Humans have long predicted the end of the world. There have been catastrophic prophecies as long as there have been people—with some large-scale prediction of the end occurring at least every few years. A famous recent example is in 2012—the end of the 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar led many to believe that disaster was imminent.
This obsession isn’t new, either—descriptions and predictions about the end of the world are staples of mythology and religion. From Jewish belief in the return of the Messiah at the “end of days”, to the “Last Day” in Islamic Doctrine, to Buddha’s Sermon of the Seven Suns, to the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelation, religious doctrine has long been a source for end-of-world predictions.
Nearly a thousand years ago, European life was turned upside-down. As the printing press, and therefore printed material, became more widely available, millions of Christians read the Bible—a document previously reserved for the literate elite—for the first time. A new wave of Christianity, Protestantism, challenged the Catholic Church, then the single most powerful entity on the continent. Wars were fought, and a power struggle seemed to turn the world on its head.
But, eventually, things settled—the world adapted to a new normal, and life went on.
We see similar patterns of upheaval and adaptation all throughout history. From the advent of industrialization to the breakup of colonial empires, revolutions (both literal and figurative) aren’t the exception, they’re the norm. One idea or innovation, in the right circumstances, can trigger a cascade that fundamentally reshapes our lives. That’s what the printing press did a millennium ago, and that’s what the internet is doing now.
It’s so easy to feel like the world is upside-down, everything sliding and falling out of place. Our institutions seem more fragile than ever, it feels like we hate one another more than ever, and we’re constantly reminded of our world’s existential problems—climate change and nuclear war and systematic inequality—and made to feel powerless to stop them. According to a Reuters poll conducted in 2012, months before the Mayan calendar’s end, 15% of Americans thought the world will end during their lifetime. Similar studies conducted recently have shown the same thing, too—a 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that nearly 4 in 10 U.S. adults believes “we are living in the end times”. Although we may ridicule fanatic prophesies that forecast the world’s demise, we’ve fallen into a similar helpless forecast of the end, and it’s only gotten worse.
But we don’t give ourselves enough credit. We’re living in a time of massive transformation and upheaval, and it’s natural that we’re bad at immediately adapting. The massive unrest we’re seeing is a reflection, and a consequence, of the light-speed communication we’ve pioneered in the last few years, just like the printing press a millennium ago. When anyone and everyone can communicate with everyone else, when people are given the newfound power to post and create in a newly public way, we’re bound to take some time adjusting to a new normal, eventually coming to a time when communication is stable, and the Internet isn’t a source of deep, societal division. Without historical context, we tend to think we’re living though fundamentally new changes, ones that our culture won’t survive. But none of this—including our belief that the end is near—is new, or even uncommon. Just as many have (unsuccessfully) predicted the end of the world before, they will continue to do so—past this cultural shift and through many more to come.