The End of the World, Part 2,389…

So the end of the world is coming again — or so it would seem!

The End of the World fascinates me to a certain degree, particularly because it has been predicted about five thousand million times by a myriad of people for a myriad different reasons.

Invariably there's some big end-of-the-world whoop-tee-doo, followed by a clean up of the "party" the following morning... because nothing actually happened.

Which leads me to conclude that even though the end of the world is repeatedly predicted, the world is actually remarkably resilient and whenever it seems like everything's falling off the edge of a cliff invariably somebody reaches out and pulls it all back to a normal situation of "complete and utter chaos."

Throughout the history of humankind it seems like people have typically thrived more on crisis and chaos and they have on being comfortable and sitting around playing tiddlywinks.

Or whatever it is people do when they feel content...

Of course, this is not to suggest that there aren't aspects of our existence that go away from time to time. But the reality is that more often than not they slowly creep out the back door with a whimper, rather than crashing in an apocalyptic ocean of flames.

And maybe that's where I end up shaking my head at the doomsday sayers, because whereas they may have latched onto a thread of truth in their predictions they tend to rather frequently forecast the sudden end of the world rather than a quiet and gradual withering death. And most of the time what we end up with is a quiet withering death.

Candles didn't suddenly become obsolete overnight when electricity was invented, nor did horse drawn carriages or for that matter landline telephones.

But one of the things that has long baffled me about the whole concept is this fascination with the end of the world.

Not only that, but what exactly are the purveyors of the end of the world actually hoping to gain by everything coming to an end? Is it just a suicide wish in disguise? After all, if the world ends and everything burns up you, too, will be dead and gone. So even if your prediction is correct neither you nor anybody else would be around to go "Wow, Ed Bob was right the world ended!"

Rather seems like misguided effort and energy to me.

But I suppose panic-like behavior sells newspaper, and gains you views on YouTube and Tiktok...

Consider this: if financial turmoil (as we're currently experiencing it) should truly leads to the end of the world, how come we didn't all end up going back to being cave dwellers running around and clubbing each other in the head with rocks and sticks, following the Great Depression in the 1920s?

Maybe I'm misguided here, but it seems to me like the end of the world people don't really want to deal with reality, specifically with the reality that the historical record suggests that "the end of the world" is far more likely to be caused by natural disasters, than by humans behaving badly.

That giant meteor striking what is now the Gulf of Mexico? Yeah that's the end of the world. An Ice Age? Yeah that's probably the end of the world for a lot of people. People making bad investments? Yeah, probably not as close to "the end of the world" as they'd like to think!

So, 10 days ago Bitcoin was touching $70,000. A few days later, it went under $50,000 and people were calling for the financial "end of the world." When I started writing this post, it was back up past $62,000 again.

I guess "the End of the World" is a pretty subjective idea...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great rest of your day!

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Created at 2024-08-08 17:18 PDT
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