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Is this the end of the world? Don't expect it to look like a zombie apocalypse

We'll prevail in the face of rampant wildfires. Credit: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

We'll prevail in the face of rampant wildfires. Credit: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images


July 11, 2021   7 mins

A few months back, a friend of mine had a baby girl, and so, on the card accompanying her birth gift I wrote, “When you’re my age, I’ll be 118.” This is funny because in 59 years I’ll be dead, but it’s also depressing because I’ll never get to see what happens next in the unfolding narrative called the world we live in.

My writing has often fixated on the end of the world, perhaps because I’m jealous of a future I’ll never get to see, so, in response, I think, “Well, if I can’t see who wins the Academy Awards of 2083, then nobody will get to see the Academy Awards of 2083.” Hence, I have, or rather, once had, a tendency to latch onto apocalyptic thinking — except I’m actually finding that harder to do these days. I once thought the end of the world was kind of cool, but now I see it as corny, even though depictions of it are irresistible, like Beatles music or Ranch dressing. The bogeyman du jour tells you a lot about a culture at a given moment; there’s a reason UFOs became a thing during the McCarthyist Fifties.

The house I grew up in was sold a few years back and the house next door was torn down and replaced by what is arguably the ugliest McMansion in Canada. Most trees in both properties were chopped and — there’s just been too much change, and because of this I’ve lost all desire to ever visit there again. This is something of a counterargument against being jealous of the future and wanting to see how things change after you die. I suspect the future is neither a glorious Brave New World nor a zombie apocalypse. It’s just a lot of tasteless chipping away at the things you once held to be important. In some senses, the future reminds me of a game of Monopoly because nobody ever actually wins a game of Monopoly: people merely drift away from it to do something else, and there’s no satisfying win or loss. How on Earth has that game persisted for so long? Maybe because it unwittingly mirrors the ageing process and prepares us for death.

Having said that, there will, one day in the future, come the day when someone drives a car for the very last time. There will come the day when somebody makes spaghetti for the very last time. A day when — well, you catch my drift. Everything must end at some point, and it’s the end of these small things that make any description of the end of the world extra disconcerting, poignant, and even frightening, because they’re the things that structure our days. But it’s also those small losses that make End Times scenarios fun to read about and fun to watch. There exists a website out there that is devoted to finding chronoclastic errors within zombie TV shows. These sites are fuelled by people who watch the TV screen with a finger on the pause button as they hunt for innocuous background set-dec errors like a recently mown lawn. They’re thinking, After the zombie apocalypse, nobody will ever mow a lawn again. How could this TV show be so clueless? This is the same sort of person who watches movies set in World War One only to spot railway station signs done in Helvetica Bold, and declare the movie is dead to them. And this person is me.

But so much of what we think of as the look of the end of the world comes from film, TV and their often extremely low set-dec budgets. 30 years ago, in Vancouver, I lived in a neighbourhood that was always being used as some sort of film or TV set. In the mornings I’d open the blinds and the streets below would be lined with Sixties muscle cars from Detroit, so I could tell it was a period piece movie set back then. Or sometimes there would be Model T’s and the show would be set in the 1920s. And sometimes I’d open the blinds and there would be tumbleweeds, huge piles of litter and a few sloppily modified electric cars, and this meant that the movie in question was set in a post-apocalyptic future. If you ever wonder why the future in movies is not bright, it’s because using litter and keeping the lights low is a really simple way to stretch your budget.

In our culture, the end of the world seems to happen in very predictable ways and there’s a kind of reassurance and comfort that comes from this. Capitalism runs amuck; AI runs amuck; viruses run amuck; environmental catastrophe runs amuck. Amuck. Amuck, amuck, amuck. If you say the word a few times in a row, it starts losing its meaning and becomes just a sound effect. If you watch too many disaster movies you get the same blanking out effect; it all turns into colourful explosions and alien Halloween costumes.

Alien invasions, of course, are plot line staples for cinematic ends of the world — certainly the most special-effects driven — but I have trouble with aliens wrecking earth because it’s as if we’re offshoring, in the most extreme sense of the word, blame for an end of the world that will, as we know, be entirely brought down by human beings. Using aliens to end the world is a cop out. Human beings have earned the right to end the world. We are a useless species. We deserve the end of the world — but the rest of the world doesn’t deserve it, and our epitaph can only read: Sentience was a terrible idea.

So yes, it is strange to think that there will be the last time someone ever sings a song, and strange that there will be a last human ever born, but this vein of thinking reeks of speciesism. Why is it only the end of the world when humans are gone? A world without whales or a world without penguins or songbirds seems to me to be a form of the end of the world. At what extinction point do we call it a day and say, “Well, yes, it’s a planet, and yes people are still around — but there’s just no point to it”?

When the end of our world does happen, it will be quick, and completely out of left field. The end of the world will be the “unknown unknown” as opposed to the “known unknown” which is basically our list of the usual apocalyptic suspects: viruses, radiation, famine, climate, AI and comets. Knowing this, five years from now it might turn out in the end that the actual vector for human extinction is that everyone who got AstraZeneca and then used Crest toothpaste a year later dies of some hideous disease, and people who got Pfizer who use Colgate toothpaste go next, but by the time it’s figured out, it’s too late. Smug anti-vaxxers fare no better, as some fresh new bug wipes them out a week later and doesn’t even need toothpaste to get the job done. I’m being facetious, but why not? The end of the world is kind of absurd. I’m thinking about ridiculous zombie films and also about Love in the Time of Cholera: dying by trying to save a parrot from a tree.

My longstanding love affair with the end of the world goes way back and most likely stems from my being a child of the Cold War. In high school art class we had to make environmentally aware dioramas, so, I’d make dioramas of gas stations that just happened to straddle the San Andreas fault. It had to be gas stations, and the stations had to cleave in two halfway between the two gas pumps bays, because that way I could melt the 1973 oil crisis together with Mother Nature, the two of them working in tandem to end the world. Forty years later, I worked with a computer modelling friend who worked on the earthquake disaster film San Andreas, which came out in 2015. Their 3D design building team was divided into two groups who were never allowed to even talk together and who worked in different parts of the building. One group built the buildings, and the other group destroyed them. The worry was creative cross-contamination that would make less satisfyingly accurate seismic destruction. That extra level of detachment made the scary special effects even scarier, but it also made the results feel industrial and mass produced, like Warhol paintings.

The thing is, in the Seventies, the end of the world seemed much nearer than it does right now. Nothing worked back then, and everything was fading and imploding and being smothered in oil and soot. The Seventies with an internet would have been an utter pit of despair. Which reminds me: I was in Toronto in 2003 during SARS Classic, which had a 16% kill rate and, to be honest, the city didn’t feel even remotely as doomy as it does now during Covid, which has a pathetic kill rate of, what, 0.3%? That’s what happens with an internet everywhere around you: it’s this sleepless beast that roams everywhere, poking shit with a stick all along the way, and waking up every conceivable sleeping dog it finds with a clanging pair of concert cymbals.

I guess my biggest issue with the end of the world is, I realise as I write this, that I no longer believe in it. In short form, in my lifetime I’ve seen acid rain and the ozone hole be fixed, and I have every reason to expect global warming to be fixed, though heaven help anyone who shows even a smidge of optimism on that issue. A few weeks back in Vancouver, where I live, and in nearby Seattle and Portland, we had the hottest recorded days ever, and not just by a little — these new heat numbers blew up the charts. I know my house is on fire and yet I somehow think we’ll be fine.

Two days after I wrote that conclusive sentence, the small town of Lytton, British Columbia — a three-hour drive north-east of Vancouver — experienced Canada’s all-time highest temperature ever: 49.5°C. Lytton’s mayor was on national radio talking about how unusual this was. Then this morning a wildfire burned the entire town of Lytton to the ground. Last year, the entire town of Paradise, California burned to the ground. I may not believe in the end of the world, but I do believe in messages, and the end of the world is somehow mapping onto real life in a way that feels like cheese melted onto a hamburger. I really do want to make it to 118 because I want to see all of this stuff get fixed, and it will be.


Douglas Coupland is an award-winning Canadian writer and artist. He has published 13 novels, and his latest book is Binge, a collection of 62 short stories.

DougCoupland

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Jacqueline Walker
Jacqueline Walker
3 years ago

I don’t believe in the end of the world either and for the same reasons: growing up through the 70s and early 80s, frightened out of my wits by the Club of Rome and their ‘world running out of resources’, our class harangued by a teacher obsessed with geopolitics who was convinced communists were going to sweep down out of SE Asia and invade or India and Pakistan were going to blow each other and us up (I was in Australia at the time), then Reagan was elected and the news told me I wasn’t even going to make it through university before he started world war 3 and destroyed the world, then Chernobyl and we were all going to get cancer…. Thing is – none of it happened – I drew the obvious conclusion and I’ve never believed any of this nonsense since. I vigorously opposed every attempt of teacher and press brainwashing to terrorise my kids with the last 20 years’ crop of doom stories (climate change, extinction, dangers of nuclear power etc.) and succeeded. Trouble is now a lot of the time we feel like the only sane people amongst crowds of terrified puppets.

Last edited 3 years ago by Jacqueline Walker
Barbara Williams
Barbara Williams
3 years ago

We need to convert our fear into courage and to face the truth of what we are doing to our planet. Check out the Universal Aspiration

Heidi M
Heidi M
3 years ago

Oddly, this was a joy to read!

J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago
Reply to  Heidi M

Yes, I enjoyed it too and I’m not sure why. It was a stream-of-consciousness ramble on the end of the world (or not the end of the world). The guy can write, and he also offers an optimistic conclusion in contrast to the doom-and-gloom PC climate change merchants. Not a bad combination.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

he can’t write, I hated it, my two posts prior are ‘Awaiting for approval’, and will never be seen – but Please Unherd, do not go down this path of writing…

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Heidi M

I thought it the worst mess I have ever read, – everything it said was either stupid or wrong, or pointless, true paid by the word, stream of consciousness, junk.

And what is so hugely annoying is any thoughtful person, any of Unherd’s stable of writers, would write a very good piece on the end of the world, that is the ultimate human morality tale, time to reflect on all existence, time to extrapolate human failings, and hopefully strengths..

“the future reminds me of a game of Monopoly because nobody ever actually wins a game of Monopoly: people merely drift away from it to do something else,”

What sort of a person fails to finish a game of monopoly? It is played till one is bankrupt, very clear, when you have to pay one of the various fees but have not got the cash – Game over for that player. I did not finish the article, just drifted BTL….

I really hoped for a great story to kick off my mid day break, you know, a bit of News reporting, a well thought out opinion, some revelation a thoughtful writer has on existence…

But this Cr*p….. And on a Saturday, so likely nothing worth reading till Monday…. Unherd, try being a magazine of world events and intellectual discussion; finance, jobs, housing, work, society, classics, philosophy, culture, politics, history, – things we do not get in the MSM much, not this silly drek.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

I tried to read it but only got halfway. I thought it was leading to a point but the musings just rambled on.

Peter LR
Peter LR
3 years ago

I have to confess that I don’t get the antinatalist drive to save the planet by deliberately having no children. I understand the carbon-saved figures they work with but who is going to pay for their pensions, grow their food and give them care and love in their old age? Basically the answer is other people’s children; but if their idea really caught on there would be internationally the social problems now in China following its enforced one-child policy. Of course if we had no children born at all then the last generation would die of starvation and neglect which sounds horrific.

George Wells
George Wells
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

If you don’t have children, who would you save the planet for?

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  George Wells

The polar bears maybe… anyway the planet doesn’t need saving, it will get through fine until it is destroyed by the decaying sun. Only the people on it need saving… so all this ‘selfless’ concern is just narcissism all over again.

Last edited 3 years ago by Martin Smith
chris sullivan
chris sullivan
3 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Agreed-the ONLY reason for choosing to have kids is if you are optimistic in an informed way that they will have a reasonably pleasant/meaningful life-NOT that they will be your caretaker in old age etc. A particularly narcissistic view of another human’s rights etc (tho unborn. It is the breeding kids to look after you that has overrun the planet……………….Any real ‘grownup’ will take themselves out of this space-time situation when medical of poverty issues get to a particular point. The real problem is that there are not many grown ups around – just lots of old children looking for someone to look after them…………………………

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Nations will still be around at the end of this era of the earth. It doesn’t end but gets renewed for a thousand years and then a new earth and heaven. At least that is what the bible says and I believe that.

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

Having fewer children is not the same as having no children. And let’s face it, if we’re honest what we really mean is *certain people* should not be having children. There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet, we’re not running out of people any time soon. But we are like locusts consuming everything on our finite planet. QUALITY not quantity should be the mantra.

Last edited 3 years ago by Cheryl Jones
Peter LR
Peter LR
3 years ago
Reply to  Cheryl Jones

Hi Cheryl, apparently the world population growth rate is 2.5 now and will drop to net rate of stabilisation of 2.1. Without that net rate a country can’t support itself. So overall world population is stabilising but falling in rich countries where entrepreneurship could create solutions to supply needs.

Barbara Williams
Barbara Williams
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

You are completely overlooking our consumption problem. The UK is operating at 301% biocapacity. This means that we are using natural resources annually at a rate that exceeds the speed at which they can recover by 200%. This is not sustainable. For more information check out How Damaging is our Lifestyle? – Poems For Parliament

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago

120% of statistics are completely made up to give useful idiots a ammunition to fuel their self-righteous indignation

Nick Dougan
Nick Dougan
3 years ago

301%. How is that calculated? And with such precision?

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago
Reply to  Nick Dougan

To do with zero carbon or something. If we had zero carbon all the plants would die.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago

Zero carbon again?

Last edited 2 years ago by Tony Conrad
Barbara Williams
Barbara Williams
3 years ago
Reply to  Cheryl Jones

Your comment is so frighteningly anthropocentric, it explains how we have devastated our ecology so mercilessly. A complete disconnect from nature has arisen in our modern culture. I have no children, my awareness of our impact on the environment has been acute ever since I was at school in the 1970s. Nevertheless I am the one fighting frantically to raise awareness to inspire other people to wish to rescue what is left of our bio-diversity, on which we depend for our survival. Check out my idea for a Universal Aspiration

Last edited 3 years ago by Barbara Williams
chris sullivan
chris sullivan
3 years ago

You go girl !! I think plants and animals deserve more concern/protection because they cannot fend for themselves against the onslaught that is homo sapiens. Of course though the planet itself is well able to regenerate after humans have left-and create another host of interesting creatures as it did after the asteroid calamity 60 million years ago.It is what we are doing to farmed animals and birds that is the worst form of moral calamity/abuse in the contemporary world !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 years ago

This contradicts your assertions; I found it interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ5oHByFPU4

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

I agree with the interviewers here not the Greenpeace person.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago

Not a bad idea until you brought global warning and zero CO2 into it. I have read enough scaremongering about it and have now grown immune to it I’m afraid.

Alan Thorpe
Alan Thorpe
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

Apparently, Harry and Meghan have been awarded for limiting their family to two. If this is because they are concerned about the increasing world population, they don’t understand anything. If there is a population problem, then we need to kill off the elderly, not reduce the birth rate.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

What’s your cut-off for the elderly? This is the critical metric before I can decide to agree or disagree.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

If you are fifteen it will be forty. If you are twenty then 60. If forty then 90. After forty you wouldn’t have a cut off.

Johanna Barry
Johanna Barry
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

Thank you covid a very rational bug it seems. Though wasn’t there a film on along those lines. Soylent green?

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

There are too many people – just witness the plastic and other waste. How would you solve this with more people?

Rob Britton
Rob Britton
3 years ago

Despite the fact that the Earth has existed for about five billion years now, every generation seems to believe that the world is about to end, whether it be by nuclear holocaust, aliens, global warming or green politics. It never does, and I don’t suppose it will be any different this time round.

Nick Dougan
Nick Dougan
3 years ago
Reply to  Rob Britton

Humanity on the other hand has lived for just 100,000 years of that 5 billion. We should not take our survival for granted.

Alan Thorpe
Alan Thorpe
3 years ago

Probably about 25 years ago I thought the same about dying – that the worst part would be that I did not live to see what humanity finally achieves. After the complete nonsense of an invented human caused climate crisis, an exaggerated pandemic with effectively being forced into having an experimental vaccination, biology not determining gender and seeing the generation of hatred where none exists, I don’t want to see the future.
The solar system will end in around 7 billion years and that is one of the few predications about the future that we have gotten correct. The sun will become a red giant and the earth will be destroyed. But since no species lives forever, it is certain we will vanish before the earth is destroyed.
The question we need to ask is whether we will destroy our advanced civilisation before we become extinct, and the answer seems to be yes. It may not happen quickly which we know from past civilisations, but we have never had a global economy before and been dependent on advanced technology. The way that Jabber Johnson seem to be set on destroying our energy supplies and the economy, Britain could be one to the first to head into poverty.

Jacqueline Walker
Jacqueline Walker
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

I agree with your sentiment. I think it’s a natural part of getting old, slowly the world gets stranger and stranger as technology changes, fashions, moods and mores all change (they’ll come round again perhaps but after we’re gone) and it becomes a world you don’t recognise.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
2 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

It looks that way with Boris doesn’t it? I thought he was so sensible to start with but he looks set to crash Britain and has forgotten that it is a competitive world.

Dr Stephen Nightingale
Dr Stephen Nightingale
3 years ago

Certainly you are more likely to make it to 118 degrees rather than 118 years.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago

“…there will, one day in the future, come the day when someone drives a car for the very last time. There will come the day when somebody makes spaghetti for the very last time…”.

I for one, welcome our new nihilist overlords. Nice piece, btw.

Al M
Al M
3 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

If you speak to your average member of the UK’s Italian diaspora, spaghetti bolognese really is the end of the world!

Last edited 3 years ago by Al M
Scott Powell
Scott Powell
3 years ago

Great to see Coupland join Unherd. One of my fav authors. I have a cherished copy of Life After God that is falling apart. I’ve been curious to hear his thoughts on today’s madness, as he has captured previous times in such a curious and succinct way. Hopefully more coming!

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
3 years ago

Is the McMansion one of those mock Georgian horrors the plague Melbourne?

Johanna Barry
Johanna Barry
3 years ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

ooh they are ugly! glad someone else sees the horror. I related to his comment, whole heartedly! brick vanillas with decorution

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
3 years ago

Nothing glorious about Brave New World…

David Owsley
David Owsley
3 years ago

Very good. I was a bit pensive but the “And this person is me.” got a LOL…the rest was good too, concur with previous comments.

B Luck
B Luck
3 years ago

I suspect the future is neither a glorious Brave New World nor a zombie apocalypse. It’s just a lot of tasteless chipping away at the things you once held to be important.

Reminded me of a verse from one of Ezra Pound’s poems:

All things are a-flowing,   
Sage Heraclitus says;   
But a tawdry cheapness   
Shall outlast our days.

Last edited 3 years ago by B Luck
Zorro Tomorrow
Zorro Tomorrow
3 years ago

If you take away the world’s unsuitable dwelling places, the poles, mountains, deserts, non arable land, there’s a smidgin left for 7+billion people. Once someone worked out we could all stand up on the Isle of Wight. In UK we don’t put buckets out to catch the rain (of which we only use 4%). We could freeze dry the surplus western food and reconstitute it, redistribute it. Wave power, unlike wind, and tidal coffer dams filling up with high tide running dynamos as they drain down and follow the outgoing tide, is always there. We are inefficient and lazy; we’d need a benevolent fair totalitarian government to enforce this but no, we just carry on. A one time sixth former could destroy the myth of dangerous CO2, at what? .038% with Argon at .93% but no, we are in practical terms lazy thinkers and ignore water vapour and methane and historical evidence of changing climate over 100,000 years. Ice ages with ice sheets down to the Pyrenees where no edible vegetation could grow. etc. If such an entity as Gaia existed we’d be a minor irritation, punished with the odd hurricane or tsunami. If the goddess even noticed we were there. https://bit.ly/36v8GHj

David McDowell
David McDowell
3 years ago

Great black-comedy writing.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago

Excellent piece of writing.

LCarey Rowland
LCarey Rowland
3 years ago

Good luck with that.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
3 years ago

This guy’s a real sunburst.

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
3 years ago

AMOK

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago

The world at present seems to be uncannily and unerringly following the Book of Revelation…

David Bell
David Bell
3 years ago

I’m a recent subscriber to Unherd. This article makes me wonder whether I have wasted my money.

davidbuckingham7
davidbuckingham7
3 years ago

Denial of global warming is unbelievable and worrying.
Action to stop it is still inadequate, so it’s the most likely cause for ‘end of the world’, and that’s for every living creature and the planet.Pretty comprehensive.

Barbara Williams
Barbara Williams
3 years ago

This article reflects the general the lack of awareness about how close we really are to apocalypse. Check out the latest proposal to afford us some chance to survive, a Universal Aspiration

Alan Thorpe
Alan Thorpe
3 years ago

It not climate change that is the problem, it is human stupidity, fear and greed.

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

Amen-and as Einstein said-that stupidity is endless-so i guess we sit back for the ride like being on the inside of a movie as an unpaid extra. Just best not to add our offspring to that movie………………..

Nick Dougan
Nick Dougan
3 years ago

You should try Bjorn Lomborg and avoid worrying yourself into an early grave.