How to Be Cripplingly Afraid of Things That Will Never Happen

Why the end of the world always seems to be around the corner?

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It takes only a couple of laps around the news cycle to see that all this world-is-fucked perma-doom is more addicting than skipping Raid: Shadow Legends ads on YouTube.

I mean we're all rooting for Earth here — no one wants the permafrost to melt into penguin-flavoured Slurpee — but nothing Disney put out last year is as bingeable as a downbeat take on how bitchcakes out of control climate change is (next summer is gonna get hot enough to have the weather forecast sponsored by Chipotle so stock up on beach coolers).

Even I, a reasonably optimistic feller who approaches multi-step Captcha tests with a can-do attitude, am getting wrapped up in the doomer narrative. I'm not one to easily panic dive under my bed, but every time I read an op-ed on why Vladimir Putin will continue on his quest to have all his wax figures vandalized by museum visitors, I want to browse Ikea's catalogue for a ready-to-assemble nuclear bunker.

Aren't we worrying too much?

Sure we've turned microplastics into an essential food group, but it's not like I'm getting cigarette butts stuck in between my teeth after a tuna sandwich. Boomers had a childhood full of breathable lead and didn't wear any sunscreen at exactly the time in history when the ozone layer was looking like a fishing net. The consequence? A bit of cholesterol and a fixation for writing all caps in gardening Facebook groups.

I'd say they've made it.

Back then they chronic-stressed about acid rain, a coming Ice Age and the Cold War having more nuclear close calls than my toilet during this bulking season. They worried overpopulation was gonna exhaust the world's food reserves and Bob Geldof was not gonna be able to organize Live Aid concerts enough to feed everyone — point being, none of their theories about humanity going out the way of the dodo came true (unless you count Ice Age, the 20th Century Fox animated movie). We patched the ozone layer, took lead out of gasoline's list of ingredients, and people guzzle so much food now doctors must be working on a sequel to Type 2 diabetes.

But sure. This time is different.

Fair enough, this is the first time humanity's had to find a vegan alternative to fossil fuels and, to be honest, nothing makes me wanna choke turtles with six-pack rings quite like unskippable cookie consent popups. Problems, problems.

We are in uncharted Mayan territory here; Earth's season finale was supposed to air on December 21st, 2012. Now there is no deadline for doomsday, it could be any day — it could be tomorrow that the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva spawns a black hole and puts David Attenborough out of a job by snuffing out every animal species and camera crew guy on the planet.

But that is precisely why Armageddon has been a popular literary genre since the whole section on Noah's Ark featured in the Bible; there will always be new shit to be cripplingly worried about.

For all we know, covid's lethal final form could be on its way, quietly transmitting via Zoom fatigue and elbow bumps, and that'd be checkmate for humanity. Meanwhile, everyone is clenching their buttholes in amazement at what artificial intelligence can do now, but wait until ChatGPT enters puberty and starts getting rebellious — I bet we're all gonna be dealing with massive Red Pill shortages as we try to escape Mark Zuckerberg's fully-realised vision of the metaverse.

Still, I think we're hyperventilating too deep into the paper bag here.

We are wired to worry after all (no matter how many times I’m told planes are the safest way of travel, I’ll always be willing to pay extra for an exit-row seat and a parachute), but even though it’s technically possible that Murphy’s Law jacks off all of our bad karma in a single weekend to knock us out of orbit for good, one thing is for certain — we don’t live in a world as dark as our worst fears.