This is the second post from The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
You Would Die in an Apocalypse
And so would I.
It’s weird that one of the most popular genres of escapist fiction requires the extermination of most humans.
The thing about apocalypses is that most people die in them. So if you have fantasies of the apocalypse, that’s fine, but please remember that in everyone else’s apocalyptic fantasy, you are almost certainly going to be one of the people who dies.
I watched Fallout recently, which I think does a great job highlighting this horrible hubris. The people who drop the bombs are the people who have decided dramatically smaller numbers of people are a lot more manageable.
Like all the best post-apocalyptic stories, Fallout does a pretty good job making it look like a pretty bad deal. It makes the point that the people who survive aren’t the lucky ones, and that survival itself is probably short-lived.
But even when the stories get this right, we still gobble them up. Why?
I think we’re desperate for escape from the problems we don’t know how to solve.
There’s seductive simplicity in wiping out all the complexity of modernity, trading it in for the elemental challenge of survival. Who among us, eyeball deep in the soul-killing process of filing for taxes, hasn’t wondered if we might be better off having to hunt for dinner with a rusty machete?
Maybe there’s some truth to it. It’s important to wonder if we might have thrown some babies out with the hunting and gathering bathwater, and then question how we might be able to reclaim what we lost.
But beware your cravings for cataclysm. Because no matter how much of a badass you think you are, you would die in an apocalypse.
And so would I.
