Scan barcode
A review by brontherun
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell
4.0
Movies, podcasts, and books that fictionalize the end of days abound. They have been around at least as long as the bible, and probably longer. Mark O’Connell delves into our psychological obsession with the fascination, to the point of preparation, for the apocalypse. The 24-hour global news cycle of the last four decades may have contributed to relentlessness of doom and gloom. As O’Connell puts it: “The apocalypse is profoundly dull. I, for one, am sick to death of the end of days. I’m sick, in particular, of climate change. Is it possible to be terrified and bored at the same time? Is it possible, I mean, to be bored of terror? If not of the kind of literal terror that privileged people like me rarely experience, at least the kind of abstract terror that is released like a soporific gas from the whole topic of ecological catastrophe.”
I share his fascination/boredom dichotomy with end of days but less from a hopeless feeling about the future than out of a desire to understand the popular culture notion of spiraling towards acceptance of apocalyptic hopelessness as an inevitability. The economic spending and consumer industries that have sprung up around preparing for some version of the future that resembles Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is real, as O’Connell explores across the globe. People spending their financial resources on everything from estates in New Zealand, to bunkers in South Dakota, to protein sludge packs from the internet. And then they post videos on social media? O’Connell has apparently watched hours of such video. “It struck me that these bug-out-bag videos bore a strong family resemblance to the more mainstream YouTube phenomenon of haul videos, in which a person, usually a young woman, laid out for her videos the results of a recent shopping trip. The bug-out-bag video was a kind of apocalyptic variation of this display of consumerist achievement.”
The whole thing seems wildly absurd and immature. "And there is something fundamentally male about this narrative of exit, of escape as a means towards the nobility of self-determination." The players in these destruction scenarios are often men, escaping the day to day reality of getting stuff done. The opposition of escapism from community togetherness versus care of one another is raised by the author. Traditionally, women have played the care givers in society as a whole, and I think have less opportunity, or even inclination, to give up on it.
From the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to groups of privileged seeking escapist options from the global environmental problems, this book is a fascinating ride-along of O’Connell’s 18 month dive into the world of the apocalypse proclaimers. From the Mars escapism fantasy to New Zealand outposts, I can’t help but think that some very wealthy people are spending a lot of money pursuing unlikely outcomes when that money could be doing so much good to directly reduce suffering and pain in the world as it is.
Perhaps my favorite snippet from the book was of a woman who directly faces that conflagration of ecological destruction and doesn’t give up. A firefighter of outback wildfires, she shares her experience with the burning world with the author. And he latches on to the terror she faces (literally faces!!): "So, this is something that has happened to you, in your own life, as a person? Actual snakes that are on fire have leapt towards you from vegetation that is also on fire?" At this question, the woman chuckles. Yep, if she can face that and still laugh, there is hope in the world. Like the author, if we want to turn away from attention-grabbing apocalyptic stories to reduce our anxiety, we have to place what is really going on in the world in our own context. As bad as it may be, life isn’t always burning snakes leaping at your face. And when they are, try not to lose your sense of humor.
I share his fascination/boredom dichotomy with end of days but less from a hopeless feeling about the future than out of a desire to understand the popular culture notion of spiraling towards acceptance of apocalyptic hopelessness as an inevitability. The economic spending and consumer industries that have sprung up around preparing for some version of the future that resembles Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is real, as O’Connell explores across the globe. People spending their financial resources on everything from estates in New Zealand, to bunkers in South Dakota, to protein sludge packs from the internet. And then they post videos on social media? O’Connell has apparently watched hours of such video. “It struck me that these bug-out-bag videos bore a strong family resemblance to the more mainstream YouTube phenomenon of haul videos, in which a person, usually a young woman, laid out for her videos the results of a recent shopping trip. The bug-out-bag video was a kind of apocalyptic variation of this display of consumerist achievement.”
The whole thing seems wildly absurd and immature. "And there is something fundamentally male about this narrative of exit, of escape as a means towards the nobility of self-determination." The players in these destruction scenarios are often men, escaping the day to day reality of getting stuff done. The opposition of escapism from community togetherness versus care of one another is raised by the author. Traditionally, women have played the care givers in society as a whole, and I think have less opportunity, or even inclination, to give up on it.
From the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to groups of privileged seeking escapist options from the global environmental problems, this book is a fascinating ride-along of O’Connell’s 18 month dive into the world of the apocalypse proclaimers. From the Mars escapism fantasy to New Zealand outposts, I can’t help but think that some very wealthy people are spending a lot of money pursuing unlikely outcomes when that money could be doing so much good to directly reduce suffering and pain in the world as it is.
Perhaps my favorite snippet from the book was of a woman who directly faces that conflagration of ecological destruction and doesn’t give up. A firefighter of outback wildfires, she shares her experience with the burning world with the author. And he latches on to the terror she faces (literally faces!!): "So, this is something that has happened to you, in your own life, as a person? Actual snakes that are on fire have leapt towards you from vegetation that is also on fire?" At this question, the woman chuckles. Yep, if she can face that and still laugh, there is hope in the world. Like the author, if we want to turn away from attention-grabbing apocalyptic stories to reduce our anxiety, we have to place what is really going on in the world in our own context. As bad as it may be, life isn’t always burning snakes leaping at your face. And when they are, try not to lose your sense of humor.