The world is ending (but our stories won’t)

Lesson #38 of 40

As I approach 40, I’m embarking on a year-long project to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned in four decades of life. This is lesson #38. You can read the full series here.

Me, assessing the day’s headlines. (Getty Images)

I’ve made it to the point in my writing process where I’m getting comfortable telling people that I’m working on a novel.

In late October, I built a foundation: a color-coded spreadsheet to keep track of characters, dates, plot points, and word counts. In November, I followed the breakneck NaNoWriMo schedule of writing 50,000 words in a month. Back then, I called it an experiment — just to see if I could bust out 1,600 words a day. (I could, but it wasn’t easy or pretty.)

In December, I didn’t write much at all. But I did print out the first two sections of my draft and share them with two close friends. Looking back, I can see how undeveloped the plot and characters were, how truly messy my words and thoughts felt. Thankfully, those friends are still my friends — the best kind, who continue to cheer you on even after you show them a less polished side of yourself (or your manuscript).

In January, I joined a group of beta readers — three other women who are also working on manuscripts and looking for feedback. For the past three months, we’ve been trading pages, offering encouragement and thoughtful critique. And now, in the margins of my days — 40 minutes before my family wakes up, a blissful hour at a coffee shop on Saturday — I’ve been editing, rewriting, rethinking, and reworking pretty much everything. At times, I’ve wanted to throw my entire draft out the window in disgust. Other times, I’ve wanted to throw my hands in the air in triumph.

I don’t have any expectations of getting published. Right now, my North Star for working on this project is: Does it still feel fun? If the answer is yes, I keep going.

You might be wondering what the book is about. What’s been so fun that I’m willing to carve out time whenever I can to just keep writing?

It’s about the end of the world.

More specifically, it’s about a neighborhood book club of moms who exclusively read post-apocalyptic novels. Over time, the books start influencing their real lives, and each woman begins to prepare for the apocalypse in her own way — some plans are practical, some are ambitious, and some are outlandish.

Then, the power goes out, and it seems like the end of the world might actually be happening. Each of the moms has to put her fictional knowledge and real-life prep work into practice.

Fun, right? At least I think it is.

It’s no coincidence that I began working on this book in late October, as the 2024 U.S. presidential election loomed. Instead of mainlining political coverage, I funneled my anxiety into fiction. In November, when Trump was elected, the NaNoWriMo structure was a blessing. Churning out 1,600 words a day on top of work and parenting meant I didn’t have (much) time to spiral. Whenever I felt anxious, I gave those feelings to a character, who could wrestle with them on the page.

And now, as the significant effects of that election are taking shape, I find myself doing the same thing — channeling my anxiety into art.

The world has always been ending. Humanity has always imagined that end.

We’ve been dreaming up apocalypses for as long as we’ve been telling stories. From the Book of Revelation to The Road, Y2K to Don’t Look Up, we regularly picture ourselves living on the brink. And sometimes, fact catches up to fiction. From famines and pandemics to wars and natural disasters, people have long endured unspeakably hard times, dismal eras when the end seems imminent.

But there’s something about now that feels different.

“This is not the religious end of time, or eschaton, that has fascinated humanity for thousands of years,” Dorian Lynskey writes in Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World. These days, we seem to be experiencing “the end of the world as a pervasive mood — a vibe.”

What once may have sounded like a fringe or overly pessimistic viewpoint — The world is ending! — has become a strangely sober, even virtuous, assessment of the moment. Yes, the world is ending. It’s a normal part of conversation, a shared small-talk understanding.

To be fair, things do feel bleak right now. I get it. I’m worried about big, scary things like economic collapse, climate disasters, and political extremism, just to name a few. I regularly have to talk myself down from worst-case scenarios.

And I’m not alone. A YouGov survey conducted in February 2020 found that nearly three in 10 U.S. adults believe it’s likely there will be an apocalyptic event in their lifetime.

At first glance, that seems like a grim statistic. But I think there’s something deeper going on.

We’re drawn to apocalyptic stories because there’s a strange comfort — perhaps even wisdom — in imagining the end. There’s something freeing about admitting how little control we have. How everything we know could disappear in a minute.

As Frank Kermode wrote in The Sense of an Ending: “We need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning.”

I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do, not only with my novel-in-progress, but with this newsletter. That’s what we’re all trying to do, in some way or another — make sense of the space between the beginning and the end.

Maybe contemplating the end of the world can help us appreciate what we have while it’s here.

The world as we know it is dying. And so are we. It’s a tough pill to swallow, a heavy truth that’s hard to sit with for too long. It’s much easier to distract ourselves. (May I suggest attempting to write a book when your life is already packed to the brim?!)

But every so often, when your head feels overly full and the headlines feel especially loud, consider taking a deep breath and sitting with it: The world is ending. It might actually help.

The goal — if there is one — isn’t to feel worse by accepting this dark truth. It’s to ground yourself in that perspective, and work from there. Instead of letting the alarm bells get so loud that you become frozen, try using them as a cue to take whatever action feels right.

March in the streets. Plant a garden. Call your representatives. Hug a friend. Make art.

The world is ending. Doesn’t that make you want to appreciate it more? Let the bad feelings slide, and hold onto the good ones? Treat the earth and the people living on it with a little more kindness and respect?

The fictional book club I’m writing about is not-so-secretly inspired by my own neighborhood book club.

Like any good book club, our conversations inevitably veer from the text at hand to our own lives. More often than not, someone will bring up concerns about real-world events. She’ll share her fears in a way we all understand — like an exhale after holding your breath for an unnervingly long time. And we’ll listen. We’ll commiserate.

For the most part, we’ll all agree — yes, the world is ending.

Then we’ll get to my favorite part of the conversation: And what can we do about it?

xoxo
KHG