Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

It was not the building of bunkers beneath private land that would allow us to survive the catastrophes we faced, but the strengthening of communities that already existed.

It is both a privilege and a curse of being a writer that throwing yourself into your work so often involves immersing yourself deeper into the exact anxieties and obsessions other people throw themselves into their work to avoid.

I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak.

At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go

Given the world, given the situation, the question that remains is whether having children is a statement of hope, an insistence on the beauty and meaningfulness and basic worth of being here, or an act of human sacrifice.

The world would end neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a push notification—a buzzing I wasn’t even sure I’d felt, but figured I’d better check anyway, to see if it was real, and what it might portend.

Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country's blood - a rapidly metastasizing tumour of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose a terminal-stage capitalism

It is true that the gods are dead, because of course we killed them. But their ghosts are still with us, and the anger of those ghosts is righteous and palpable and poetic.

I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks. In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.” At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.)

The future is a source of fear not because we know what will happen, and that it will be terrible, but because we know so little, and have so little control. The apocalyptic sensibility, the apocalyptic style, is seductive because it offers a way out of this situation: it vaults us over the epistemological chasm of the future, clear into a final destination, the end of all things. Out of the murk of time emerges the clear shape of a vision, a revelation, and you can see at last where the whole mess is headed. All of it--history, politics, struggle, life--is near to an end, and the relief is palpable.

But both of us had been radicalized by parenthood. Having children had brought into horribly lurid focus the predatory face of contemporary capitalism.

to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present.

If the choice on offer is between pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks and being among the first wave of deaths in the apocalypse, I hereby enthusiastically place my order for oblivion.

they seemed to overwhelmingly favor wraparound shades, a preference that was, as far as I could gather, more or less universal among right-wingers as a group. Footage of alt-right gatherings, Twitter avatars of libertarians, images of furious and red-faced men at Trump rallies: in all of these cultural artifacts, I noted the presence of this excessively curved and ovoid style of eyewear;