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For years we’ve dryly joked the world is ending, but not everyone who says the seas are rising due to climate change is buying waterfront property on Martha’s Vineyard. A large and growing community of people genuinely believe we’re all about to die, and they’ve found each other on the internet. Their position is simple: global warming means apocalypse in our lifetime, and probably within the next few years. The only question left is how to live — or die, if we so decide to make that noble choice — with the time we have left.
A gripping portrait of a surreal phenomenon that perfectly embodies our present moment. Sanjana Friedman reports.
Image: Children of Men
Kevin was 23 when he realized the world was ending. “I called my mom and was like, we gotta sell our property and move to Alaska, we need to get to a haven where, even if things got really warm — like super warm — we can still survive.” At the time he was in his final year of college, completing a degree in Environmental Engineering and writing an essay on water resource management. “I started to read about the potential of abrupt climate change from a cascade of positive feedback loops in the Arctic and stumbled across the YouTube videos of a dude named Guy McPherson who has, like, these literal timeframes where by 2026, the lights are off and there’s almost no people left,” Kevin said. He shared his concerns with professors and peers, but few listened. “No one had any sort of inclination that this was a possibility, there was no discussion of the worst-case scenario, they would just brush it all under the rug.” He bounced between evangelizing non “collapse-aware” friends and family and wallowing in anxiety. He grieved the loss of the future he had always imagined for himself — a long career, fatherhood, a nice house on a big plot of land. He stockpiled canned foods and planned for the coming chaos.
And then he turned to Reddit.
Though the almost 25,000 members of the subreddit r/collapsesupport come from vastly different educational, cultural, and financial backgrounds, they are unified by one shared conviction: things are bad — maybe as bad as they’ve ever been — and they’re going to get a lot worse, a lot faster than most people think. Officially the subreddit presents itself as “a dedicated place for thoughtful discussion about the state of the world as it stands today and how we are coping,” but, in practice, Kevin suggests it acts as a kind of r/suicidewatch for the collapse-aware. Unlike its sister subreddit r/collapse, whose almost 500,000 members mainly share news stories about environmental and social turmoil, r/collapsesupport is specifically for people to vent their fear and anger about what they see as the impending breakdown of civilization.
