Quite a lot, feels like over a majority of my life.
Heard it when Y2K was a thing.
Heard it when 9/11 happened.
Heard it when Bush got re-elected.
Heard it when 2012 came.
Heard it when Trump got elected first time.
Seems to be a recurring thing.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
53 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
1454 readers
58 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Every time an event reminds us nukes exist.
People who say this is the worst of times (US) and I have to remind them of things like the civil war, ww1, the great depression, ww2, the red scare...
I like to pull this list up whenever someone starts talking about how the signs are clear that the end is near: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
Christian apocalyptic belief has been poisoning right wing politics in the US for ages now. Things like relations with Israel have been heavily warped by it.
People have been saying the world is ending through all recorded history. At best, it's more credible now that we have scientific ways, but mostly it's bellyaching not based in reality.
I suspect old people and their rose-tinted memories might be the reason. If you're trying to decide if things are worse, better or the same as they used to be, and you just go by hearsay, it's always going to be skewed towards things getting worse. Then, just extrapolate forward, and the end is neigh.
Empirically things have gotten so much better over living memory in the West it's not even funny, and things have been more of a random walk over the rest of human history.
Since I was a child. Religious nutjobs in and around my family. Then I became an adult and it's all I see from people in response to news.
It gets old so I try to tune out, remove toxic people, and focus on enjoying my life.
Some 25 years at least, that I can remember. Been there for 1999 Nostradamus, 2012 Mayan Calendar, Nibiru or some other rogue planet colliding with the Earth in ~~2014~~ ~~2015~~ ~~2016~~ 2017
If you think back carefully, you will notice that the world ( > "as we knew it") did end in 2012. All your memories since then share a certain quality of confusion, lack of concensus about meaning or purpose, post-truth. These are just the dying dreams - flagellations of our consciousness, as it complicatedly decays towards nothingness after the end of the world. Hugs :-)
Hell, I've been waiting for 99942 Apophis to swing by us since Stargate was still on the air. Still got five years left on that one, but 2004 when that was first called out as a concern was the first time I really started contemplating the idea of the actual end of the world, in a bang not a whimper.
Sure, Y2K was supposed to cause some chaos, and 2012 was fun from a "what if magic is real" sort of angle, but everything else has been a gradual dawning realization that the world as we know it is probably going to be gone in my children's lifetimes -- not over yet, but profoundly changed, more difficult, the slow closing of the book on a golden age for humanity we didn't fully appreciate while we were in it.
*laughs in evangelical upbringing
Even the ancient Greeks used to complain that society was devolving. They talked about earlier generations being gold and now they've devolved to iron.
At least since the 90's.
Since I learned of the existence of Jehovah's Witnesses, nearly 40 years ago.
Since I got my first taste of the Hittites battle formations. 0/10, would not do again.
Since the beginning.
The only time I've had someone tell me we're living through the end times was during the whole 2012 thing, but they said it as a joke.
On the other hand, I've always had a feeling, even before I was a teenager and started becoming aware of the world outside my little bubble, that humanity won't be around by 2100. I very much hope I'm wrong.
I just learned today that the magnetic poles are gonna swap in the 2040s, so that's my guess.
They're not swapping by 2040. Geomagnetic poles take an obscenely long time to swap; we're talkin' hundreds of thousands of years. What's gonna happen by 2040 is that Earth's geomagnetic "North" will line up with "true North".
Ah. That's more like it.
Forever.
More often lately...