Armageddon, the Apocalypse, and Me

When I was a kid, I thought global warming worked the same way I thought hair grew.

That every second, the Earth’s temperature was steadily rising by some miniscule amount,

maybe a billionth of a degree Fahrenheit, undetectable in the moment to the human senses. Like

a proverbial frog in a boiling pot, it would be impossible to notice any change until it had already

happened. Nonetheless, I used to lay down in the grass and press my cheek against the Earth’s

surface, to see if I could feel it heating up. And I’d apologize. “I’m sorry you’re warming,” I’d

say to the planet, as if I were to blame for its predicament simply by virtue of being born.

…

My elementary-school understanding of climate change wasn’t my first major bout with

existential dread. I’d learned from an illustrated children’s encyclopedia I loved, The Big Book of

Questions and Answers I think it was called, that several billion years from now the sun would

burn out. It would run out of hydrogen and, in its final throes, expand into a red giant, engulfing

Earth and the rest of the inner planets. But of course, the Big Book reminded me, I needn’t worry

about this, because I’d die long before the sun would. It was someone else’s problem. For a

while, this explanation was sufficient to me. But it didn’t take a middle schooler to understand

that people had children, and their children would have children and so forth, and eventually

somebody would have to deal with all the inconveniences that came with being born into a world

that was about to end.

…

There was a certain point in my formative years when it seemed like just about every

popular novel aimed at the adolescent demographic dealt with some sort of dystopian future

society. It wasn’t The Hunger Games or Divergent, though, that gave voice to my long-held

concerns about our planet’s ultimate fate. It was a little book called The Fault in Our Stars, about

a pair of teens with terminal cancer falling in love.

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when

there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species

ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.

Everything we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of

this will have been for naught,” says protagonist Hazel Grace, in one of her many attempts at

profundity. “There was time before organisms experienced consciousness and there will be time

after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God

knows that’s what everyone else does.”

Since Hazel is dying, she probably spends more time thinking about this stuff than the

average person. The summer before high school, a couple of months after I read the book, I tried

to engage my mother in a discussion on the topic, although with far less eloquence than author

John Green utilized via Hazel.

“Mom, what do you think about human oblivion?” I asked as we watched TV.

“What’s that?”

“The idea that humans are always writing great novels and discovering penicillin and

stuff like that, but someday the sun will die and it’ll all be pointless,” I said.

Her response was far from satisfying: “Well, I’m counting on heaven happening before

that, so I’m not too worried.”

…

One mid-February day in fourth grade, after I’d hopped off the school bus and gotten up

from trying to feel the globe warming (I swear, it wasn’t a regular occurrence) I decided to do

some research about the end of the world online. I was in a pretty good mood— it was the start

of a long weekend for parent-teacher conferences, and I was excited to see what my mom would

bring back for me from the Scholastic Book Fair. Plus, we’d just gotten a copy of the Mamma

Mia movie on DVD— I loved all the songs and I wasn’t allowed to watch very many movies that

were rated PG-13.

ABBA was soon forgotten, however, in the face of what I discovered— namely, all the

ways the world could end in the next few years. The Large Hadron Collider, a newly-constructed

particle accelerator in Switzerland, could produce a black hole and devour us all. A solar storm

might fry us and disable our technological grids. The ancient Mayan calendar, which stretched

all the way back to the supposed day of creation, stopped recording dates after December 21,

2012— so naturally, that meant the world would end that day. Never mind, of course, that no

actual Maya sources, modern or historic, suggested that the apocalypse was the reason for the

calendar’s end. It had to be true. The Internet said so!

On the off chance that we survived all that, there was also the possibility that an asteroid

like the one that killed the dinosaurs, with 20 million times the destructive power of the

Hiroshima bombing, could penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere in March of 2014.

When I’d finally taken in enough, I burst into my parents’ bedroom, where I found my

father, freshly home from work. A million questions teemed inside my mind: what’s solar flare?

Can nuclear power destroy the world? but highest in priority was “Dad, the Mayan calendar says

the world’s going to end in 2012!”

He was probably more amused than anything (in hindsight, I guess it was kind of funny)

but still tried to assuage my very real worry.

“Well, people said the world was going to end in 2000, but we’re still here, aren’t we?”

he said. “How old will you be in 2012— fourteen? And your sister will be eleven.” Then he told

me that I should just try to focus on school. I went downstairs to discover that my sister had

started watching the movie without me, but now that was the least of my concerns.

…

Even the conventional scientific theory of doomsday, with the planet’s demise occurring

billions of years after I was dead and buried, frightened me as I faced the prospect of a much

sooner Armageddon. In the midst of my doomscrolling that day, nestled between the various

conspiracies, I stumbled upon an article from the University of Washington by science journalist

Vince Stricherz. More than a dozen years later, I can appreciate it for its literary beauty.

In it, the astrophysicist Donald Brownlee demonstrates the Earth’s lifespan through

twelve hours’ rotation on a clock — the planet’s formation occurring at midnight, and high noon

being the end of the world. The age of plant and animal life takes place between 4 and 5 AM,

and we’re smack dab in the middle of it right now.

Before I read that, I’d just figured that human civilization in its current form would keep

persevering throughout the epochs, until things got awkward in five or six billion years, like the

Big Book said they would. Now, I knew our species’ window of sunlight was much shorter. By 5

AM, the one-billion-year reign of animals and plants will come to an end. At 8 AM, the oceans

will vaporize. I envisioned the lake at my aunt and uncle’s cabin, where my family spent every

Fourth of July, dissipating into nothing.

By [the end of the world], Earth will have faced a variety of “ends” along the way,

Stricherz writes. The last dinosaur perished long ago. Still to come are the last elephant, the last

tree, the last flower, the last glacier, the last snowflake, the last ocean, the last life.

…

As my long weekend came to a close, I felt no more secure in my longevity than I had

when I first read of the upcoming Mayan apocalypse. Since my dad’s reassurance hadn’t been

successful, I tried seeking comfort from my mom.

“There are a lot of websites out there that don’t tell the truth, that aren’t appropriate for

kids or even for adults,” she told me. “People have made calendars all throughout history; there’s

no reason for that particular one to be correct. Only God knows what will happen with the end of

the world. Those people don’t know what God’s plan is.”

…

Growing up in the Lutheran church, we didn’t talk about the end times much. There was

the occasional mention of Christ’s second coming in our liturgy, but we didn’t believe in the

Rapture or hear sermons drawing heavily from the book of Revelation. My mother’s faith

seemed to rely on a lot of compartmentalization— she’d speak of Adam and Eve as if they were

real, literal people but still accepted the theory of evolution and that the Earth was formed

billions of years ago. She expressed curiosity for what the human race might evolve to look like

if we were still around tens of millions of years from now, yet professed that Jesus would come

again to judge the living and the dead when the congregation recited the Apostles’ Creed.

My Sunday school teacher liked to show us videos about how the world was only a few

thousand years old, and seemed to equate young-earth creationism with Christianity itself, which

only confused me further; no one I knew had ever said this sort of thing before. I knew my

parents would think this was ridiculous, as would my grandparents and my aunt and uncle’s

family, who were very devout but also educated and respectful of the scientific consensus. The

woman made me feel that one had to accept creationism in order to be a Christian, so what did

this mean for my family’s beliefs— were they somehow damned?

Around the time that I found out about the Mayan calendar and attempted to feel global

warming was also when I began to fear that God would throw my ten-year-old butt into hell for

not having enough faith. Before, I’d accepted Christianity’s veracity on the same grounds that I

knew two plus two made four, because it was what had been presented to me as an immutable

fact. But I was beginning to realize that adults didn’t always tell the truth, a concept previously

foreign to my worldview— how could I take at face value what anyone said? No one had ever

explained to me the true identity of Santa Claus or how babies were made; rather they just

assumed I’d figure it out through my own research. Which I did, with the realization that maybe

the only person I could trust was myself.

Despite my own church’s apocalyptic apathy, religious theories of the end of the world

terrorized me just as much as the scientific ones did, whether in the form of ominous pamphlets

the Jehovah’s Witnesses left in our mailbox, or nightmares of Judgment Day and Jesus telling me

I was destined for hell. Drive across any midwestern landscape, and mixed in with

advertisements for Culver’s and porn you’ll find plenty of billboards imploring you to

contemplate your eternal destiny, because the Lord is coming back.

The one that scared me most read simply The End is Near! in black text against a yellow

background, with a link to a Christian website at the bottom, but the first one I ever paid

attention to is a fairly common one, easy to find when you plug its catchphrase into a search

engine. It asks, Where are you going? Heaven or hell, the prototypical clouds and flames serving

as a backdrop to each of your two options. Below is a Bible verse and a hotline you can call if

the billboard inspired you to ask Jesus into your heart. Dude, I’m just going to the grocery store.

As my family drove home from my grandparents’ house one evening that spring, I looked

up from the book I was reading to be faced with this question, and was thoroughly spooked.

Surely God had intended for me to look up at just the right time to see this billboard, because I

needed to be reminded of my impending damnation. I opened my Bible to a random page when

we got home, trying to find a sign from Him. As luck (or divine providence) would have it, I

landed on Mark 3:28-30: “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven of the children of man, and

whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be

forgiven, for he is guilty of an eternal sin.”

I’d never heard the word “blaspheme” before, but could intuit its meaning, and

immediately the words fuck the Holy Spirit popped into my head, never mind that I was years

away from ever dropping an f-bomb aloud. Because if someone tells you “don’t think about pink

elephants,” what’s the first thing you think about?

Of course “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” means something a bit above the average

fourth-grader’s pay grade. I understand not even the world’s most learned theologians have a

consensus on what one has to do in order to commit it. But hey, good luck explaining that to

someone who still receives visits from the Tooth Fairy.

…

By fifth grade, my fears of December 21, 2012 or a supermassive black hole had mostly

subsided on their own, although whenever I thought about something in the distant future, like

high school or what I wanted to be when I grew up, a small voice in the back of my head

whispered but what if the world ends? The fears of hellfire and divine judgment never truly

vanished, even as my disillusionment with Christianity and the church grew, because unlike a

scientific hypothesis they could not be tested and proven right or wrong.

At 18, I got into a discussion about antinatalism (the idea that bringing children into a

world of suffering is immoral) with my best friend, James. It was more of a philosophical

exercise than an expression of anything we actually believed, yet still I conjured to mind Donald

Brownlee’s clock, the halfway-expired hour in which Earth is hospitable for animal and plant

life. Remembered my unsuccessful attempt years ago to get my mom to care about human

oblivion. “Is it okay to carry on your lineage, when eventually Earth won’t be habitable

anymore?” I asked, trying to sound hypothetical. He said he thought that humans would have

space travel figured out by then, and my mind wandered off into abstract corridors toward the

heat death of the universe.

…

I hate to break it to you, but I don’t have a plan. I wish I possessed the resolve of Al Gore

or my mother’s confidence in the promise of heaven. What I do have, however, is the realization

that all my worries of an imminent demise meant something: namely, that I valued my life and

didn’t want to see it end. When December 21, 2012 did roll around, I no longer believed that the

ancient Maya had any special insight into the timing of the apocalypse, yet in all the pain and

loneliness and torment that for me defined being fourteen, I wished they had.

So if you need something to fear, step outside and take advantage of the fresh spring air.

Press your cheek down in the grass and see if you can feel the planet warning against your skin.

Go to Switzerland and collide all the particles together. Call the toll-free number at the bottom of

the Jesus billboard and pretend like you’re at a middle school slumber party. Or, if you need to

rest, lie down and remember that the end of the world will still be there when you wake up.

After all— it’s only 4:30 AM.