Since my parents said it the day I was born.
People who say this is the worst of times (US) and I have to remind them of things like the civil war, ww1, the great depression, ww2, the red scare…
Every time an event reminds us nukes exist.
Quite a lot, feels like over a majority of my life.
Heard it when Y2K was a thing.
Heard it when 9/11 happened.
Heard it when Bush got re-elected.
Heard it when 2012 came.
Heard it when Trump got elected first time.
Seems to be a recurring thing.
If you were raised by Christian fundamentalists (the kind who believed that church was evil), then you also heard it in 1994, and twice in 2011. Two straight years of world-ending predictions. It was fatiguing.
People have been saying the world is ending through all recorded history. At best, it’s more credible now that we have scientific ways, but mostly it’s bellyaching not based in reality.
I suspect old people and their rose-tinted memories might be the reason. If you’re trying to decide if things are worse, better or the same as they used to be, and you just go by hearsay, it’s always going to be skewed towards things getting worse. Then, just extrapolate forward, and the end is neigh.
Empirically things have gotten so much better over living memory in the West it’s not even funny, and things have been more of a random walk over the rest of human history.
Some 25 years at least, that I can remember. Been there for 1999 Nostradamus, 2012 Mayan Calendar, Nibiru or some other rogue planet colliding with the Earth in
2014201520162017Hell, I’ve been waiting for 99942 Apophis to swing by us since Stargate was still on the air. Still got five years left on that one, but 2004 when that was first called out as a concern was the first time I really started contemplating the idea of the actual end of the world, in a bang not a whimper.
Sure, Y2K was supposed to cause some chaos, and 2012 was fun from a “what if magic is real” sort of angle, but everything else has been a gradual dawning realization that the world as we know it is probably going to be gone in my children’s lifetimes – not over yet, but profoundly changed, more difficult, the slow closing of the book on a golden age for humanity we didn’t fully appreciate while we were in it.
Half a century and counting
Since I was a child. Religious nutjobs in and around my family. Then I became an adult and it’s all I see from people in response to news.
It gets old so I try to tune out, remove toxic people, and focus on enjoying my life.
Every time I start a new game in Zomboid.
Christian apocalyptic belief has been poisoning right wing politics in the US for ages now. Things like relations with Israel have been heavily warped by it.
Even the ancient Greeks used to complain that society was devolving. They talked about earlier generations being gold and now they’ve devolved to iron.
Pretty much from the very beginning.
As genx, we all thought we would die like war games, but i don’t remember anyone calling it end times.
*laughs in evangelical upbringing
No kidding.
I remember dad making me read some book proving the end times were here because Saddam was Nebuchadnezzar reborn (the proof was their silhouettes looking similar). So much “whore of Babylon” stuff.
He recently sent me a YouTube video of a guy talking about the valley of Jehoshaphat and Trump heralding the end times.
It never ends.
I grew up with all of these idiotic Nostradamus shows and books that claimed he was foretelling the end of the world in our times. Of course his predictions were so vaguely worded you could slap them anywhere in history.
The book of Revelations is a feast for people who love to interpret symbolism.
My entire life. I grew up attending Christian schools where we were taught that we’re living in the end times.
