Why Are We So Fascinated With Our Own Demise?

In 1985, when I was 9 years old, I watched the first episode of the new Twilight Zone, a reboot of the classic early-1960s TV series. People rarely talk about the ’80s version, which ran for just three seasons. But there must be other viewers around my age who have never forgotten “A Little Peace and Quiet,” the second story in that debut episode. It’s about a woman who discovers a magic pendant in the shape of a sundial that gives her the power to stop time. Whenever she says “Shut up,” everyone and everything in the world except her comes to a halt, resuming only when she says, “Start talking.”

At first she uses the device to give herself a break from her irritating husband and chattering children. But at the end of the episode, she hears an announcement that the Soviets have launched a nuclear attack on the United States, and she deploys the magic phrase to arrest time. In the last scene, she walks out of her house and looks up to see ICBMs frozen in midair, leaving her with an impossible choice: to unfreeze time and be destroyed along with all of humanity, or to spend eternity as the sole living person in the world.

I remember that TV image better than most of the things I saw in real life as a child. It was the perfect symbol of an understanding of history that Generation X couldn’t help but absorb—if not from The Twilight Zone, then from movies such as The Day After and WarGames. The nuclear-arms race meant that humanity’s destruction was imminent, even though no one actually wanted it, because we were collectively too stupid and frivolous to prevent it. We were terrified of the future, like the woman in the TV show—yet we also secretly longed for the arrival of the catastrophe because only it could release us from the anxiety of waiting.

Four years after that broadcast, the Cold War ended in an American victory with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In an influential essay published in the euphoric year of 1989, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history.” But it felt more like the resumption of history. Throughout four decades of nuclear brinkmanship, humanity had been living in fearful expectation, like Brutus in Julius Caesar : “Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.” Now the doomsday weapons had been, if not abolished, at least holstered, and the passage of time could mean progress, rather than a countdown to annihilation.

Somehow, things haven’t turned out that way. Young people today are no less obsessed with climate disasters than Gen X was with nuclear war. Where we had nightmares about missiles, theirs feature mass extinctions and climate refugees, wildfires and water wars. And that’s just the beginning. As Dorian Lynskey, a British journalist and critic, writes in Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, wherever you look in contemporary pop culture, humanity is getting wiped out—if not by pollution and extreme weather (as in Wall-E and The Day After Tomorrow), then by a meteor or comet (Armageddon, Deep Impact), a virus (Station Eleven, The Walking Dead ), or sudden, inexplicable infertility (Children of Men).

Adrienne LaFrance: Humanity’s enduring obsession with the apocalypse

These are more than just Hollywood tropes. Lynskey cites surveys showing that 56 percent of people ages 16 to 25 agree with the statement “Humanity is doomed,” while nearly a third of Americans expect an apocalyptic event to take place in their lifetime. Logically enough, people who believe that the world is about to end are much less inclined to bring children into it. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey of unmarried Americans ages 18 to 34, 69 percent say they want to get married one day, but only 51 percent say they want to have children. Around the world, birth rates are falling rapidly; one South Korean online retailer reported that more strollers are now being sold for dogs than for babies in that country. Perhaps this is how the world will end—“not with a bang but a whimper,” as T. S. Eliot wrote in his 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men.”

But the fact that Eliot was already fantasizing about the end of the world a century ago suggests that the dread of extinction has always been with us; only the mechanism changes. Thirty years before “The Hollow Men,” H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine imagined the ultimate extinction of life on Earth, as the universe settles into entropy and heat death. Nearly 70 years before that, Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man imagined the destruction of the human race in an epidemic. And even then, the subject was considered old hat. One reason The Last Man failed to make the same impression as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lynskey shows, is that two other works titled “The Last Man” were published in Britain the same year, as well as a poem called “The Death of the World.”

In these modern fables, human extinction is imagined in scientific terms, as the result of natural causes. But the fears they express are much older than science. The term apocalypse comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “unveiling,” and it was used in a literary sense to describe biblical books such as Daniel and Revelation, which offer obscure but highly dramatic predictions about the end of days. “A river of fire streamed forth before Him; / Thousands upon thousands served Him; / Myriads upon myriads attended Him; / The court sat and the books were opened,” Daniel says about the Day of Judgment.

Everything Must Go takes note of these early predecessors, but Lynskey mostly focuses on books and movies produced in the U.S. and the U.K. in the past 200 years, after the Christian apocalypse had begun “to lose its monopoly over the concept of the end of the world.” He divides this material into sections to show how the favorite methods of annihilation have evolved over time, in tandem with scientific progress.

From the January/February 2023 issue: Adam Kirsch on the people cheering for humanity’s end

In the mid-19th century, as astronomers were starting to understand the true nature of comets and meteors, writers began to imagine what might happen if one of these celestial wanderers collided with our planet. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Destruction of the World,” published in 1843, was perhaps the first to evoke the initial moment of impact:

This kind of cataclysmic fantasy hasn’t disappeared—in the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up, astronomers discover a new comet months before it’s due to strike Earth. But whereas 19th-century stories emphasized humanity’s helplessness in the face of external threats, the technological advances of the 20th century created a new fear: that we would destroy ourselves, either on purpose or accidentally.

Hiroshima demonstrated that a global nuclear war could not be won. Radioactive fallout and nuclear winter, in which dust and smoke blot out the sun, would mean the extinction of most life on Earth. This scenario could be played for eerie tragedy: In the 1959 film On the Beach, Australians go about their ordinary lives while waiting for the fallout of a nuclear war to arrive and complete humanity’s erasure. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) staged the end of the world as an absurdist comedy, the accidental result of ideological mania and sheer idiocy. The film closes with the terrifying yet preposterous image of an American airman riding a falling bomb like a rodeo steer.

Technology didn’t just enable us to annihilate ourselves. More unsettling, it raised the possibility that we would make ourselves obsolete. Today this fear is often expressed in terms of AI, but it first surfaced more than a century ago in the 1920 play R.U.R., by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. Čapek invented both the word robot (adapted from a Czech word meaning “forced labor”) and the first robot uprising; at the end of the play, only one human is left on Earth, an engineer spared by the robots to help them reproduce. Isaac Asimov’s classic collection of sci-fi stories, I, Robot (1950), envisioned a more benevolent scenario, in which robots become so intelligent so quickly that they simply take over the management of the world, turning humanity into their wards—whether we like it or not.

All of these stories can be seen as variations on the theme of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a tale told in ballad form by Goethe in 1797, at the dawn of the age of technology. Because our tools have become too powerful for us to manage, the future never unfolds the way we expect it to; our utopias always lurch into dystopia.

This element of self-accusation is what makes an apocalypse story distinctively modern. When human beings imagined that the world would end as a result of a divine decree or a celestial collision, they might rend their garments and tear their hair, but they could do nothing about it. When we imagine the end of the world in a nuclear war or an AI takeover, we are not just the victims but also the culprits. Like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, we have no one to curse but ourselves: “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

In A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present, the historian and museum curator Glenn Adamson surveys a different genre of stories about the future—the ones told by 20th-century “futurologists.” Where Lynskey’s writers and filmmakers envision the future as an inevitable disaster, these modern seers believed that we can control our destiny—if we only have the good sense to follow their advice.

Adamson applies the term futurologist to a wide range of figures in business, science, politics, and the arts, most of whom would not have described themselves that way. For the designer Norman Bel Geddes, shaping the future meant sketching “cars, buses, and trains that swelled dramatically toward their front ends, as if they could scarcely wait to get where they were going.” For the feminist Shulamith Firestone, it meant calling for the abolition of the nuclear family. We also encounter Marcus Garvey, who led a Black nationalist movement in the early 20th century, and Stewart Brand, the author of the hippie bible The Whole Earth Catalog. The assortment of visionaries is odd, but Adamson accords them all a place in his book because they expanded America’s sense of the possible, its expectations about what the future could bring.

A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present

By Glenn Adamson

The villains of Adamson’s book, by contrast, are the technocrats of futurism—think-tank experts, business executives, and government officials who believed that they could dictate the future by collecting enough data and applying the right theories. A classic example is Robert McNamara, who serves as a parable of “the rise and fall of technocratic futurology’s unchallenged dominance” in Cold War America.

McNamara became a Harvard Business School professor in the 1940s, and demonstrated a talent “for planning, for forecasting, for quantitatively analyzing, for segregating the trouble spots and identifying the upcoming trends, for abstracting and projecting and predicting.” During World War II, he was recruited by the Air Force to study production methods and eliminate inefficiencies. After the war, he did the same at Ford Motor Company, rising to become its head.

When John F. Kennedy named McNamara as his secretary of defense, the choice seemed like a perfect fit. Who better than a master planner to plan America’s Cold War victory? Instead, McNamara spent the next seven years presiding over the ever-deepening catastrophe in Vietnam, where America’s strategic failure was camouflaged by framing the situation, Adamson writes, as “a series of data points, treating ‘kill ratio’ and ‘body count’ as predictive measures in the war’s progress.”

The conclusion that Adamson draws from his illuminating forays into cultural history is that any claim to be able to control the future is an illusion; the more scientific it sounds, the more dangerous it can be. Yet he ends up admitting to “a certain admiration” for futurologists, despite their mistakes, because “they help us feel the future, the thrilling, frightening, awesome responsibility that it is.”

The future can be our responsibility only if we have the power—and the will—to change it. Otherwise it becomes our fate, a basilisk that turns us to stone as we gaze at it. For a long time, that monster was nuclear war, but today’s focus on worst-case scenarios arising from climate change is not as well suited to storytelling. Lynskey quotes the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s complaint that “global warming has still to produce an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells … or in film any equivalent of On the Beach or Doctor Strangelove.”

Read: For how much longer can life continue on this troubled planet?

Climate change is hard to dramatize for the same reason that it is hard to solve: It happens slowly and in the background, until it doesn’t. Compared with that TV image of Russian missiles suspended overhead, our current fears for the future are as intangible and omnipresent as the weather. Confronted with melting glaciers and vanishing species, our promises to use paper straws or shut off the faucet while we brush our teeth feel less like solutions than superstitious gestures.

In a curious way, reading Everything Must Go can serve as therapy for this kind of fatalism. “The unrealized fears of the past can be a comfort,” Lynskey writes, “because the conviction that one is living in the worst of times is evergreen.” There is a difference, of course, between living in fear of the Last Judgment and living in fear of nuclear war or global warming. The former is a matter of faith; the latter are empirical realities. But when impending catastrophes are real, it is all the more important that we not frighten ourselves into seeing them as inevitable. As Edgar points out in King Lear, “The worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ”