I Believe The World Is Ending - Does That Make Me Crazy?

There are countless reasons modern civilization is heading for collapse. Global temperatures are rising fast, ecosystems are breaking down, pollution is growing exponentially, and the remaining fossil fuels are deeper and more expensive than ever to extract.

Just to name a few.

And yet, if you tell the average person that the world is ending, they’ll look at you the same way they’d look at a guy standing on a street corner, screaming and holding a sign that says, “The end is near.” Trust me, I know.

They’ll say things like, “Sure, times are tough, but it’ll get better. People always find a way.” Do they, though? History says otherwise. Every major civilization has ended in collapse. Some quickly, some slowly, but they always end with the people starving and scattering.

I know this, and yet I’ve doubted myself many times. What if the world isn’t ending? What if I’ve gone down a conspiracy rabbit hole? What if I’m as deluded as flat-earthers and people who believe the moon landing was a hoax? How would I know?

I ask myself these questions because I’ve been deluded many times before. At various times in my life, I’ve believed a lot of crazy things: that vaccines are dangerous, 9/11 was an inside job, the Earth is only 6000 years old, and many others.

The thing I was most wrong about happened shortly after my 18th birthday. That’s when my parents learned about something called Y2K. They heard about it from right-wing radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, and they read about it on websites like Newsmax and World Net Daily. But what exactly is Y2K?

The end of the world.

For those who don’t know, when computers were first invented, programmers only used two digits to indicate the year. For example, 76 meant 1976, and 84 meant 1984. The problem was, 00 didn’t mean 2000—to a computer, it meant 1900.

So on New Years Day 2000, the Y2K (year 2000) bug would cause all computers to think that the year was 1900, leading to invalid dates, errors in calculations, and system crashes affecting banks, corporations, infrastructure, and pretty much everything the modern world relies on.

In other words, the end of the world. My parents were convinced that at 12am on January 1st, 2000, the grid would go down permanently and the entire world would be descend into chaos. They were completely terrified. So one day, they sat me down and explained what Y2K was and what was going to happen.

And I believed them.

At 18, I was feeling lost. I had just graduated from high school and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had already been raised as an evangelical Christian, so I decided to rededicate my life to Christ. Becoming a diehard Christian gave my life purpose.

I spent my free time praying, studying the Bible, reading Christian books, listening to recordings of preachers, and going to church whenever it was open. At that time, I was very gullible. If a preacher, right-wing radio host, or my parents said something, I believed them.

So naturally, I was fully convinced that the end times predicted in the book of Revelation had arrived. I believed that during the post-Y2K chaos, Jesus would return and bring all the true Christians to Heaven. But that didn’t mean we wouldn’t go through hard times first.

To prepare, my parents purchased a 60-acre piece of land in rural Oklahoma. My oldest brother and his family were also concerned about Y2K, so they moved onto the property first until my parents could sell their house and join them.

Once we had all moved there, we got to work. My dad purchased guns, a tractor, and tons of emergency food. I’m talking bags of rice, oats, and beans stacked to the ceiling. He built a storm shelter / root cellar, planted a quarter-acre garden, bought chickens, pigs, and cows, put rain barrels at the corners of both houses, and so much more.

We believed God had warned us about Y2K, not just so we could save ourselves, but so we could help others. When survivors came from the city, we would feed them, but we would also share the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We were so naive.

Looking back on it now, I realize there is no way we would have survived a grid-down scenario like Y2K. Sure, we had lots of food, livestock, and a huge garden, but we still went to the grocery store every week. We still used local utilities for power and water. And we still went to the doctor if someone got sick or hurt.

If Y2K had really taken down the power grid permanently, it probably would have been a few weeks before people from the city murdered us and took our supplies. And even if no one ever found our property, we would have survived a year at best before starving.

By the fall of 1999, we started to hear about companies investing millions of dollars to fix the Y2K bug. We assumed these companies wouldn’t be able to fix it in time. Why? Because that’s what the right-wing radio hosts told us as they sold cases of emergency food.

Still, I began to suspect that Y2K might be overblown. One night I was watching David Letterman, and he was talking to people in the audience. He asked one guy what he did for a living, and the guy said he was working to fix the Y2K bug. I remember thinking, Of course they’re going to fix it.

Software companies want to make profits, and they can’t exactly make profits if the world comes to an end. They had known about the Y2K bug since the beginning, so why wouldn’t they invest whatever was necessary to fix it in time?

It’s a shame climate change doesn’t work like Y2K. If we knew for a fact that climate change would collapse civilization on, say, January 1st 2050, and fixing it would only cost a few hundred billion dollars, then I’m sure we would stop it in time. Sadly, climate change is a slow-moving crisis, and humans aren’t wired to deal with crises like that.

Anyway, New Years Eve 1999 finally arrived. I watched TV as countries around the world rang in the new year. First it was New Zealand, then Australia, then Japan. One country after another celebrated with lights and fireworks, and there were no power outages, no planes falling out of the sky, no hordes of people mobbing the stores and killing each other in the streets.

Nothing.

My mom watched TV with me, and her face was white. She didn’t say much, but she kept complaining that she felt sick to her stomach. In order to buy that land, my parents had cashed out their 401ks. They had left their friends, family, and jobs behind in order to prepare for the end of the world. But the world wasn’t ending.

I do remember one incident. The local news told the story of a man who returned a movie to Blockbuster, and the computer system claimed it was 100 years overdue and that he owed thousands of dollars in late fees. The news anchors had a good laugh.

In the end, all our preparations were for nothing. Even so, I still remember those days fondly. My family was closer than ever, I had a lot of quality time with my dad, and I loved the peace and quiet of country life.

Now, I wish my parents had kept that land. But before long they got jobs, sold the land, purchased a house in a nearby town, and that was it. Y2K turned out to be the biggest nothingburger of all time.

After that, I started doubting my beliefs. If my parents could be that wrong about Y2K, what else were they wrong about? Were we really living in the end times? Was Jesus really going to return soon? Or did my family have a major streak of alarmism and tendency to fall for doomsday predictions?

I realized that my parents had been predicting doomsday since before I was born. In the 1970s, they purchased land in Canada because they thought Nixon would seize power and become a dictator. In the 1980s, they read books like 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Is In 1988 and 20 Reasons Why This Present Earth May Not Last Another 20 Years (published in 1973). That’s when they started going to church every week. And of course in the 1990s, they learned about Y2K.

So over the next couple of years, I gradually shed the beliefs I had been raised with. By 2002, I was a full-blown atheist and confident that doomsday would never arrive, at least not in my lifetime. It was a happy, care-free time. Of course, it wouldn’t last.

In 2008, the Great Recession hit, and I was completely caught off guard. To figure out what was happening, I started visiting sites like DrudgeReport.com and RonPaulForums.com. After Barack Obama was elected president, I was convinced he would confiscate everyone’s guns and create a socialist dictatorship.

By the middle of his first term, nothing like that had happened, and I began to realize that I had overreacted. That streak of alarmism that runs through my family had fooled me yet again. Just as I had shed my religious beliefs after Y2K, I began to shed my political beliefs as well. Around that time, I started a family, confident that with intelligent people like Obama in charge, the future would be relatively stable.

Then a few years later, in 2020, I started learning about climate change, peak oil, biodiversity loss, pollution, and more. By the end of the year, I was fully collapse-aware. Even though I’m only 44, I assume I’ll be dead within 20 years—maybe less—due to the food shortages and general chaos that will come with climate breakdown.

But once again, I have to ask myself, am I just being an alarmist like my parents? Unfortunately, no. No this time. And here’s why…

Unlike Y2K and the rapture, the collapse isn’t a single event. It’s not a thing that will happen at some point in the future. The collapse is happening right now, and the evidence is everywhere.

You can see it in higher prices, melting ice caps, dwindling oil reserves, the rise of fascism, declining living standards, record-breaking temperatures, the disappearance of forests, the drying up of aquifers, the collapse biodiversity, the exponential growth of pollution, the ever-worsening “natural” disasters, the failure of green energy to replace fossil fuels, and so much more.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the experts. Tens of thousands of scientists from around the world are warning that we are heading toward total collapse later this century. Just ask the average climate scientist how they feel about what’s going on, and most of them will admit that we’re basically fucked.

And that’s just in regard to the climate! Even if there were no climate change, we would still be screwed due to peak oil, pollution, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion. All these things are part of the polycrisis, a collection of crises that amplify one another.

So you see, there’s no chance that a scientist will make a breakthrough or create some invention that solves all these crises just in time to avert collapse. The polycrisis is too complicated. Even if we invented a source of limitless energy like fusion, we would probably just destroy the planet even faster.

If I had to convince you that we’re doomed with only one word, it would be this: Overshoot. Once you understand the concept of overshoot, you’ll understand why collapse is inevitable. Humans exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth over 50 years ago, and when a population of animals exceeds the carrying capacity of its ecosystem, the population rapidly declines. Every single time.

So no, despite what some people have told me, my warnings about collapse aren’t just alarmism. They are rooted in facts, science, and the reality that we are breaching planetary boundaries. Maybe I do have a streak of alarmism, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

I’ll close with an analogy that I find helpful.

Imagine a group of friends are planning a camping trip to a nearby forest. One of those friends, let’s call her Cassandra, is afraid of bears, and she says to her friends, “Are we sure there aren’t any bears in that forest?”

Her friends laugh and assure her that they don’t have to worry about bears. It’s been years since anyone saw a bear in that forest, and even if they do see a bear, it would probably leave them alone.

But Cassandra isn’t convinced. She reluctantly goes on the camping trip, but she stays alert at all times, regularly scanning her surroundings and listening for any sounds that might indicate the approach of a bear.

Is Cassandra being an alarmist? Yea, maybe. But if a bear does approach, who do you think will be the first to notice?

Right now, a bear called collapse has already entered the campsite. So far, most people are still asleep in their tents, completely oblivious. Those of us who are paying attention have seen the bear, and we’re desperately trying to wake up the rest of you, but you keep calling us crazy and going back to sleep.

Eventually, everyone will wake up. And for most people, it won’t be until the bear is inside their tents, mauling them to death.

Until next time,

— Alan