spare links for the end of the world
the end is near
The email at the top of my inbox says the world is closer to catastrophe than ever before.
I am 13 years old and I know I am going to die when the world ends.
My 7th-grade science teacher tells us that Yellowstone Park is basically one giant supervolcano. He explains to us that this volcano is so big that if it were to ever erupt, the ash and smoke it would produce would block out the sun for decades and we would all die.
It’s 2012 and I spend all of my spring break thinking about how unfair it is that I’m going to die soon. I am sitting on the couch in my parent’s living room when the Mayan calendar resets. I am staring at the ceiling while I wait for the volcano to erupt and the asteroid to hit my house.
It’s 2022, I am 24. I walk around New York and think about how sad it is that I’ve only lived here for 4 months before it will be destroyed by a nuclear war.
On my commute to the office, I listen to a podcast from the New York Times that explains how Putin is not a rational man. They predict Russia’s risk of escalating to using nuclear weapons is somewhere around 12%.
The thing that strikes me most about New York is the psychic storefronts. All the women in the city can tell me what I have to look forward to. I look up at the soft glows of the neon in the window and think about all the people in this city I can pay to tell me what kind of man I’m going to marry, and how many kids I will have.
My friend Taryn tells me how she is never going to move too far away from Michigan. That she wants to make sure that if she has kids that her family has plenty of space and easy access to fresh water.
I look up at the neon glow in the window. What are we going to do with all this future?
To comfort myself about the end of the world I listen to a podcast about a group of linguists, artists, and architects that were invited by the government to develop a marker system years to warn human civilizations of nuclear waste byproducts buried in the New Mexico desert that can last up to 10,000 years.
To comfort myself I watch a TikTok on Man After Man by Dougal Dixon that theorizes how humans will evolve in a dying world. How some may evolve to have different ways of breathing to combat toxic air or grow gills to build and adapt to underwater civilizations.
To comfort myself I think about swimming in Lake Michigan in the summer of 2013. I am floating on my back and I am surrounded by an endless horizon of clear cold water. I am 15 and I am so uncomfortable in a bathing suit.
I am so young and I am so grateful that I have lived through the end of the world.