If you’re both young and healthy with a life expectancy of several more decades, then you have a not unlikely chance that twenty, thirty, maybe forty years hence you will die in a food or fire, a famine, or from some novel virus, in a refugee camp or drone attack from an authoritarian government. Abandon comforting fantasies of living into your ninth decade, expiring on your deathbed surrounded by loved ones, looking back on a life with few regrets while facing the unknown fearlessly. Much of the world already expects a violent demise for themselves; anyone reading this needs to also get used to that feeling. Armageddon has always been happening somewhere; as this century progresses, we’ll just see apocalypse become globalized. If attuned to the recent changes in temperature—both figurative and literal—maybe you already have distressing premonitions about your fate, the fate of most of the people now reading this. Because on every major score—the political, the social, or the economic, Christ knows the environmental—the future will be worse than the recent past.
Ours is the era to have seen the resurgence of massive pandemics and violent ground wars, of increasing economic stratification and rising international authoritarianism, all of which harken to the most barbaric periods of the twentieth century, except our present is also dominated by the existential crisis of climate change. If epistemic doom is the tenor of our times, then the name of our age is the apocalyptic present, for this is an era in which regular definition of past and future no longer hold, a moment in which one must look back to the Bronze Age collapse or the fall of the Western Roman Empire to find anything similar (and neither of those were marked by the same profound environmental changes we see today). Searching for a term to describe the current predicament, we can draw from the gravitas of grand rhetoric or the high-brow obscurations of academic jargon, but maybe it is far better to pick a term universally understood, and that is to say that we’re collectively, irredeemably, and totally fucked. No better word encapsulates this moment.
If, for the past several decades, most who lived comfortably in what was at one time called the first world were able to ignore the signs of eventual civilizational and ecological collapse, the events of the previous decade have made such an incipient fate impossible to ignore now. Even while mass media and Western politicians obscured the true severity of our predicament, whether by false optimism or outright denial, the wider culture in literature, music, film, and so on has often been able to detect the faint vibrations of the four horsemen’s hooves as they beat their way toward us from the darkening redness in the West. E. Ann Kaplan describes pop culture’s prescience in Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, suggesting that “cultures may now be entering a new era in which pretrauma is pervasive in the public sphere. In this new era, media of all kinds—journalism, the Internet, television, film, and literature—offer catastrophic future scenarios.”
My own pretrauma was expressed during the time of Hurricane Sandy by listening to Arcade Fire’s 2010 pre-apocalyptic album The Suburbs, for as Win Butler sang, “Even in the half-light / we can see that something’s gotta give.” When that record came out, I was writing a dissertation about seventeenth-century apocalyptic narratives, but it was the melancholic lyrics on The Suburbs which spoke directly to what I was beginning to observe in that decade when the unravelling began to accelerate. Butler prophetically describes our “dead star collapsing,” the sense that “something was ending.” The Suburbs bears witness to the apocalyptic present by speaking of epistemic doom, our thrumming anxiety that remains just beneath the surface, felt by a multitude but frequently obscured by the official line. What I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is that the album made me feel less alone. “Tough we knew this day would come,” Butler sings, “Still it took us by surprise.”
Because any fair and honest accounting of our current situation must lead to admitting that the world is dying, which demands a response from all of us, including the theorists and critics, artists and writers. That we’re facing an apocalypse is clear not just to climatologists, but also to Cassandras in political science, epidemiology, computer science, philosophy, and most importantly, regular people who exist in the regular world and are witness to the reality that something is happening. In matters social, political, cultural, and especially environmental, there is an accurately felt deficit of optimism, a broad consensus that we’re currently amid an unprecedented, existential, global crisis. On fronts political, economic, and environmental, we are barreling toward an abyss. All the threats we face are interrelated, bolstering each other and encouraging what so often feels like the inevitability of civilizational collapse. This is the “polycrisis,” a term popularized by the British historian Adam Trooze who writes in a 2022 issue of the Financial Times that in the “polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.” Economist Paul Krugman calls it the Great Unravelling in a 2003 collection of essays about the nascent George W. Bush administration.4 Maybe it’s a better turn of phrase than Krugman could have anticipated, because beyond the corruption, incompetence, and malice of the forty-third president’s administration, “Great Unraveling” is a pithy description of our undeniable entropy, of the teleological slide into collapse whose signs are obvious. We are stalked by four horsemen, and their names are pandemic, authoritarianism, technocracy, and climate change. Their children are war, meaninglessness, and collapse.
The contours of our future—whether we can even have a future—must be imagined before anything else. To that end, this book is a modest entry in that venerable genre of ars poetica, an argument for the relevance of thinking, arguing, expressing, imagining, and writing during these hazy late days of the Anthropocene. This will be accomplished by compiling separate syllabi for four different types of calamities—the epidemiological, militaristic, technological, and climatological—with the intent of demonstrating how women and men in the past have responded to similar contexts. Each of the four chapters is named after a respective horseman of the apocalypse as borrowed from the biblical book of Revelation, so that now the white horse refers to pandemics of disease, the red horse to militarism and authoritarianism, the black horse to unfettered technology, and that final pale horse to climate change, ecological devastation, and the Anthropocene. The first section of each chapter is dedicated to a theoretical, cultural, and literary analysis of a particular chapter’s subject, while the second half of a chapter is dedicated to a personal consideration of that chapter’s subject that was written while pertinent current events unfolded, as a kind of journalistic first draft of history. At the start of each one of these “letters,” I indicate both its date of composition and the location in which it was written, the variety of the latter indicating some of the peripatetic nature of employment for a young scholar in this century. In his charming and perceptive The Anthropocene Reviewed, novelist Adam Greene explains that he “wanted to write about some of the small places where my small life runs into the large forces of the Anthropocene,” and that’s my own goal as well, to express a little of our apocalypse from my own limited perspective, hopefully elucidated through a critical understanding.
Because my book is written from a subjective perspective about what it means to live and write during this particular historical juncture, it is by necessity even more individual and idiosyncratic than a conventional scholarly work would be. As much as this is a work of scholarship, it’s maybe more a personal work by somebody trained in scholarship, marshalling the tools of theory and reference, quotation and research, to try and make sense of the current apocalyptic predicament in its collective implications and its personal effects. Calling autotheory a “pragmatic new form,” Tasha Haines in Redemptive Hybridism in Post-Postmodern Writing describes how discursive, theoretically infected memoir “has a ring of ingenuity about it—of composing terrain in a space where there is formerly none.” In that spirit, I’d suggest that any writing from within apocalypse must by necessity be in the first person if it’s to be commensurate with its subject. Because what I want to convey is urgency, and a particularly personal urgency at that.
Throughout Writing During the Apocalypse I will marshal those references that convey how irredeemably fucked we might be, but ultimately I take that reality as a matter of course; what I want to describe is the barometric drop that is hypernormalization, the widespread feeling of epistemic doom which I define as the sense among people that the world is ending, but with an uncertainty as to how and when exactly it will do so. That is the emotional tenor of our times—a spiritual tenor of our age. What is required, then, is this set of aforementioned syllabi for the end of the world. As such, each chapter (themed around Revelation’s horseman) will focus on an aspect of our current collapse while being composed of a critical section and then a number of autotheoretical sections written as missives during the midst of particular historical events. As a work of personal cultural criticism, as a work of autotheory, what I intend to do in Writing During the Apocalypse is to not just make a series of observations about the polycrisis we’re in the midst of (or maybe more accurately toward the end of), but rather to make a defense of the humanities—a defense of writing—when it seems that the world is ending. To do so by way of example and way of curation. I’m cognizant that such an ars poetica could easily degenerate into naval-gazing myopia, into the apolitical quietism content to tend a small plot of land which is the author’s garden while the world burns. Even worse, in some ways, would be a retreat into gauzy, saccharine sentimentalism that proffers literature as balm, palliative, mere chicken soup for the doomed soul. As something inspirational. If I should accidentally court such a position—and perhaps it’s inevitable—please show me forbearance. Perhaps by the time you read this book, the surprise of the end will have abated. If you’re one of those people on the other shore, I wish you could let me know how we did.
From Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unravelling Used with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic. Copyright © 2026 by Ed Simon.
