What Happens When You Wake Up the Day After the World Was Meant to End?

The safety of pessimism

I took a class in university about culture in the 1960s. I needed an Art History credit and I chose it because I was in love with the idea of rockstars at the time. The class didn’t have much structure, it was taught by a brusque woman in her 70s who lived her entire life in New York City. She would tell us stories about the cultural scene and her life in the city, going off on regular tangents. One day she told us a story about the night they all thought they were going to die during the Cuban missile crisis. The gist of it was they all got drunk, had sex, confessed their love for people, and went to bed thinking that they weren’t going to wake up in the morning. But they did.

Repose (1895) by John White Alexander

It always stuck with me, the idea of thinking it’s all going to go up in flames and then waking up the next morning, having to continue on in a world that you didn’t expect to be part of. Last year when I watched the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown (2024), there was a scene similar to what my teacher had described. It hit me even harder than it did when I first imagined it, maybe because the world feels a bit more unstable than it did then. As my teacher said, “heavy.”

I think a lot of people right now have this idea that the world is on the brink of ending. When discussing the future there is a general cynicism that has become almost expected. Throwing our hands up and saying we’re doomed, that it’s over and there won’t be a planet or a future, stop trying. When discussing politics people often say there needs to be a revolution or it all needs to be burned to the ground.

I think there’s a trap that we all fall into, a sort of the world is fucked competition. A race to who can express the most fatigue with state of the world. Maybe it’s a way of trying to acknowledge the constant flood of bad news that lights up our phones every 5 minutes. Maybe a way to deal with a world that feels so unstable and out of our control.

But I’ve noticed that we act as if one day a switch will flip and we’ll all be wiped out in some sort of armageddon or purge, and we will be dead or at least no longer bound to the rules of society. The truth is, when you look into the science and predictions, that’s not really how it would happen. Climate change, our biggest existential crisis, will not light us all in a fire ball and end us in one fell swoop. Things will change, people will die, be displaced, lives will be turned upside down. It will be chaotic, no doubt, but there will still be a world. Maybe a different one, but a world nonetheless and we’ll have to adapt, we won’t have a choice.

People in war zones or areas already feeling the effects of climate change, still have to go to work, pay bills, have birthdays and anniversaries, give birth. They have to try to have some sort of a life within it. Sometimes I think just exclaiming it’s over, allows us to not have to imagine that. The idea of dealing with the fallout or the aftermath of something catastrophic seems to scare us more than the thought of the world just ceasing to exist. But I worry it makes us act as if it’s too late already and there’s nothing to be done while we still have time to make things better. It’s not a foregone conclusion yet, and it will be a lot worse if we don't try now.

I think there is a self preservation in pessimism. There’s a kind of a morbid satisfaction with the idea of everything just ending. After all, it’s easier to give up than figure a way out. Trying to remain positive and imagine a good future seems so far away, so overwhelming. Being pessimistic makes us feel smarter and more in control, you can’t scare me I’ve already thought the worst is going to happen. Remaining hopeful may seem naïve, but I’d argue it takes a certain amount of steely grit to be positive. A devotion to your envisioned future.

And it seems as though every generation has their “world ender.” Nuclear threats, world war, plague, famine, revolutions. I’m sure they all thought the world was over, thought there might not be a point in trying. But we’re still here. Maybe this is just our constant human state. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a certain amount of narcissism in thinking that we have it the worst and there’s no point in trying. Why are we any different than the people who came before us?

So what happens when we just keep living in a world that was supposed to end?