Doomscrolling

Except for Stanley Kubrick’s (1964) comic farce, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—with Major T. J. “King” Kong waving his cowboy hat and whooping as he rides an atomic bomb to its target—I grew up with no apocalyptic-cism whatsoever: no notion of “the close of probation,” “the national Sunday law,” “the mark of the beast,” and nothing on the Second Coming. So I never fretted about the end of the world. I rarely gave it a thought, actually. It just didn’t fit my daily routine.

Then, at 13 years old, I read a Time magazine article that said that the United States and the Soviet Union had about 30,000 nuclear missiles zeroed in on each other. Given my cynicism (even at 13), I instantly realized that being nuked was a likely possibility, a thought that, more than terrifying me, put me into a nihilistic funk: Nothing about me matters because nothing about me can survive an 18,000,000°F [10,000,000°C] blast.

You don’t have to be a Seventh-day Adventist poring over prophecy charts, or expounding on winged lions, or calculating day-year timelines in order to be interested in, or even fretful about, how our world ends. This angst is nothing new, even if millions who had worried about the end of the world have died. In his acceptance speech in 1950 for the Nobel Prize in literature, William Faulkner groused: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” (Faulkner died in 1962.)

Notice the date of his lament: merely five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and only one after the Soviets tested their first nuclear bomb. As if worry about the world ending by natural means were not enough, by the early 1950s, with the creation of thermonuclear weapons, humanity (bless their hearts) now had the capacity to do the job themselves. Or close to it, anyway. When director Stanley Kramer, for instance, wanted to borrow a nuclear submarine for his movie On the Beach, which was about humanity being wiped out by atomic weapons, the Pentagon refused, saying the movie was too negative. “No: your story says an atomic war would wipe out the world, and that isn’t so,” the Pentagon told him. “Only about 500 million people would be killed.”

Doomscrolling Through the Ages

From Mesopotamian texts of the second millennium B.C. to the movie Don’t Look Up with Leonardo DiCaprio (2021), humans have speculated about, fretted over, or (in some cases) tried to prepare for the end of the world. It’s not so hard, even from a humanistic perspective, to understand this doomscrolling. Civilizations, flowers, memories, stars, everything is expendable (It’s the second law of thermodynamics), and so why not the world, too? It’s only logical.

“Who cannot see that the world is already in its decline, and no longer has the strength and vigor of former times? There is no need to invoke Scripture authority to prove it. The world tells its own tale and in its general decadence bears adequate witness that it is approaching its end” (Cyprian of Carthage [circa A.D. 250].) According to Thomas Malthus (1798), we should have all starved to death by now, while H. G. Wells (1945) feared that “this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.” He wrote this before the existence of the LGM-30G Minuteman III, the RS-28 Sarmat, the Dongfeng-41, or the Hwasong-15—nuclear-armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) from, respectively, the United States, Russia, China, and North Korea, each capable of killing millions in minutes, a testimony to humanity’s insatiable ingenuity in improving the means for mass murder.

We humans have worried about the end of the world because with our technology we can now bring on that end ourselves.

Whether Al Gore’s 2006 warning about climate change (you know, “10 more years” or else), or fearing that the Large Hadron Collider would create a mini black hole that would atom by atom consume the planet, we humans have worried about the end of the world, more so lately, because, with our technology, we can now bring on that end ourselves. Oh, yes, our latest fear—the AI apocalypse. Finding humans irrelevant, AI might kill us all. (One scenario goes like this: the first question people ask the most powerful AI program is “Does God exist?”—to which it replies, “He does now!”

Ending Credits

To ensure that we don’t get complacent, in 1947 (again, notice the date), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock, which tells us how close we supposedly are, well, to Doomsday. With the first setting, in 1947, at 7 minutes, our proximity to oblivion has varied from an aeonic 17 minutes, in 1991 (end of cold war), to only 85 seconds left today, in 2026 (partly, no doubt, their commentary on the current United States administration)—the closest ever, at least according to these prognosticators of the Apocalypse.

We are close (whatever that means), not because of nuclear weaponry, or AI threats, or climate catastrophe, or whatever criteria these atomic cuckoo clockmakers use (for some reason we went from 90 seconds in 2024 to 89 in 2025), but because each day brings us nearer to the second coming of Jesus, when everything changes, radically, irreversibly, and eternally through the supernatural intervention of the Creator. “Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him” (Rev. 1:7). “For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matt. 24:27). “The heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat” (2 Peter 3:10). “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thess. 4:16).

The days of the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11, 12) will, obviously, be over. Fallen humanity’s squatting in the Lord’s kingdom ends. Though “the whole creation groans” (Rom. 8:22), it won’t forever. Because of Christ’s death and resurrection, God recovers much, but not all (however tragic the loss), of what sin and rebellion have hijacked.

At 13 I feared nuclear war; at 70 I don’t, even though it could happen. Nuclear annihilation is not how the end comes long-term, because the end never comes long-term. For those who rejoice in “the promise that He has promised us—eternal life” (1 John 2:25), which is “an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away” (1 Peter 1:4) in “the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:11), where the redeemed “shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 22:5)—what does, what can, “the end” mean?

However important the idea of the end is now, after “the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor. 15:52), it will be as obsolete as the nukes that many fear will bring that end to begin with.