We Have Always Lived in the End Times
Meditations on Media and Popular Culture
Do we live in the endtimes? Do we live at the End Of Time?
Humans have lived on earth for at least 300,000 years. Before that, we lived here but were not quite human yet. Perhaps our apocalyptic visions and predictions for the last 2,000 years (or so) have been correct. In the long view, we are at the end of time. Roughly, the last 2,000 years or so (since the year zero) compose less than 1% of our time on earth. These 2,000 years have been busy, scary, bloody, eye-opening, sometimes beautiful, and often very destructive. If that’s not an apocalypse, what is?1
There have been wise voices, here and there, who have noted that, within this whole “civilization” experiment, we’ve made a few mistakes and taken a few wrong turns. Some of these wrong turns take us on a perilous journey toward doom. It’s not hard to see that, but it is sometimes difficult to share this information with others, or our own selves, in a way that doesn’t cause panic, or cause us to stick our heads in the ground and pretend it’ll all be fine.
Will we annihilate ourselves or will our better inclinations lead us to some kind of salvation?
I dunno. Why are you asking me?