There is always a future
Lessons from the apocalypse
On Tuesday, I got one last good night of sleep. On Wednesday, I felt angry, and scared, and so, so, so sad. I also felt a sense of clarity so sudden and profound that I can only compare it to early March 2020. I knew the world I thought I lived in was over, even though my material circumstances, and my decisions, and my emotions, will take a while to catch up. It turns out there was no reality in which the impossible, unthinkable thing didn’t happen. It turns out things that happen to people far away can also happen to me. It turns out there was less time than I thought.
I’ve spent the last four years writing a book called Apocalypse, and this past week, I finished the copy edit. One lesson I’ve learned from researching and writing about 40,000 years of apocalypses and how they shaped human history is that the worst-case scenario can happen. It has happened, over and over again. State collapse, megadrought, plagues, extinction. Violence, chaos, war, imprisonment, starvation, exile. These things happen. They happened to countless numbers of our ancestors, all over the world. They are happening to people right now. Whatever you think protects you from the worst-case scenario, well, there is a world where that thing stops mattering, far more quickly and decisively than you could have imagined. That may have been the world we entered this week. We don’t know.
But another lesson from spending years writing about apocalypses is that there is always a future. There is always renewal, creativity, survival, resilience, and reinvention. Not just on the other side of those worst-case scenarios, but during them, and because of them. People can’t help but change and adapt and imagine and live no matter what. It’s who we’ve always been, and it’s who we are now.
Saying there is always a future doesn’t mean the world just has to hold on and grit its teeth while we wait for normality to reassert itself, as so many of us did the first time (at least until March 2020). It doesn’t mean the future will look anything like the past. It means the future will emerge from the wreckage of the worst-case scenario, as time and life and loss and grief and hope and imagination churn it into fertile soil. It means, as I wrote two years ago, there is no going back—not back to normal, not back to how things were, not back to how you wish they could be again. There is only going forward. And there is always going forward, maybe even especially when we wish we didn’t have to.