Living through the Apocalypse shouldn’t be so much fun.
It should be terrifying, miserable, and unbearable. No one should be laughing, making art, or making love. All eyes should be on the TV as it narrates to us our demise. People everywhere should be looting and pillaging, breaking into their neighbors homes and rampaging like a Mongol army across every city. A third of the stars in the sky should be gone by now while baleful horns blare through the night. People should feel a gnawing existential dread in every breath because the safe and orderly world they once knew is gone forever and each breath of oppressive air could be their last.
All this true and depending on where you are, may even be happening to some extent. But none of it really matters. And having the time of your life right now is not disrespectful of those who truly are suffering. Why? Because even if this is the literal end of the world, succumbing to fear helps no one and changes nothing.
While this is not the end of THE world, it is the end of A world. The anxiety, fear, and dread we all felt is a natural response to looming instability. But the fear and anxiety only alerts you to danger, they do not provide a detailed map for navigating worldwide change. The fear helps raise awareness of your own place within your environment, either more vulnerable or less vulnerable. It truly does serve a vital survival function for all sentient creatures. But fear was made for situations where fight or flight can address the threat. It is not useful for dealing with complex human systems and societal changes and it will rot you from the inside out if you allow yourself to stay mired within its quicksand grasp.
Most people know this and have heard about the negative effects of stress chemicals on the body. Research on primates has shown highly deleterious effects from living in constant fear or stress. Yet people struggle to put this knowledge into practice when faced with a frightening real-life situation. People do not know how to deal with the fear of change and legitimate threats to their lifestyle and wellbeing. For a head of household, nothing is more frightening than the thought of losing a job or a home. Except perhaps, the thought of losing an entire nation or living in a destabilized world where all of a sudden you are completely alone with no resources and nowhere to go. Even those who have prepared for these situations can live in fear of every stranger who comes near.
All these feeling are natural and understandable given the severity of the threat and the general lack of preparation for it. Most modern, secular people have no foundation to spiritually counter the fear and have no intellectual reasons why they should. I would like to propose why the fear and anxiety must be overcome, and why this time of trial, tribulation, and terror should actually be engaging. Fun may be too strong a word for some people, especially if you do lose your job, your home, or a loved one, which is why engaged or serene or motivated are better descriptors. As stated before, we are living through the end of a world. Many believed this world was safe and that a certain level of lifestyle was guaranteed. However, this world was a world of falsehood, of false security and phantom guarantees. This world destroyed millions of lives in its insatiable march for more, where anyone at anytime could be trampled underfoot, even those who believed themselves to be safe. And the worst thing about this world is that no one cared. No one cared because in this world most people lived in a false reality, a dissociated trance so thick they couldn’t see the real suffering around them because the authorities and celebrities said it didn’t exist.
This phantom world was intolerable with its dead eyes and empty smiles. People ambled through their lives only sometimes racing toward the next consumable, mass produced item or trend seen among their peers. Some people were so dissociated, so deep in trance, that it was impossible to talk with them about anything real. Everything was hidden and occulted behind a veil of complication and social camouflage. This world made everything byzantine and difficult, and even made its products less robust by design so that more were needed.
And this hateful world was ruled by a class of people so corrupt and useless that despite having a wealth of technology and financial instruments to employ, everything they did only made things worse. These people deliberately started wars through manufactured pretenses, caged innocent human beings, and covered up child sex trafficking. These rulers were psychopaths who traumatized their citizens and then truly believed that they, as a class, were superior in every way to the miserable, traumatized peasants. They believed they held a God-given right to rule the poor, confused masses for their own good.
This ruling elite was able to get away with this abuse through their ownership of and collusion with the corporate media and intellectual elites. These elites were a caste of corporate press journalists, pundits, ivy league professors and administrators, celebrity actors, movie-makers, pop stars, and NGO directors. This media caste were the ones who helped manufacture consent for wars, they castigated the imprisoned innocents, and knowingly covered up child sex trafficking by downplaying the damage and refusing to report on it. This class of enablers would dutifully help the ruling elites carry out their damaging, psychotic plans and would then ruthlessly blame the working class for problems the elites created.
This is the world which is now ending.
When you examine this falling world without fear’s distorting lens, you can see how in many ways, it was intolerable and needed to change. So the question becomes: Why should we fear this dying world?
Instead of worrying that this terrible and abusive world was the only thing keeping chaos at bay, think about how you can follow your dreams as the environment evolves. If there is anything you believe you can do to make yourself or your family safer, do it now. Once you have done that until there is nothing else you think is necessary, the next step is to start following your heart.
Following your heart and living the best life you can is not idle self-help cliché, it palpably reduces fear and stress when you spend time making art, building skills, growing a garden, improving your health, or working on a home project with your family. I believe that most people’s chronic depression stems from not following their heart through being creative or spending their free time wisely. Not only will your life improve, but so will the lives of those around you. The world does not need heroes, it need more people following their dreams for their own sake.
To my eyes, the reason all of us exist as mortal, vulnerable beings here on Earth is to find out who and what we really are through our experience of the human condition. Adversity and challenge are life whetstones by which we are honed. The Grand Alchemical Transmutation is less about turning physical lead into gold but more about the spiritual lead of trauma, abuse, and failure into the spiritual gold of art, friendship, and love.
What could be more adverse than an apocalypse? The end of an age or era comes with many hardships which can be either good or bad depending on how you choose to take it. As a family man, I couldn’t think of anything besides death of injury that would be harder to bear than losing my home. The look of fear and discouragement in my loved ones’ eyes would be devastating. Yet, what good would grief and despair do for my family in this situation?
We know from the study of literature and cinema that there is not story without a conflict. There is no development of character without adversity and being forced to choose, to see how the character reacts. Life is a series of choices; sometimes choices have unforeseen consequences. The level of challenge presented by apocalypse choices are the Soul-making of an individual. While the choices presented by the old world were obfuscated tricks, the apocalypse of that world provides one benefit: things are now made simple.
Apocalypse means revelation, unveiling. Now as the curtains of the old world peel away, all things are laid bare. People have shown themselves for who they truly are, things have become clearly ranked in importance, and we now know both which people and which possessions we can do without. As scarcity increases, so does the value of the things we still have. People get put in one of two categories: in or out, trusted or untrusted.
The Revelation not only illuminates and clarifies, it exposes and indicts. The regime of the old world’s crimes are rapidly becoming known and their enablers are being outed as the bootlicking petty authoritarians that they are. If there is any fun for me during this end of the world it is watching the media apparatus get exposed as arrogant, hypocritical, peasant-hating cowards. Each day they descend further into embarrassment, taking their supporters with them. Those who lied and who did crimes against humanity deserve to be mocked at the very, very least. We can take some small pleasure in this comeuppance.
As you laugh at your oppressors remember that there is no better time to pursue your dreams then during an apocalypse. If you don’t do it now you may never get the chance. And remember that no matter how bad things may seem, there will always be good people. I truly believe that in times of hardship, most people will do the right thing. I have lived through some of the southern United State’s worst hurricanes and I have seen two cities underwater. But what surprised me the most was how generous, patient, and kind people were to one another in the aftermath of the destruction. All the old animosities vanished when real tragedy struck. Therefore, I am not worried about living through some terrifying dog-eat-dog battle royale if things get bad. My mantra through these times is “The worse it gets the better it gets.”
The reason that its possible for conditions to improve as they seem to get worse is that all of the once occulted ills are now coming to light. The toxins are rising to the surface. What this means is that it has always been this bad, you just could not see it before. Though we must endure the discomfort, at least we can begin to address the real problems. A problem cannot be solved unless it is known and well-defined. We are going through the first step of the healing process which is removing and identifying the toxins.
Finally, there is no need to fear the ruling-class deliberately pulling the plug on the System to cause mass chaos because the System IS the control mechanism of the people. Why would the insane, power-hungry control freaks deliberately remove the yoke which harnesses the vast wealth and labor of the people? In fact, right now the elites in government and media are desperately trying to maintain control on an angry and increasingly suspicious populace. We are seeing these large orchestrated events and socially destructive mandates because the elites are getting desperate. They know damn well that they are losing the narrative as more people pierce the veil of lies.
The more heavy handed and ridiculous the propaganda gets, the more people wake up to the truth; the more people wake up to the truth, the more heavy handed and ridiculous the propaganda gets. We have a feedback loop which only benefits us in the long term. In the short term however, things will likely get worse. All you have to do is hold on, because when a change in government is truly and earnestly desired by the people and the old regime is weakened, the revolution happens without violence, as if it were naturally meant to be.
But ultimately I hope you do more than just hold on, I hope you thrive. I hope you find your life’s calling and pursue it everyday whether tanks or flowers line the streets. You pursuing your passion regardless of external permission or denial makes a better world for all of us to live in. I hope I have made the case that fear is not necessary, that it should at least be subservient to your life’s work. We will get through this, and I earnestly believe a better world is on the other side.
Love it.