The world is coming to an end. Make no mistake about
it, the days are numbered. Where you are, you can’t even
imagine what it will be like when the bottom hits.
Or, to put it differently, the world is always ending.
What comes next is up to us. Every morning we wake
up and sweat and bleed to put an exact duplicate of the
previous day’s world in its place. We need not do this,
but we do, out of fear, or despair, or psychotically de-
luded petty ambition, or sheer stubborn lack of imagi-
nation. At any moment we could all stop paying rent
and going to work—nothing could stop us if we all de-
serted together—and rebuild society from scratch with-
out landlords or loan payments. Heaven knows we’ve
all had that daydream at least once. It’s not police or
politicians that keep the wheels turning and the bodies
burning, it’s our own compliance and complacency, not
to mention lack of faith in each another.

Yet even if we insist on keeping at it, the Disaster is
not sustainable. Capitalism as we know it is not going
to be here in five generations—any environmental
scientist can tell you that. Likewise no one has to argue
for the destruction of the middle class—it’s already
destroyed: it is the class of people laid waste by their
own materialism and duplicity, suffering emotional and
psychological consequences to which any psychiatrist
can attest. It’s no longer a question of whether the
system we grew up in has created the best of all possible
worlds—everybody knows the answer to that question
by now—but of how we’re going to handle the mess next
time the terrorists get through the checkpoints, the fuel
supply runs out, the computers and power plants break
down. Considering other options, trying them out, that’s
not radical—it’s just common sense when the writing is
on the wall.

But are we really going to live to see anything else? Do
we dare hold our breath for another world?
Despite the seriousness of our situation, the future
isn’t one monolithic, inescapable doom. There are several
futures ahead of us, just as today there are people who live
side by side but inhabit different worlds; which one you
live to witness will depend largely on what you do in the
meantime. This nightmare exists precisely to the extent that
we invest ourselves in it—every day we work for it, buy from
it, and stake our lives on it, we are buying into the protection
racket that keeps it the only game in town. Correspondingly,
the world of our dreams exists to the exact degree that we
behave as if we’re already living in it—there’s no other way
it can come to be. The turning point for each individual is
the turning point of society, in miniature. Don’t ask when or
whether that point will come, but how you can reach yours;
if you can get there yourself, everyone else can too.
When you really start to go for it, when your actions
open a bona fide portal to another way of life, others will
come out of hiding and join in. What, did you think you
were the only one going crazy here? It takes an entire
subjugated nation to keep things running, and there are
plenty of others among that number who know how
little they’re getting out of it. They are the millions who
don’t get consulted for newspaper polls, who might
pick you up hitchhiking but never appear on television.
Ten thousand sleeper cells wait for the point of critical
mass to arrive, ready to spring into action with their own
yearnings to breathe free and private scores to settle,
desperate for a war to fight in that really matters, a love
to fall in that can command their attention—killing time
and themselves in the meantime with anorexia and
alcoholism, dead marriages and dead-end jobs. Every
day each of us puts off taking the risks we know we
need to take, waiting for the right moment to come or
for someone else to go first or just feeling too beaten
to try, we have the blood on our hands of every suicide
who couldn’t hold out any longer, every ruined love affair
that couldn’t endure in the vacuum, every sensitive
desperado artist buried inside the corpse of a miserable
service industry employee.
Next time the end of the world comes, we won’t be
paralyzed, watching it on television. We’ll be out there
deciding for ourselves what comes next, cutting down
the transmitter poles with chainsaws if need be to get
others to join us.
It’s not too late to live like there’s no tomorrow—
indeed, all our hope for the future depends on it. Say
your last words now, and start from there with whoever
joins in. Dreams do rebel and come true.

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