This Is the End of the World

Everything is slipping away and will never return.

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with Church, 1811 (plus a half-drunk Powerade Zero bottle).

I woke up enveloped by the sound of sheets of rain on a tin roof. Thunder grumbles like more sheets of tin wobbled farther away.

The first thing my eyes land on is a half-drunk Purple Powerade Zero. Half-awake, the beauty of the thing mesmerized me. The corrugated plastic was more like impossibly thin glass, turned stained glass in the lower half by the unworldly vibrant purple liquid inside, which rested in perfect stillness like an amethyst, carved platonic geometry only witnessable by royalty up until about a hundred years ago.

Then, as the world beyond the sleep and sheets of rain crept back into my brain, I recognized all this as pretty funny. It’s a Powerade Zero bottle - mass-produced plastic crap soon to be haunting some cursed landfill for the next thousand years.

It is incredible though, looking closely at the thing, really how sharp and faultless and beautiful it is, objectively. You can hardly find the seams to indicate its factory origin. Only modern context tells me that it would be inappropriate to admire it - cynicism is practically mandatory to not be crushed to death by ubiquitous ads for super-stimuli. Pure self-protection has muted my ability to even notice this strange bottle, what would have boggled the imagination only 150 years ago.

We happen to live in a house built in 1885, which contains a very different kind of beauty - hand-hewn wood and irregular iron door handles. Probably, the original builders had not much sense of what we would even appreciate about their little house, so far in the future. Those people would probably be much more amazed by my perfect purple bottle than their noticeably human handy work.

To those people, I’m sure this place was cold, dirty, messy and filled with little upsets, tragedies, and discomforts. What I see here now, though, is their small triumph against the march of time. That they, however incompletely and resentfully, muddled through and made a home. To the extent they managed it, they imbued their faith in the future in the wood and brick. I am the unknown future that enjoys that labour of faith. So, I get to see the beauty in things that, to them, might have seemed mundane: chair molding and time-smoothed planks. By delighting in it, I almost sense their ghosts enjoying their work for the first time, similar to how children have a way of making things new. Though they are long gone and I don’t even know their names, we almost communicate now, to the point where linear causality breaks down, and I’m effecting them ever so slightly to see across the veil: What you’re doing matters beyond what you can know.

Our world, as it exists so mundanely for us today, was the brave new frontier for them. How could they have ever foreseen my wife and I having our first Christmas here in 2025, fixing up their home with the help of supercomputers in our pockets and AI that tells me the best way to deal with lead paint? The heralding of what would slowly become our world was the end of the world for them. Under their feet, despite the hard wood and stone, their whole cosmos was fading away.

To the extent they could sense that, maybe they worried a little less about rising lumber costs or how the neighbor was a drunk or how dreams had been dashed when a brother was killed in the Civil War. Maybe, during this time of year, they could really see each other and realized that one day, very soon, it would be the last time they ever did, here in this place. They may even be able to hope, vaguely, that I sense there was once love here, somehow imbued in the wood-wear or how the shape of a room holds voices.

In this way, the end of the world is the time when things can really come into focus. That’s why we love movies about the apocalypse so much - it’s fun to imagine what it would feel like to really know it was the end.

But, of course, the world is ending. Just like it was for people in 1885, our world is dying to a new world we can’t begin to imagine. We are only ghosts in that world. They can only reach back to us dimly, as if through a dreamy rainstorm wind, trying to show us that despite our temporary grievances, what we made in good faith has persisted into their world in ways we would have never guessed.

This time of year, the end of the world is especially close, as if just across a thin veil. The days are short and it’s cold. Most of the work is done and all the expectations we had for this year are now written on a headstone. Now, it’s only for us to wait and hope new light shines again.

We try to ignore it. The moment a chill hits the air, we are shouting about Christmas and gifts and lights. But Christmas hasn’t come yet, and we all feel that, if we’re honest. On my main street, Mariah’s belt echoing to no one for the 50th time makes the grinning decorations feel like a conga line at a funeral.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in hope. But hope is wasted on the delusional. And love is wasted on those who never realized it is all coming to a quick end. So, hold hands and weep for the short time we had. Let your heart swell with longing that it may last just a little longer.

Only through that sorrow will cynicism finally be stripped away from you, like waking up from a gentle sleep by blankets of apocalyptic rain. Then, you will finally glimpse something mundane, like a Purple Powerade, shine through the eyes of someone 150 years from now; Someone who knows how your world and your story ends. All your unconscious concerns about the bottle - corporate greed, plastic waste, and predatory marketing - all of that is fully resolved history to some stranger in the future, good or bad. All your concerns and worries will die with you, so why live in them now?

The world really is ending; that is most palpable this time of year.

After it is deeply felt, hope might shine like stars in those long cold nights, glimmers from people on the other side: they nudge you through the veil of time, toward what matters, in the end.