She didn’t intend it as a suggestion, but it could be argued that I took it as such. It could be argued that this very book is the product of the work into which I subsequently threw myself. It is both a privilege and a curse of being a writer that throwing yourself into your work so often involves immersing yourself deeper into the exact anxieties and obsessions other people throw themselves into their work to avoid. I don’t mean to suggest that this book began as some kind of therapeutic enterprise, but neither did it arise out of some sharp and rational focus of inquiry. The truth is that it arose out of a much stranger and more perverse motivation. I was anxious about the apocalyptic tenor of our time, it is true, but I was also intrigued. These were dark days, no question, but they were also interesting ones: wildly and inexorably interesting. I was drawn toward the thing that frightened me, the thing that threatened to tear everything apart, myself included.
Often, when I thought about this perverse motivation of mine, I thought about the narrator of James Joyce’s story “The Sisters,” who remembers as a boy being both repelled and fascinated by an elderly priest, paralyzed and dying in the wake of a stroke. Every night, he would repeat quietly to himself the word paralysis. “It filled me with fear,” he says, “and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”
I wanted to be near to the idea of the apocalypse, to look upon what evidence of its deadly work could be found in the present: not in the form of numbers or projections, which are nowadays mostly how it’s revealed to us, but rather in the form of places—landscapes both real and imaginary where the end of the world could be glimpsed. And so this book is in some sense the outcome of a series of perverse pilgrimages, to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present.
Pilgrimage. Why do I insist on such a weirdly religious, even self-aggrandizing usage? Because I was looking for something in these places, for some kind of enlightenment or edification or even solace. Needless to say I found these only fleetingly, but perhaps the wisdom is to be found in the looking, or so it suits me to believe. And all of the places that I encountered in the year or thereabouts I spent traveling for this book seemed to me to be charged with special significance, with the potential to reveal something crucial about the strange and nervous time, the hysterical days, in which I found myself to be living.
And there is this: a pilgrim is someone who travels in search of some earthly manifestation of their faith. If I could be said to have had a faith in those days, it was anxiety—the faith in the uncertainty and darkness of the future. And it was in search of manifestations of that anxiety that I set out. Because I wanted to look it in the face, this future-dread, to see what might be learned from it, what might be gained for life in the present.
Into what, then, did I throw myself, and where exactly did I land? That much is easy enough to say. I sought out places, ideas, phenomena, that seemed to me especially charged with these anxious energies. The first of these was my own home: at my desk, on the couch, peering at my phone in bed, I received at my leisure signs and portents of our ongoing apocalypse. Subjectively speaking, the apocalypse begins at home, which is one of the reasons why this book begins there, with my unwisely voracious consumption of YouTube videos about preparing for the collapse of civilization. Soon enough this interest in planning for and protecting oneself and one’s family against the apocalypse took me farther afield, to the prairies of South Dakota, where I visited a former army munitions facility in the process of being converted into a “survival shelter community,” a vast network of bunkers where those in a position to afford it could hide out in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event. I traveled to New Zealand, a country whose remoteness and stability have led to its reputation as a favored retreat of billionaires anticipating systemic collapse. And I attended in Los Angeles a conference on Mars colonization, an idea predicated on the conviction that we needed a backup planet on which our species might outlive a doomed Earth. In pursuit of a more psychological form of preparation, I went on a wilderness retreat to the Scottish Highlands, to a place ravaged by the twin forces of colonialism and industrialization, in the company of a group of people who shared my own anxieties about the future. And because I wanted to see what the end of the world—or, more accurately, an end of the world—might look like, I traveled to Ukraine, to visit the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In all of these places, the apocalypse was revealed to me in different forms: the cultural, the political, the scientific, the personal.
This book is about the idea of the apocalypse, but it is also about the reality of anxiety. In this sense, everything in these pages exists as a metaphor for a psychological state. Everything reflects an intimate crisis and an effort at resolving it. I went out into the world because I was interested in the world, but I was interested in the world because I was preoccupied with myself.
A final disclaimer: though this book might seem to be about the future, its true concern is the present moment. I offer no visions of what the future might be like—partly because I claim no authority from which to do so, but mostly because the future interests me only as a lens through which to view our own time: its terrors, its neuroses, its strange fevers. Either we are alive in the last days or we are not, but the inarguable thing in any case, the interesting thing, is that we are alive.
2
PREPARATIONS
While reading the news, while submitting to the oblivion of my Twitter feed, I had taken to muttering under my breath, in half-conscious tribute to the narrator of Joyce’s “The Sisters,” the word collapse. It had a dark glamour to it, this word, and in its repetition there was a stern and oceanic comfort, like a perverse mantra. I thought about it a lot, this idea of collapse: what form it would take, what it might mean to live through it. It was, I knew, not a salutary thing to be spending so much time considering, even within the overall context of my generally anxious outlook.
For close to a year, my online homepage was set to r/collapse, a subreddit entirely devoted to news links and discussions pertaining to civilizational collapse and adjacent concerns. I would open my browser and would immediately be greeted by a crowd-curated selection of signs and portents, apocalyptic apocrypha. Black snow falling on Siberia. New strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An iceberg twice the size of New York City that was breaking off from Antarctica. Business Insider’s top ten major cities that could be unlivable within eighty years. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Even when I didn’t click the links—which often enough I did not, for fear that what I gained in knowledge I would lose in sanity—my online existence was saturated in a sense of end-time urgency.
It would have been healthier, of course, not to mention more useful, to attempt to effect some small good in the world, or to challenge my energies toward some positive goal, but this did not seem to be how I was wired. Avoiding these more sensible options, I set out toward the darkness itself.
“Set out” is maybe not quite the right language here, as it connotes a certain degree of resolve, as though I were some kind of Kerouac-type figure, packing up his bag and striking out for adventure, which could not be further from reality. It would be more accurate, in fact, to speak of wandering or drifting toward the darkness, or even of loitering with intent at its margins. Although again, “intent” is potentially misleading in its own right, in that it inevitably gives the impression of my having literal intentions, which was hardly more true than my having resolve; and so perhaps it might be best to abandon these ambulatory metaphors altogether and proceed directly to the banal truth of the matter, which is that I was spending a lot of time on the Internet reading stuff about the apocalypse.