Why the World is doomed (And that’s okay)

By Joseph Earp

I was six when I realised everything was doomed and we were all going to die.

I was lying in bed, getting ready for sleep. My dad had just brought me a glass of milk. There was either something about him passing it or me holding it that filled me with totally unexpected dread revelation. I became aware of every inch of my flesh, and more than that, I realised that sometime soon, every inch was going to rot and decay.

So I did the only thing anybody does when faced with unspeakable, unthinkable horror. I wept.

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot recently, mostly because I have spent the last few months filled with an unspeakable dread. I have lost a lot of faith in the world. Everything seems fucked up and damaged. The planet seems haunted: people cruel and shallow. It seems as though the apocalypse is hanging around the next corner, smoking a cigarette and waiting to throw out a leg and trip us all over once and for all.

North Korea refuse to cease building up their nuclear arsenal. Mass persecution of the LGBTQI community is everywhere, from Russia to our own beloved Newtown. People on Manus island are setting themselves on fire while politicians coldly lie down the barrel of a camera. Donald Trump swept another day of primaries. Whether or not he becomes president now is irrelevant. The damage has been done. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people have put their support behind a man spewing hatred and horror.

Nothing is going right, and everything feels evil. The ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. The poor and the homeless will be the first to pay the price. As always. And even if global warming takes its time before it kills off us – the entitled toffs sitting around blogging about it – the blood of those innocents will be on our collective hands.

I think about these things all the time. And I am a six year old again, holding a glass of milk. Weeping.

And yet, there is comfort in realising we are doomed. Although we are perpetually in danger – the world is always almost coming to a close – it hasn’t collapsed in on itself yet. And that in and of itself is remarkable. All those people on this planet, all of them scared and susceptible to hate, and ever prepared to be evil – they do good things. They do them all the time. Kindness is as widespread as cruelty. It just doesn’t always seem as worth remarking upon.

We take ten step forwards, then we go eight back. The eight back feels like an apocalypse, but it’s not. It’s just the world naturally trying to work out its own order. Things centre themselves. Science tries to fix problems. People protest. Dictatorships crumble.

And even if – even if – Donald Trump becomes President, he will spend four years falling over himself. He won’t commit the war crimes he’s threatened, or build any walls. He will lie, and try to spin the world out, and then the curtain will be drawn up, and he’ll be seen as a liar. He will begin to doom the world, and the world will react so vehemently against his moral ugliness, that as soon as those four years are up, Donald Trump’s complete opposite will be waiting to take those ten steps in the right direction.

After all, my dad said it all way back when, trying to comfort a weeping six year old. I was so wracked with sobs I let the glass go, dropping its contents everywhere. My dad looked at the puddle spreading in the sheets, then my crying face, then the puddle.

He shrugged. “No use crying over spilt milk,” he said. Then he laughed. Then I did too.