‘Notes From An Apocalypse’: How to get ready for the end of times by Mark O’Connell
Spoilers contained within
“The way we build gods, is the way we build the apocalypse”
— Caroline Ross (from Notes from an Apocalypse)
I’ve recently finished Mark O’Connell’s book Notes from an Apocalypse. I curiously picked it up when I was poking around my favourite charity store for a bargain price of 2 quid. Probably because it had the word ‘Apocalypse’ and probably because I believe (in some sense) one is coming.
I thought this was a great book. Knowing another person was obsessing over the End of The World like me made me feel less crazy. I enjoyed O’Connell’s ethical dilemma of bringing children into the world, which the whole book is generally sculpted around. O’Connell’s “notes” begin with wondering if bringing his son into a dying work was the best idea and threads through tender moments he shares of reading the Lorax (by Dr Seuss) to him, the joy he feels as a parent watching his child interact with the world. The book ends with the sense of presence he feels when looking into his baby daughter’s face and watching her smile, believing that even if there is an apocalypse coming, nothing could replace that special feeling he has — the one of gratitude towards living.
I don’t know if he has convinced me yet to have children. The last few pages made me think he was spinning out in feel-good-baby pheromones and forgetting, rather rationally, that the End of the World is near. But still, I can see how one can conclude that an anxiety-driven life is no life at all to live, especially when trying to raise two young children.
I was thinking of all the times over the last thirty years when parents (Boomers and Gen X) looked at our generation (I’m talking about Gen Y and Millenials here), sleeping soundly and innocently in our cribs and thought about how they’d raise us to care. That we would be the generation that would make it all better again because “we’d care” (as O’Connell points out is a needed worldview from the ending of the Lorax). It turned out that didn’t happen — in fact, it gets even worse. It turns out that more than half of all carbon ever emitted by humankind has been emitted in the last thirty years. So that’ll be us, the Gen Y and Millenials, contributing to that (guilty).
Like many people born in the 80s to 90s in Western wealthy countries, I’ve grown up in complete abundance. One year I sat on a plane for some 220 hours — that’s just plane time; it does not include waiting at the airport. Some of which were purely so that I could experience leaning over a waterfall or standing on the top of a mountain so that my 700 or so Instagram followers could envy my jet-setting life. Maybe now is the time to confess (and I guess these apologies will never end), I did it for the likes, and I’m truly sorry. (I’m unsure how I can ever make it up to the generations coming after me).
The defensive part of me wants to say, “but it wasn’t me!” it was the world I was born into. My parents wanted me to get a well-paid job after university in the country they had chosen to migrate to (which I did). And I wanted to live the lavish Western lifestyle I have been affianced to. Success was the number of stamps I could accumulate in my passport and how many likes I could get on my pictures (if you can’t tell yet, I’m Australian).
Now that I’m older and wiser, I’d like to think I know better and, like O’Connell, have suffered for the better part of the last few years feeling guilty, ashamed and hoping that by publically declaring these feelings, I can forgive myself for the continuing burden I am putting on the planet (I say that as I currently sit in an air-conditioned room having flown to Crete on a plane…).
Without going on a Vision Quest or a colonising Mars exhibition (like O’Connell had), I have discovered that the wider existential crisis is also a reflection of my inner existential crisis. Learning about the climate crisis felt like the innocence was stripped away from me at the tender age of 32, at what should be the peak of my life, to look my mortality in the face (and everything and everyone I love and hold dear). The shock is a reflection of the depth of denial in the West on the topic of death. (Did you know that it comes for all of us?).
Just before I boarded my plane and flew out of London two weeks ago, I exchanged voice notes with a friend who was going through collapse anxieties. I’m hoping I’ll become somewhat of an expert on how to console those who have just woken up to the prospect that our whole civilisation is on the precipice of annihilation. I reassured him that ultimately, we were all going to die anyway. (Sidenote: I read on Reddit r/showerthought somewhere recently that the slowest way to kill someone was to give birth to them). I know it sounds slightly nihilistic, but we simply cannot act from a place of fear, especially if the anxiety starts to eat away at us from the inside (we’ll all just end up on meds, curled up on the ends of our beds hoping someone will come and save us, spoiler alert: no one is going to — and I’m speaking here from experience).
O’Connell goes on journeys that many of us in the collapse-anxiety mindset might be curious about. He explores the world of “preppers” (and laments that it’s mostly white men who are trying to isolate themselves from society). He visits places where you can End of the World bunkers for the average civilian and billionaires. He even explores (as mentioned) the community trying to get off Earth, colonising our neighbouring planet Mars (even a toddler would realise saving this planet might be better than giving birth to children who cannot even live in the atmosphere or gravity of Mars?). He completes a solo nature retreat (akin to a Vision Quest) in the remote forest of Scotland, and finally, he visits Chernobyl, the edge of what a nuclear apocalypse is). He talks about his anxieties a lot.
What I liked about O’Connell’s book was the honest realisation that it wasn’t just about the loss of civilisation per se that he was worried about; it was specifically the loss of his privilege. The privilege was to walk past homeless people weekly on the streets and know that he didn't have to deal with the same level of suffering. The fact that he (and I, and hopefully most of us reading this) don’t live in a war-torn country already facing civilisation collapse is, in itself, a huge privilege. The fear of collapse isn’t just a fear of death, is the fear of everything we know to be safe and comfortable. We are, after all, highly self-domesticated animals — I’ve already accepted that I’d probably be one of the first ones to die if we were needed to “survive” in the “wild” — who have creature comforts that we are not willing yet to forgo (I know I’m not speaking on behalf of everyone, and for those who have given up creature comforts, I salute you).
What reaffirmed to me that all is not lost (and also is lost) is that survival will depend on community — as told to O’Connell by a woman he met on his Vision Quest.
“They [preppers] were always men, … always talking about their kit. But the matter of the fact was that if civilisation did collapse, these men would be entirely useless to themselves and worse than useless to everyone else. What they didn’t understand, was that the thing that would allow people to survive was the same thing that had always allowed people to survive: community”
— Caroline Ross (from Notes from an Apocalypse)
I personally believe that womxn (or female-bodied persons) hold the key to our very survival. And those male-bodied people who recognise this might have some hope of continuing their lineages (it’s here I’d like to direct you to the Women’s Liberation in Rojava, a Kurdish community that has already faced their apocalypse and are fundamentally and radically re-thinking a new way of living). Not because I am biased (I am), but because, in my personal experience, it is the womxn who have historically weaved the fabric of social cohesion in communities.
Overall, a well-written and funny book — one in which I had to underline many words that I was illiterate in (but enjoyed doing so to expand my ever-growing vocabulary) and would that I would recommend, especially to mxn (male-bodied persons) who were thinking that prepping would save their ass from The End of the World.
“A question I have frequently asked myself is whether the appeal of the apocalypse, in all its vastness and finality, is that it can comfortably absorb the personal fear of death. And not just death, either, but every other ancillary fear, too — of change, of instability, of the unknown, and of the precariousness of life itself, all positions held within it”
— Mark O’Connell
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