The Draw of Doomsday

In the past couple years, the concept of the apocalypse has become this unique alluring concept through media; it’s a common theme in television shows, novels, music, and merchandise.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, an apocalypse is “an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale”. Meaning, you and I would most likely be dead. These “apocalyptic fantasies” would not come to fruition. Knowing this, why do people continue to plan for or dream about a world-wide apocalypse?

The Apocalypse Appeal

There’s actually quite a bit of psychology behind the reason why people entertain ideas of an apocalypse. Some of us have an appetite for worldly destruction because of the so-called self-fulfilling prophecy. An apocalypse would simplify life; no more worrying about taxes or sending out Christmas cards, only survival. As individuals, we have the desire to feel special, or, above average, and the knowledge that you are one of the few to survive the beginnings of an apocalypse seems to make some people feel special and the “hero of their own story”, so to speak.

Our personal identities largely relate to our relationships with others as well as our surroundings. In an apocalypse, your title (teacher, co-worker, child, blogger, etc.) goes out the window pretty quickly. There are no longer ethical and unethical rules.

Perhaps these are a few of the reasons why your neighbor has built a bomb shelter or a zombie trap in his basement. The term “survivalist” has become more prevalent as talk about the apocalypse increases. Some find comfort in the idea of doomsday, as there’s a growing belief that something is very wrong with human existence today, and with an apocalypse (meaning, something to really shake things up) a sense of hope for a better and new future emerges.

Talk of the apocalypse has gone from good fun to obsession. I’m guilty of it too; a few months ago I went on a date that involved a couple hours talking about plans for the zombie apocalypse and our respective survival plans. Life can seem cumbersome and dull at times, but it’s important to note that you don’t have to worry about zombies when you’re on the toilet or sleeping at night. Let’s just keep the apocalypse in the media and out of real life, shall we?

“I laugh at your claims to bravely take on a zombie apocalypse when most of you can’t stand up to a spider.” -unknown

Further reading:

• How to Survive an Apocalypse WikiHow
• How to Survive Post-Apocalypse
• Underground Bunkers & Survival Shelters
• Can You Survive a Zombie Apocalypse? A Quiz

Do Solipsists Buy Life Insurance?

How do you know that other entities and objects exist around you? Perhaps your phone is an illusion. That lunch you just had–another illusion.

Solipsism is the idea that nothing exists, other than one’s mind. The French philosopher Descartes attempted in the 1600s to discover what was real, and what was not. He developed the premise that he would not believe anything, as he thought the “real” was a demon tricking him. So, he ventured down the path of doubt, doubting both the world and himself. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that if you doubt your own existence, you’re thinking, and therefore, you exist. (Hence the phrase, “I think therefore I am”.) So then, if nothing exists, what’s the point in buying life insurance? Or any insurance, for that matter?
But, it seems, many of us are not Solipsism. We care about life, sickness, death, an afterlife in some of our cases…you know, all that good human stuff. Namely, ‘three minutes to midnight’.

I’ve been hearing that phrase an awful lot since the start of 2016. Perhaps it’s because the creators of the Doomsday Clock decided to move the metaphorical minute hand up two minutes from last year. What does that even mean? Other than the Linkin Park album, minutes to midnight had no meaning to me, until the recent uproar began.

Get this: this Doomsday Clock doesn’t gauge anything measurable. This “symbolic clock face” represents the countdown to nuclear warfare and global warming, and each year, it can move forward or backwards. Created in 1947 by contributors to the Manhattan Project on the Science & Security board, the “clock” was originally set to ‘seven minutes to midnight’ (the choice of that number was not even remotely scientific).

Perhaps it’s our tendency to convert everything into metric calculations. Or perhaps it’s just a bunch of apocalypticism. The creators even devised their own website, thebulletin.org, which is full of lucrative charts and graphics detailing the looming collapse of the planet.

The reason, apparently, for the change in ‘five minutes to midnight’ to three was the following:

“Uunchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals”-The Bulletin

…Ok. It’s all just based on a hypothetical threat, and when hasn’t there been one of those? Doomsday has always been a fascinating concept to us, and what this clock truly measures is worry. (Worried as in, how worried the Bulletin Science & Security members are.) Don’t believe me? Well, not only was the clock not based in science, but it also put itself in a corner. We have an entire fifty-seven minutes of backpedaling, but only another three minutes of forward movement. So what happens if it’s ‘one minute to midnight’ in 2017? Will we start to inch forward into the seconds?

I’m definitely not a Solipsist. But I will agree on the fact that the Doomsday Clock is one thing that just doesn’t exist.

Carnivorous Cadavers

A naked man was caught on the Miami highway eating the face of another man.

An actor killed a man in Canada, dismembered the body, and ate it’s flesh.

A man in Maryland reportedly ate the heart and brain of his roommate.

Is this a dog-eat-dog world, or a human-eat-human world? While these may be cases of mental illness that led to cannibalism, we can’t help but have the image of zombies pop into our minds with these scenarios. Cannibalism isn’t listed in the DSM, and it isn’t directly against the law. While there are no outright laws banning the consumption of human flesh, these incidents are usually go along with murder, necrophilia, or desecration of corpses. This begs the question: do zombies actually exist? No matter the answer, why is mankind so obsessed with them?

The Homo antecessor, the connection between neanderthals and humans, were cannibals. Eventually, through evolution, humans developed hunting techniques to eat other animals since consuming one another was not a sustainable food source.

Now, the difference between our ancestors and zombies is that a zombie is known as “undead”. Technically speaking, a zombie is a human body in which the consciousness is deceased and the bare biological systems are restarted. In short, it’s clinically dead. People are often reported as clinically dead only to be revived later. In a sense, they too have been brought back from the dead, but with their consciousness intact. To be deemed “alive”, an organism must react to stimuli and have functioning metabolic processes. So if zombies perform both of these tasks, are they truly dead?

A zombie is nothing more than a pathogen controlling a human meat suit. These creatures tend to have a criteria of their own: stimulus-response including the consumption of flesh, they continuously decompose, and are contagious via bodily fluids.

So again, I ask, why are we obsessed with the zombie apocalypse? Is it because these creatures were originally human, or, still human? Also, could a zombie apocalypse actually happen? It’s unlikely. The classic zombie pathogen is extremely complex and could never occur in nature unless it was engineered by humans themselves. Every feature of the pathogen exists separately in a rudimentary form, thus providing the building blocks that could be combined to form a possible outbreak. These individual features would have to be strengthened, recombined, and honed into one doomsday plague.

While the threat of a zombies knocking on your front door is zero to none, “zombie apocalypse” is still one of the most common searches on Google. After a few seasons of watching The Walking Dead, many people aren’t all that afraid of zombies. In a recent survey, 40% of respondents said they would fight back if facing a zombie, compared to the 12% that would wait it out or the 9% that would hide in a shelter (source).

Zombies have become familiar to us. Tons of us have dressed as zombies for Halloween, many have danced like a zombie to the iconic song Thriller, and some mornings, we even claim to feel like a zombie. We know zombies. They range from hilarious to terrifying, but either way, they’re made from us, they’re part of us. They remind us of morality, decay, and the fragility of our existence. On an even darker note, they remind us of how inhuman a human can become.

Luckily, unlike most zombie stories, in a real scenario, zombie-on-zombie cannibalism combined with bodily decay would eventually wipe out the zombies and save the human race from total annihilation. With a combination of quarantine and evasiveness, the human race will survive.

But either way, be sure to guard your braaaaaaiiiiiiins.