‘End of the world vibes’: why culture can’t stop thinking about apocalypse

In a 2020 YouGov poll, nearly one in three Americans said they expected an apocalyptic event in their lifetimes, with the Christian Judgment Day relegated to fourth place by a pandemic, climate change and nuclear war; zombies and aliens brought up the rear.

While promoting his doomsday satire Don’t Look Up in 2021, director Adam McKay awkwardly tried to define this era: “the Great Awfulization … or the Gilded Rage … You can just really call it collapse culture … There’s such a list of things to keep your eye on.”

As of January 2023, the hands of the Doomsday Clock – the symbolic timepiece maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947 – point for the first time to 90 seconds to midnight on account of the climate crisis, Covid-19, disruptive technologies, rising authoritarianism and the revenant menace of nuclear war arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking during the second world war, long before 24-hour news or the internet, the poet Wallace Stevens argued that the “pressure of reality” overwhelms our sense of perspective: “It is not possible to look backward and to see that the same thing was true in the past.

Contemplating annihilation can certainly be a valuable means of reckoning with death, loss, abandonment and a capricious universe, but one can also detect the rumbling of a bad conscience – a dark suspicion that the end might be richly deserved.

In the character of Justine in Lars von Trier’s movie Melancholia, or the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, or Morrissey crying “Come, Armageddon!” on Everyday Is Like Sunday, we find a vivid desire for it all to be over.