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

interrogates our insatiable appetite for doom - and asks why each generation is so drawn to the idea that they will be the last

This is not the religious end of time, or eschaton, that has fascinated humanity for thousands of years, but the end of the world as a pervasive mood – a vibe. “It’s pretty clear the world is ending,” Marc Maron says in his comedy special End Times Fun. “I don’t want to shock anybody. Seems to be happening though.” Everybody laughs.

There have always been doomers. In 1974, the year I was born, French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing declared: “The world is unhappy. It is unhappy because it does not know where it is going and because it senses that if it knew, it would discover that it was heading for disaster.” One week in September 1965, the most popular song in America was Barry McGuire’s warning that we were on “the eve of destruction”.

One can feel the pressure of reality in the frenzied overload of REM’s 1987 hit It’s the End of the World as We Know It or the work of Don DeLillo. In DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II, the author Bill contends that the novel has been displaced as a source of truth and meaning by the news, which “provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel … We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily.

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