the.com/end times
The apocalypse: always fifteen years away, every single year, forever.
means The imagined final period of human history, when civilization or the world itself is believed to come to a catastrophic close.
from Rooted in apocalyptic traditions across religions — the Christian Book of Revelation, Zoroastrian frashokereti, Norse Ragnarök — all describing a decisive, final reckoning for the world. The English phrase itself is a plain compound, 'end' plus 'times,' gaining wide circulation through 19th- and 20th-century Christian eschatology and prophecy writing, then drifting into secular use for any looming, civilization-scale doom — climate collapse, nuclear war, AI, take your pick. Every generation supplies its own candidate for the end, and every generation is, so far, wrong.
- origin
- Nearly every religion has its own version
- track record
- Predicted wrong hundreds of times since antiquity
- psychology
- Certainty about chaos feels better than chaos itself
- irony
- Believers keep paying rent anyway