Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,1

but I knew that soon enough he would have to leave it and live in the future. And it was not obvious to me how a person was supposed to raise children, to live and work with a sense of meaning and purpose, in the quickening shadow of that future.

It didn’t take much, in those days, to set me off on a path toward the end of the world. There were frequent opportunities to indulge my tendency toward the eschatological. Cartoons, viral videos, radio news bulletins, uneasy exchanges with neighbors about how it never used to be this warm in February. So many things felt like a flashback sequence in the first act of a postapocalyptic movie, like we were living right before the events of the main timeline kicked in. I knew that this kind of thinking was as old as human civilization itself, that imagining the apocalypse was immemorially a response to times of rapid change and uncertainty. This recognition made it no less oppressive, no less real.

What did I feel when I thought about my son and his future? I felt a kind of abstract but all-consuming melancholy. My love for him felt like an insoluble moral problem. The smart money seemed to be on apocalypse, but as a parent I felt I had some kind of moral duty to be deluded about the future, to avert my gaze from the horizon. I was by no means living up to this duty.

* * *

—

We are alive in a time of worst-case scenarios. The world we have inherited seems exhausted, destined for an absolute and final unraveling. Look: there are fascists in the streets, and in the palaces. Look: the weather has gone uncanny, volatile, malevolent. The wealth and power of nominal democracies is increasingly concentrated in the hands of smaller and more heedless minorities, while life becomes more precarious for ever larger numbers of people. The old alliances, the postwar dispensations, are lately subject to a dire subsidence. The elaborate stage settings of global politics, the drawing rooms and chandeliers, are being dismantled, disappearing off into the wings, laying bare the crude machinery of capital. The last remaining truth is the supreme fiction of money, and we are up to our necks in a rising sludge of decomposing facts. For those who wish to read them, and for those who do not, the cryptic but insistent signs of apocalypse are all around.

Another browser window, another omen of the end. A UN report detailing how one million species are at risk of imminent extinction. An image of a waterfall cascading into the Arctic from the sheer cliff face of a melting glacier. The proliferation of antibiotic-resistant diseases. And all of it subject to the great flattening effect of the online discourse.

Listen. Attune your ear to the general discord, and you will hear the cracking of the ice caps, the rising of the waters, the sinister whisper of the near future. Is it not a terrible time to be having children, and therefore, in the end, to be alive? This question is not a rhetorical one. I myself go back and forth on it, obsessively, helplessly, talking myself in and out of different kinds of answers. And if it is now a terrible time to be alive and having children, you have to ask when, in the scheme of things, it was ever a good one.

Having children is the most natural thing in the world, and at the same time among the most morally fraught. During the time I am talking about here, I was consumed—pointlessly, morbidly consumed—by the question of whether having brought a human being into the world was a terrible ethical blunder, given what seemed to lie ahead. The last thing the world needed, after all, was more people in it, and the last thing any hitherto nonexistent person needed was to be in the world. It was of course a little late in the day now, the deed being well and truly done, to be giving serious attention to these fundamental questions, but then again it was precisely the day’s lateness that brought the questions themselves into absolute focus.

Because the first thing to be said about becoming a parent, whether it happens by choice or by chance, is that it is one of only very few events in life that are entirely irreversible. Once you’re in, existentially speaking, you’re in. And so the real question, the only question—given what the world is,