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You graduate college, and the world ends.
Your mother flinches, the first time you say this out loud, and it turns out to be prophetic. No matter who you say it to, people don’t want to accept this proposition.
“The world hasn’t ended yet,” they say, almost to a one. “There’s time to find a solution. The best minds on the planet are working on it.”
But you’re not entirely sure what the difference is. It seems entirely semantic to quibble over whether the world has ended now, or if it is simply ending in slow motion as everyone spends the next twenty or so years rearranging deck chairs on a planet-sized Titanic.
You graduate college, and the president announces that the sun is dying.
Same thing, really, when you get down to it.
The thing about the world ending in slow motion is that you still need to get a job.
You’ve always known people are good at denial, but the years following the announcement are some next-level shit. Coalitions are built that have never been built before, countries that have spent decades on the brink of all-out war suddenly coming together to find a solution. This is the language that all the news outlets are repeating, and it might be the first time in living memory that you google translate news from across the world and find the exact same angle.
It’s all very hush-hush, highly classified, strictly need-to-know, so on and et cetera, but there’s enough people involved that details leak out anyway. Enough for the world to put together a general picture: the best scientists available are all packed together on a big boat somewhere, trying to figure out a way to unfuck the sun.
It is, essentially, a giant, multi-government-funded science playdate.
But the world eats it up. This is, after all, what would happen in a movie, the painfully sincere hopecore sort of thing you’d watch and think, well, that would never happen in real life.
Except it is happening. And because everyone else seems convinced the world is in fact not going to end, life mostly continues to go on as normal.
So you still need to get a job. You still need to get up in the morning and wash your face, still need to drag yourself through enough sets at the gym to keep the physical animal of your body in working order, still need to buy groceries and try to remember to use the produce before it wilts in the crisper drawer.
It feels like denial, except for the big science playdate of it all. Which almost seems worse. Because denial is something the world has seen before, something that slips on with the ease of a well-worn favourite coat. Denial is a muscle the world has spent years bulking up.
And you know what to do with denial. You don’t have the first clue how to deal with desperate, misplaced hope.
Then again, you’re not really sure that what the rest of the world is doing qualifies as dealing with it, either, because the ultimate assumption is still that nothing has to change. That someone somewhere will Figure It Out. That Someone Will Fix It. So maybe it is denial after all—denial with extra steps, or maybe denial lite. One of the two.
And once you figure that out, everything makes sense again. People have been living in denial about the fact that the world is going to end for at least a couple of decades now, through threats first of all-out nuclear war and then climate change. Denial is what keeps the lights on and the world turning. Everything is the same as it’s always been.
So you get a job. And every day you go to the office and you do the work that somehow keeps piling up no matter how much of it you do, and you eat deeply mediocre deli salads for lunch and drink truly incomprehensible amounts of deeply mediocre free coffee, and the sun keeps dying but the world still turns.
Days turn into weeks turn into months, and you start to get it. The world hasn’t ended yet. Life still goes on.
The thing is, that’s definitely worse.
Before, people would sometimes ask you if you’d want to know when you’re going to die. It was only ever a thought experiment, but your reaction was always visceral.
You never would have wanted to know.
And now there is no more thought experiment, there’s only some kind of alien bacteria eating the sun and the knowledge that the world will end. Not with the eventual heat death of the universe, but twenty-odd years from now.
Yeah, that’s worse.
Twenty years feels like it should be a long time, but you sit at your desk with your shitty salad and it hits you that if the latest calculations are correct, you’re basically halfway through your life already. Which is—
A thought you wish you hadn’t had, but here you are.
It is, probably, also the reason you say yes when someone invites you out for drinks after work. It’s not that you’ve been avoiding the semiregular happy hours until now, exactly, but you’d had trouble reconciling the idea of sitting around with people you already sit around with for forty hours a week with the fact that the world is going to end. Work drinks didn’t seem like the way you wanted to spend the remainder of your one wild and precious life.
But it’s not like you’ve been doing much of anything else with it, either, and time is running out faster than you know what to do with. Twenty years is a marathon, but each individual day is a sprint and it feels like you barely blink before another day slips away.
There is not much life left to live, but you’re not quite sure you’ve really been living in the first place.
The bar you go to is just down the street, the kind of place you walk by every day on your way into the office without sparing it a second glance. The bartender waves as people start filing in, expression lighting up like he recognises your coworkers and he’s actually glad to see them, and it’s all so normal you stop walking and just stand there, until someone bumps into you from behind.
You mutter a hasty apology and move on, but your brain is stuck on the bartender and his broad smile. For weeks now, there has been a small voice at the back of your mind, gradually getting louder as it wonders what the fuck the point of anything is.
The world is going to end, so what’s the point of hopping on this quick Teams call? What’s the point of finishing up those sales reports? What’s the point of making an effort to eat enough fruits and vegetables? What’s the point of making friends with local bartenders?
Whats the point of trying so hard, when it’s all just going to end anyway? What’s the point of living?
And it’s a big fucking question, you know that, far too much to put on coworkers you’ve only known for a handful of months, but it spills out of you anyway. The words tumble out as soon as you’re settled into the corner of a worn leather booth, quickfire like they’ve been straining against your teeth and you lost the battle of keeping them inside.
“Do you guys ever wonder what the point is?”
There is silence, blinking, someone cocks their head as if in confusion. You hadn’t expected an extensive philosophical treatise, but the complete lack of reaction is unnerving.
“The point of what?” someone eventually asks, and you realise you have neglected to provide any context for the existential question you just threw out.
“Like,” you start, casting around for words and realising you have no idea where to start. You’ve never had to explain this out loud before.
“I mean,” you try again. “The world is gonna end in like twenty years, right? So what’s the point. Of anything.”
Still, the table is silent, though there’s an edge of concern to it now. Then several people start speaking at once.
“It’s almost thirty years now—”
“Yeah, they’ve been doing that thing with Antarctica—”
“And the Hail Mary is launching soon—”
“Well, soon is an overstatement, but it is launching—”
You frown. “But the Hail Mary is—I mean, it’s literally a hail Mary. Last ditch effort. Right? Whatever it is they’re doing, there’s no guarantee it actually works. So—”
“There’s never really a guarantee, though, is there?” a woman sitting opposite you asks. “Before, there was never any guarantee you wouldn’t get hit by a bus. Hell, there’s still no guarantee you won’t get hit by a bus tomorrow. The point of living is to live.”
“I—” you start, all set to argue, but you find you can’t quite think of anything to say. It seems almost absurd in its simplicity, and you’re sure you could poke holes in it if you really put your mind to it, but nothing you can come up with in the moment can get past the brick wall of the point of living is to live.
“Oh,” you say instead, and someone nudges your glass of wine closer to you. Your fingers curve around the stem but you don’t drink, not yet, mind still pinballing from argument to useless argument.
Conversation starts up again, voices a soft hum around you, but you tune out the specifics. You fiddle with the stem of the wine glass, and you think about the fact that there are no guarantees, and your gaze falls again on the woman sitting across from you.
She’s pretty, something you’ve noticed when you’ve crossed paths at the office but filed away under knowledge that doesn’t matter. How could it matter, on a planet that is hurtling towards a mass extinction event?
But her voice rings in your head, clear as a bell. The point of living is to live. So you look at her, and when she looks up and catches your eye, you do not look away.
Her name is Vivian.
After two weeks with her you understand that you have been alive, but you have barely been living. She reminds you what it is to experience the world without the constant crushing awareness that it is all going to end.
More importantly, she reminds you what it is to have hope that it can go on.
It comes gradually, little bursts of understanding at a time, and you don’t fully realise you are changing your mind until you wake up one day to find that it has already changed. That you have hope for the future, hope for the desperate plans the science playdate has cooked up, hope that in this case, a small handful of people truly can save the entire world.
You tell her this, curled up on the sofa in the apartment you share, watching live footage of the final shuttle launch from somewhere in Kazakhstan. Watching three people get launched into space, knowing the fate of all of humanity rests in their hands.
It’s kind of ridiculous when you think about it, but it’s the only option there is.
“I get it now,” you say, head tucked into her shoulder. “What the point is. What it always has been.”
“Yeah?” she asks. Her hand rests on your ankle, her fingers drawing patterns into your skin. “Hit me.”
“The point is to believe the world is worth saving.”