Apocalypses Past

In 2012, the world was supposed to end. At least according to some people.

The Mayans made a super cool calendar that only counted up to December 21 2012, and there was a prevailing theory at the time that this meant there would be no December 22nd.

As you may recall, that date did occur, nothing crazy happened, and we went on to have a 2013 as well.

In 2000, the world was supposed to end. At least according to some people.

Due to a design flaw in the date system used to program computers, the Millennium Bug (aka Y2K) was projected to drop airplanes & satellites from out of the sky, cause cooling leaks at nuclear power plants, crash our financial system, and generally make all manmade tech with a 2-digit date unstable and dangerously unpredictable.

As you may recall, there was indeed a year 2000 and nothing very noticeable fell apart as a result of not having a 4-digit year.

Surprisingly mainstream apocalyptic predictions also happened for 2011, 1999, 1984, 1976…and for this year, 2022.

Here’s my thing about all the world ending predictions: each is based on adate that is a purely human construct.

As I’ve written about before, we can’t even agree on what time it is, let alone what day it is. And as much meaning as people like to read into the numbers in our current favorite calendar (the Gregorian calendar), the truth is that it is only one of dozens (perhaps even hundreds?) that we humans have kept time to in our 60,000 year history. There is nothing special about how we tell what day it is. Look into it as I have and you will quickly find that it is amazingly arbitrary and completely nonsensical in our modern world.

Bottom line, Calendrics is just plain weird. If you find any meaning in it at all, you are really trying too hard. No one knows what the weather will be a month from today in the spot you are in right now, and they certainly don’t know when anything else that’s more significant to the human race will occur. It is not knowable in the cosmic sense, and not connectable to our profoundly human ways of understanding and denotating time.

Sorry to spoil the fun. (But not really)

I share this because we are actively engaged in ending our world now. It is not happening to us, it is happening through us. We’re doing it. I believe the moment we stop pretending that something was divinely ordained in our cosmic future is the moment we can start taking responsibility for the impacts we actively make here in the mundane present.

Yes, our world will end someday.

Okay, so...whaddya say we do our best to make sure that’s as far from this coming year as possible?