The Weight of the Future (Why The Apocalypse Can Be A Relief)
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That may explain why these scenarios have never been all that appealing to me, because I do think about the future in these hypothetical scenarios. I ask myself "Okay, what would the plan be in five years, when the scavenged food has long since run out?" and that feels scary and overwhelming. (Admittedly, rollercoaster scary, since it's a fantasy, but I find myself spending just as much time asking how the hell I'd learn to recreate agriculture and how miserable day-to-day farming would be as I do imagining myself as a badass hero who saves someone from zombies - and that's assuming I survive at all, which is a pretty big if!)
1Hypothetical-you might like exploring abandoned permaculture sites -- scavenge their libraries for knowledge of what's good to forage, and their gardens for delicious food. Perennial food forests are a great hedge against long-term food anxiety.
I thought this was going to be about the AI apocalypse, and the idea that life is pain, so apocalypse would at least be relief from the pain...
I was big into escapist apocalypse fantasy pre-2020, and I'm not any more.
Previously, I pictured the popular apocalypse as destruction of the agency-limiting systems of civilization, which would leave behind post-scarcity amounts (relative to the remaining population) of the agency-enhancing tech of civilization. It's basically the best of both worlds, if you survive -- you get most of the material benefits of centuries of industrialization if you're resourceful about it, without the individual limitations necessary for participating in the continuation of the industrial economy.
The other appeal of many apocalypse scenarios, which is highly impolitic to discuss in mixed company, is the population drop. I think there's a widely held intuition that modern life involves way more humans than our brains historically ever had to cope with. Fantasies about disconnection from the internet -- getting stranded on a tropical island with a good group, or similar -- address this problem from a less globally lethal angle as well.
The fantasy of a world in which an individual or small group functions (explores, rebuilds) independently might stem from the American cultural mythos of "wild west" exploration, and seems to also underlie the appeal of open world games where you're either the only person or the most powerful/agentic person in the world that you're aware of.
Post-2020, it's lost the appeal for me, though. Turns out my escapist fantasies were based on assumptions about humans' underlying pro-social proclivities that didn't actually play out when stress tested.
2020 - and the pandemic in general - seems to have been a bit of a watershed moment for figuring out certain things about human nature and society in general for me as well.
I also like your characterization of post-apocalyptic fantasy as getting all the benefits of a modern technical civilization with none of the people-driven drawbacks.
Interesting exploration, I wonder how to measure the frequency and impact of such daydreams. I share some of them, but recognize the escapist nature - it doesn't impact my activities any more than, say, reading fiction or watching entertainment (which is to say - non-zero impact, but not central to my beliefs).
I don't agree with your thesis about the CAUSE of such fantasies being pleasant. Some of it is a relief of responsibility - in an apocalypse, it's not your FAULT that people are suffering and dying. You can't do anything meaningful for them, so you don't have to feel bad for not doing so. But, somewhat contradictory to that, it's also attractive because in the fantasies the protagonist is much more clearly the major heroic agent of the story/world. EVERYONE ELSE is either evil or non-agentic. This satisfies a deep desire to be important.
All such fantasies seem to be "personal success in the face of an apocalypse", not "actual suffering and death along with everything you love" style of apocalypse.
While the zombie apocalypse is popular, I'd say an asteroid strike/supervolcano/other no-fault apocalypses convey a similar sense of relief.
That being said, I do strongly agree with the "heroic fantasy" angle.
I don't agree with your thesis about the CAUSE of such fantasies being pleasant.
I'm not sure I'd characterize the relief as pleasant, at least not in a positive sense. It's a removal of bad things (stressors), not an addition of good things. The cause of said fantasies is a desire to avoid feeling one's current burdens, by imagining a situation in which they don't exist.
I share your disagreement with the original author as to the cause of the relief. For me, I find the modern day and age very confusing and difficult to measure one's value to society. Any great idea you can think of, probably someone else has thought of it, and you have little chance to be important. In a zombie apocalypse, instead of thinking how to out-compete your fellow man with some amazing invention, you fall back to survival. Important things in this world, like foraging for food, fending off zombies, etc, have quicker reward, and it's easier in some sense to do what's right. Even if you're not the best at it, surely you can be a great worker, and there's little uncertainty that you're not doing more harm than good... just don't be stupid and call the horde. Sure, sometimes people do horrible things for survival, but if you want to be the hero, the choice is much clearer.
I'd say the bigger reason people like to think that some apocalypse is going to happen in the future is because we have a bias towards viewing things negatively, even if they mislead us. In particular, we have a tendency to believe that today is a wasteland according to our values, compared with the past, which naturally is drawn to golden ages. Unfortunately, those golden ages were fictional, not real, and even from at least some people's values, things have improved, not declined.
The archived article is below:
One implication is that one should treat things going worse claims as less evidence than things are going better claims, and in particular there's an a priori reason to distrust negative claims but not positive claims.
This is a part of why I suspect AI existential risk is wrong, and negativity bias is why I suspect people would fall for a false existential risk claim.
I broadly agree that we're biased towards the past and against the future, although I think a large part of the latter is that we don't like the uncertainty involved in it.
While the AI debate is well beyond the scope of this post, I will say that I would expect the future to continue getting weirder the more non-human processing capability exists, and I personally don't expect this weirdness to be survivable past a certain threshold.
More generally, one of the implications is that one should expect negative news to be less informative than positive news, since there's probably a gap between the negative things in reality, and the negative news you are hearing, and that there's more negativity in your information sources than exists in real life.
Related: sometimes when I'm driving to do something stressful/unpleasant, I'll think to myself, "Man, if I got in a car crash right now I wouldn't have to do X."
I've had similar experiences. It seems odd, but sometimes a crash can seem like a better option than takin g a test or attending an unpleasant family dinner.
It isn't, but the thought can be tempting.