that. Believing in apocalypse is an ethical performance: it signals seriousness, compassion, responsibility. Saying "we’re doomed" feels braver than admitting you don’t know. Certainty, even dark certainty, feels adult.
There’s a narcissism baked into this. To imagine that we are the final witnesses of civilization is to elevate our own story above the billions before us. It makes us tragic protagonists instead of statistical accidents. That vanity is ancient too. Every culture, from the Aztecs to the Puritans, built myths around a cosmic finale. Our secular version substitutes science for prophecy, but the emotional logic remains: we want to be alive when it all happens, because that would make our lives matter on the grand stage.
When I look at the long arc of history, the boring truth dominates. Civilizations stumble, panic, reorganize, and continue. The shape of progress is less a line up and to the right, than a spiral - looping back, but a little higher each time. There are genuine catastrophes, but most are partial and reversible. Humanity keeps muddling through, inventing patches faster than it invents disasters. The fact that we’re still arguing about our imminent extinction after five thousand years of arguing about our imminent extinction should itself inspire a kind of stubborn hope.
Hope, of course, doesn’t photograph well. Catastrophe sells because it feels urgent, and urgency is attention’s predator. The ongoing story - the one where we slowly adapt, build, and recover - is too dull for timelines // virality. But dullness might be the miracle. Civilization is a process of continuously averting our own end.
Maybe we are special, maybe this really is the moment that decides everything. But history is full of people who thought that too. Odds are, we’re somewhere in the middle - not the last generation, just another one trying to survive its own fuckery.
That's less dramatic, I know.
But there’s something freeing about it.
If we are not the end, if this is not the end, we can stop rehearsing for the apocalypse and get back to the work of civilization: learning, repairing, and occasionally laughing at our recurring talent for doom.
