An interval has concluded. Was it as [untranslatable] for you as it was for me? No? That's too bad, we could all do with a good [is this even language?].
So apparently the Mayans just didn't feel like counting that high on the calendar. We're all still here, isn't that just...fabulous. Human superstition fails again. It's hard to get excited about continued existence when you're stranded on this planet, perhaps 'the' redneck backwater of the galaxy. So uncivilized that the Others want nothing to do with us, they're all over the place out there and they steer clear of this place for the most part. I can't say I blame them, having lived here this long.
But what is the Human preoccupation with Armageddon? Why does the world necessarily have to end? Many of the peoples of this world are obsessed with the notion that someday, at some point in future time, known existence must come crashing down, bringing about some religious notion of paradise; a liberation from the suffering of the known world, and an emergence into some perfect vision of life without pain. Not every persuasion clings to ideas like those, though the ones that do bark about it oh so loudly, they make up for the ones who keep quiet on the subject. As with so many institutions in this world, these traditions have grown from just a simple idea, sprung forth from a single thought as the plant groweth from the seed. What is the seed here, the origin of all this?
The answer is perhaps right in front of us, or figuratively speaking, sometime an unknowable distance in all our futures. I speak of course of the inevitable embrace of death. It's a reality for every non-immortal living thing that exists. Every being must face the knowledge that this interval of form and sensation is finite, and the manner of its end cannot be completely known in advance. Neither can it be known with any certainty what is the further result of death is, one can only postulate on the nature of the "afterlife", if any. The ambiguous nature of these matters is the cause of a very basic human instinct response: fear. The unforgiving finality of mortality would create the strongest fear response possible in bioforms whose primary imperative is survival.
So it wouldn't be an enormous stretch to suggest that the concept of the End Of The World is merely a projection of the anxiety humans feel towards their own mortality. If every human life must end, then surely the world that contains said lives must end as well? Is there even a tendency for a human mind to reject the notion that the world will go on existing without them living in it? How can beings obsessed with some imagined future catastrophe truly be present in the here and now, aware of and acknowledging what is real and relevant?
The world does not have to end just because we do (or appear to). This universe is older than we can imagine; even this planet was already old and wise by the time humans began to appear on it. The invention of apocalypse ideologies isn't constructive, and is in fact counter-productive. Having some kind of Rapture or something always just around the corner creates a psychological excuse not to care for and maintain the world we have, on the expectation that this world is doomed anyway and a new one may just be provided later. Until we become sustainably space-faring, this planet that has cared for and provided for us is all we have. If we fail to take good care of her, then the Apocalypse will become a self-fulfilled prophecy. Humanity has the power to decide if their world ends or not, and it's a choice that every individual has a voice in making.
-SchnozBott
"It's like, uh, like a cry for survival. A cry for survival! Survival for them and for us!"
