How To Stop Worrying About The End Of The World

Cheer up, it might never happen. How to manage existential threat and make the world a better place in the process

This is an extended version of a story from MR PORTER’s The Journal

Illustration by Calum Heath

Back in January, the Doomsday Clock was reset to 89 seconds to midnight, the nearest it has ever got to its figurative “end times” since its conception in 1947. By next year, it could be closer still – assuming there is a next year, of course. Set up by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organisation founded by figures behind the Manhattan Project, the Clock originally offered a visual representation of the threat that nuclear warfare posed to humanity. In 2007, its remit was expanded to include climate change, with artificial intelligence, biological weapons and nanotechnology also now considered.

Turn on the news today and you’ll likely find other potential existential threats to add to the list. The pandemic, the “polycrisis” and certain world politicians bent on brinkmanship – you’re probably done with living through unprecedented times. And where do you go to escape? From The Last Of Us to 28 Years Later to recent musical drama The End, popular culture offers no shortage of imaginative scenarios for our demise. It all feels very nigh indeed.

“The end of the world has always been one of our favourite stories,” says SJ Beard, the senior research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and author of Existential Hope: Facing Our Future When The Signs Look Bad, which, god willing, is due out in September. “Some of the earliest Mesopotamian texts we have tell the story of ‘The Flood’ – the one that appears in the Bible – which is explicitly about surviving the end of the world. The first person to tell stories about actual human extinction was Mary Shelley. The Last Man [Shelley’s 1826 dystopian novel] has humanity wiped out by a plague and series of environmental catastrophes at the end of the 21^st century.”

So, there’s that to look forward to.

According to Beard, interest in the end times has only ramped up in recent years. “When I started working on existential risk back in 2015, a lot of people asked me, ‘Why are you working on that?’” Beard says. “Then, after 2016, they started saying, ‘Well I’m glad somebody is working on that!’ Now they keep asking me, ‘Why aren’t there more people working on that?’”

It’s not all doom and gloom, right? Beard has good and bad news on that front. “Since the Bulletin started setting the Clock, we have actually got better at solving our global problems as a species,” they say. “Not that we are fantastic at it, but we do better than we once did. However, the range and scale of the problems has grown a lot faster than this problem-solving ability. That is why we are worse off now than we ever have been from an existential risk perspective.”

OK, so we can’t guarantee that the world won’t end tomorrow. But we can at least provide a little perspective – and maybe hope. Here, then, is how to cheer up. Because it might never happen.

01. That feeling at the pit of your stomach… might be a good thing?

“Climate anxiety is an overwhelming feeling of existential dread that can lead to grief, anger, apathy and cause problems with sleep and being able to engage in normal life,” says Megan Kennedy-Woodard, co-director of the consultancy Climate Psychologists and co-author of Turn The Tide On Climate Anxiety. She says that this typically impacts people on the frontline of the climate crisis. However, a lower level “climate worry” or “climate distress” can occur “in anyone who is paying attention to the degradation of our environment”.

“This can affect anyone, anywhere across the age spectrum, but studies have shown that it impacts younger people more,” she says. Kennedy-Woodard sees this gnawing unease, however, as something to harness. “Though we know that climate anxiety is increasing, it is not something that we necessarily want to ‘cure’, rather help people to move to a place of sustainable and collective action.”

02. It doesn’t end with you

As Beard mentions, tales of the end times are deeply woven into our culture. What is perhaps more recent is the idea that the future is effectively over – that we’re already living in it.

In 2013, Douglas Rushkoff, the theorist, author of Survival Of The Richest and presenter of the podcast Team Human, coined the phrase “present shock”, a riff on the 1970s’ notion of “future shock”. Whereas before we struggled to cope with the rapid advances of the 20^th century, today we’re overwhelmed by an “always-on ‘now’”. And this can lead us to “fantasize a grand finale”, turbo-charging “apocalyptic narcissism”, the idea that the world will end within our lifetimes.

The easiest way to break this down is to remind yourself that the world hasn’t ended already. And – news here to the people of 2013 – that the future is still yet to happen. In short: get over yourselves.

“I kind of feel life gets better year by year, rather than worse,” says the broadcaster, speaker and coach David Baker. “But our brains are programmed to notice threat more than we notice the comforts.”

03. Understand the root cause of your anxiety

“We’re projecting our fear of our own individual death onto these wider anxieties,” Baker says. He draws on the work of the mid-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, linking our worries to attachment theory and the impact of our very earliest experiences on our adult mental health.

“Winnicott argued that the first anxiety, which comes from the first time the mother doesn’t come quick enough, lives with us,” he says. “We bury it deep, but unconsciously that wells up in our anxieties about the end of our life.”

Which is to say that, once unpacked, we can learn to better deal with our concerns. Not that everything is your mum’s fault.

04. Don’t just doomscroll, do something

“It is when we feel frozen that anxiety turns into despair,” Beard says. “It is better to be curious about the future of our species and to ask what you can do about it. Our brains [have] evolved to deal with risk every moment of our lives, from predators, from their environment, from other human beings. But we always evolved to respond to risk via action.”

“We like the idea that we’re doing something,” Baker says. “That’s an important aspect of us humans: ‘At least I’m doing something.’”

05. Take on one thing at a time

It makes sense that “polycrisis” is the phrase de jour – many of the crises we face, from climate change to war to pandemics, are interlinked. And to tackle them, we need to think of them as such. “I tell colleagues that we shouldn’t talk about ‘existential risks’, only ‘existential risk’ for this reason,” Beard says. “However, the important thing is to engage with a problem and work on solving it, not to worry that unless you are solving all of the problems simultaneously then you are getting it wrong. We have to address all of these problems together, but there are more than eight billion of us, so it’s fine if most people don’t worry about everything.”

“If we look at each crisis, where do you start, what do you commit to?” Kennedy-Woodard asks. “For some people, they [only] have room for one cause – and that’s fine. We don’t need everyone fighting every battle because that isn’t sustainable for mental health.”

06. Saving the world sometimes starts with ourselves

“There is a reason they tell you to put your oxygen mask on first before helping others,” Kennedy-Woodard says. “I can’t say it better than Audre Lorde: ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.’”

Kennedy-Woodard suggests spending more time in nature – eg, hiking or forest bathing – which won’t just be a pleasurable activity, but serves as a reminder of what we could potentially lose. “Identifying and then taking time to do what restores you is essential,” she says.

07. Practise Stoicism

“If a war is going to break out, you know what, a war is going to break out,” Baker says. “Rather than be helpless, we have to say, well, what can I bring to this? There is a skill we call resilience, which we could explore. The Stoic philosophers were brilliant at this – not worrying about things we cannot change. But also understanding that things will go wrong. We can pick ourselves up again and learn from what went wrong.”

08. Reach out to those close to you

“Make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world,” the author Oliver Burkeman recently wrote. “The world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.”

“Human connection is the best and only way to deal with our current situation,” Rushkoff agrees. “For me, the best way to ignite connection is to make eye contact. Sounds simple, but it works and it doesn’t have to be scary. Go borrow something from a neighbour. A tool or something you need, but don’t want to go buy. You’ll be surprised how helpful your neighbours want to be.”

“Anxiety loves isolation,” Kennedy-Woodard says. “Find a community that is working on something you are interested in – they are countless and ever popping up around the world. That gives me hope.”

09. History (and time) are on our side

“The Doomsday Clock is still only at 89 second to midnight,” Beard says. “We do have time, we are still here. I work on existential risk, which means I don’t think that human extinction is certain, only that it is possible.”

Beard notes that previous flashpoints – 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis and the arms race of the 1980s – have resulted in the sharpest swings away from disaster. “The good news is that whether it happens or not is up to us, collectively, to decide,” Beard says.

Rushkoff says he leans into existential threat. “How do you want to live what is left?” he asks. “Fighting for scarce resources or living compassionately with everyone else while you still have time? Even if we can’t save the world, we can start delivering palliative care to ourselves and our friends and neighbours. And as we do that, maybe the world doesn’t have to end anymore.”

Read the edited version on MR PORTER