Millennial Apocalyptic Numbness

Millennials are killing the Eschaton Industry

No one told the birds the world was ending

Sometimes, the joke stops being funny.

Oh, didn’t you hear? Some 200 reports from troops have come in that they were told by US military commanders that the war we are entering in Iran is a Holy War to bring about Armageddon. I only wish I were joking.

After a childhood of 90’s era Left Behind mania and end-times prognostication during the Iraq War of 2003, they are trotting out the same old tired tropes, the same dead-on-arrival religious rhetoric to gin up a holy war that nobody wants to fight. Even these people in charge seem tired of it. It is half-hearted, at best. I very much remember the threats of the end when I was younger, and they seemed so much more forceful, so much more frenzied. But frankly, I can tell that their hearts aren’t in it.

Nobody can convince me that this is a sincerely fought war over ideological beliefs. Nobody will ever convince me that this pointless, bloody, deadly conflict is anything but a frantic grasp at power and relevance from a dying empire. Nobody is buying it anymore. Nobody is buying that this new forever-war is worth it. Certainly not those dead children from the initial strike. No, this whole thing seems farcical, and the worst part of the joke is that this actually might be the one that ends everything. This conflagration has the potential to actually tip the scales into full-on world war status, fought over absolutely nothing.

And you know what the general consensus is among my generation of millennials, now in middle age, no better in status than when we started?

“Alright, I guess.”

I’ve been having that dream where I’m dying again

After COVID-19’s early years, and the great “back to the office” push, after putting up with a capitalist system that is increasingly falling apart as we ride the train to societal ruin, after a decade of Trump and his delinquent pomposity, after the Occupy protests, after the 2008 Recession, after the 2003 Iraq War, millennials are just tired of it all. We are tired of the vainglory of our leaders, the fascist preening of our tech overlords, the overbearing weight of expectations for a future that was promised to us and will never arrive. We are tired of being told to wait our turn when the truth is that our turn will never come. The worst among us get rich, and the most qualified, the most intelligent, the most educated, the most experienced, all just got laid off last quarter.

And perhaps we should have seen this coming. Perhaps it really is our fault after all. Why not? We’re blamed for everything already. We’ve heard it all before. We aren’t trying hard enough. We aren’t pounding the pavement. We aren’t reskilling fast enough. We aren’t starting our own businesses. We aren’t forging our own paths through nontraditional means. We aren’t fighting hard enough for it, all because we don’t want it enough to get it. If we wanted it more, we’d have it by now.

I am so tired of it all.

I will admit, part of this is personal frustration. I will admit that things have not gone the way I imagined they would in my life so far. And I will, of course, admit that yes, I have personal responsibility in this. I have no choice, after all. But we were all told the lies that if we were patient, we might have a future.

I am almost 40, and I am looking at entry-level positions in almost every job market I can massage my skillset into. I should be in the middle of my career, not stuck in a dead-end cul-de-sac. I have three degrees, all of which are ill-suited for a job market that wants anything but my skillset. Sure, I should have chosen more business-friendly, marketable skills, but I refuse to concede the notion that education is primarily for the purpose of employment. It might have been better to go into sales or marketing or business or engineering, but I would have been miserable in those lines of work, too. And I would be right back here, most likely, after hearing horror stories from all of my friends who also went into those markets.

The system is not working, and it is collapsing as we speak, and all of us, all the folks under the age of 50, are ready to retire early because we are all burnt out, broken, beaten, battered, and beset by a looming apocalypse.

Oh. Right. I forgot, the world is ending.

We can barely keep the lights on as it is

I have been on this beat about the apocalypse for a while. I keep coming back to the topic, partly because I find it endlessly fascinating, but also partly because I keep feeling like the end really is around the corner. But we exist in the ever-present now, the liminal between the about-to-end and the end itself. And it is difficult to focus on things that matter, like making a living or starting a new career, because just off in the distance, we have a faint awareness that we might actually wake up to a biblical apocalypse.

I mentioned that I grew up in the end-times panics of the 90’s and early 2000’s, and it is worth mentioning that almost every generation feels like it is living in the end times. Indeed, the world has ended before, multiple times, and it will continue to end and begin again in the relentless march of time. Progress is not a straight line. Indeed, progress is a myth, itself cooked up by people who lived through tremendous bouts of technological advancement, imagining that the line must go up forever. Capital, too, gave us the myth that one can simply always do better next quarter, as if we, mere finite creatures, can just do capitalism well enough to make an infinite money glitch. We unfortunately live in a material universe and are bound by material physics. Not only that, money is fake; we made it up, and we shouldn’t have organized our society around the concept in general.

Also, the biblical apocalypse will not happen exactly as John of Patmos said it would, primarily because John was not writing literally, and to take him literally would be to misunderstand the genre of apocalyptic literature to a catastrophic degree. John was speaking in symbols and analogies because those are the conventions of the genre, and it’s easier to hide communication behind a layer of obfuscating language to Roman officials. Apocalypse, as a genre, is meant to give hope to the oppressed, to speak of contemporaneous events (like the Roman Empire) in abstract ways so as to add mythic flair to the mundane work of survival amidst impossible odds.

However, there are some differences between that era and ours, foremost of which are that we have nuclear bombs and a little concept known as Mutually Assured Destruction. If one country uses nukes, it is US policy to unleash our nuclear arsenal upon the world in kind. If that were not enough, there is a little thing called Global Climate Change also happening concurrently, threatening not just human life, but all life on this planet as we know it. If we don’t blow ourselves up, the planet will cook us all alive.

These things are almost always running in the background of my mind. War. Oppression. Ecological catastrophe. Never mind my own precarity and poverty. I pursued a PhD because I believed that I might be able to teach a new generation how to think theologically and to lead the church into a better tomorrow. I had not considered that the academy itself was about to crumble into the seas. I, like my millennial compatriots, am desperately clinging to driftwood, treading water amidst a shipwreck known as “society,” and brother, my legs are getting tired.

So they keep singing like it's spring

I have no greater point than to lend my voice to the resounding choir of millennials crying out that we are exhausted, and even the news of an international war hits us as a population numb to catastrophe. We were once a generation marked by hopefulness and optimism, and now we are a generation of burnouts. We believed we could change the world, make a difference, and now we just fight to survive.

Despite the horrors, we persist anyway. Someone has to take care of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Someone has to keep the light of civilization lit, if it is not forcibly snuffed out. Someone has to keep shoveling coal in the engine, even if the floorboards are falling away and the train is running out of track.

Someone has to be responsible; it might as well be us, right?¹

1. Section headers taken from the lyrics of “Paying Bills at the End of the World” by Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties.