The End of the World Has Happened Before: Collective Wisdom for Existential Dread
- Linda Kinning
- 1 minute ago
- 8 min read
Trigger warning: I'm about to talk about religion. Not in the theological way, but in the anthropological humanist way. Whatever your background or bias, check it here and stay open to one of the oldest technologies at our disposal.
How Do We Live Through This? Ask Those Who Already Have
I am weary. I am tired. I am scared.
The fears of the next decade are manifold and terrifying: an uninhabitable planet, rising fascism, AI technologies that tear apart the fabric of society and make billionaires richer at the expense of everyone else.
I'm crushed by the weight of uncertainty and chaos. In my worst moments, I feel paralyzed with the overwhelming sense of "HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO LIVE LIKE THIS??" It feels profoundly unfair—like I didn't get to do the carefree "fucking around" part of life, but I'm definitely going to "find out" the consequences.
And yet, I'm reminded that generations before us have lived through equally tumultuous times. Humanity has felt the world end again and again and again. Civilizations have collapsed, empires have fallen, plagues have decimated populations, and people have somehow continued to live through what felt like the end of their worlds.
So what can our collective elders teach us about living in this time?
Some people turn to religion in uncertain times, finding comfort in faith—and that works wonderfully for them. What I'm turning to instead is the collected wisdom of my fellow humans who have lived before me. This is where I want to examine religion from: not as a believer seeking salvation, but as a human seeking practical wisdom from other humans who've navigated existential uncertainty before me.
Religion's Best Hack: Making Chaos Manageable
Without advocating for religious belief itself, we can examine religion anthropologically as humanity's original "social technology" for managing uncertainty and existential dread. This approach aligns with philosopher Alain de Botton's work in "Religion for Atheists," where he argues that "the most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true." Instead, de Botton suggests we examine what religions do well and how their practices might be repurposed for secular life. Throughout human history, religions have functioned as sophisticated systems for:
Making Sense of the Incomprehensible: Ancient Egyptian mythology explained the daily rebirth of the sun as Ra's journey through the underworld. Norse mythology interpreted natural disasters as the struggles of gods like Thor against chaos-bringing giants. The Aztec cosmology required human sacrifice to ensure the sun would continue to rise. Each system provided explanatory frameworks when natural phenomena seemed random and terrifying.
Organizing Social Structures: The Code of Hammurabi in Babylon (c. 1754 BCE) intertwined religious authority with legal code, creating social order through divine mandate. Similarly, Confucianism in China provided detailed guidelines for proper relationships between ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife—organizing society through ritual propriety (li) rather than through unpredictable force.
Creating Meaning During Suffering: Buddhism emerged in response to the problem of suffering, offering the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path as technology to transform suffering into liberation. Job's story in Hebrew scripture grapples directly with undeserved suffering. These systems didn't eliminate suffering but provided frameworks to metabolize it into meaning.
Building Social Cohesion: The Hajj in Islam brings together millions from diverse backgrounds in shared ritual, reinforcing communal bonds across boundaries. The potlatch ceremonies of indigenous Northwest Coast cultures redistributed wealth and established social relationships. These practices weren't merely spiritual but functioned as sophisticated social technologies that built resilience against external threats.
Historical evidence demonstrates how these technologies activated during times of extreme uncertainty:
During the Black Death (1347-1351), which killed 30-60% of Europe's population, religious flagellant movements emerged as collective responses to inexplicable suffering.
The Ghost Dance movement spread among Native American tribes in the 1890s as their traditional ways of life faced existential threats from American expansion.
In post-WWII Japan, new religious movements like Soka Gakkai gained millions of followers as people sought to rebuild meaning after devastating defeat.
During the Cold War, religious participation in America surged as nuclear annihilation loomed as a possibility.
Anthropologist Roy Rappaport described religion as humanity's "basic social act," arguing that ritual preceded even language as a way for early humans to coordinate behavior and reduce uncertainty in group interactions. Sociologist Émile Durkheim identified religion as the foundation of social cohesion through "collective effervescence"—shared emotional experiences that bind individuals into communities.
Time-Tested Patches for Your Existential Dread
De Botton argues that religions excel at "the organization of community, the transmission of wisdom, and the promotion of gratitude, compassion and charity"—precisely the qualities needed to face existential threats collectively. Examining these systems as social technologies rather than matters of faith reveals crucial lessons for navigating our current predicaments:
1. Shared Narratives Create Collective Agency
Religious traditions excel at creating shared narratives that enable collective action. The Jewish Exodus story inspired civil rights activists. Liberation theology in Latin America mobilized resistance against oppression. Quaker spiritual equality principles fueled early feminist and abolitionist movements.
Humanist Application: In facing climate crisis and technological disruption, we need compelling narratives that transcend political divides and enable coordinated response. The stories we tell about our relationship to technology, nature, and each other will determine whether we can mobilize effectively against existential threats.
2. Ritual Creates Psychological Resilience
Religious practices like Sabbath observance (across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) create protected time outside economic productivity. Zen tea ceremonies transform mundane actions into opportunities for mindfulness. Shinto purification rituals (misogi) provide psychological renewal through symbolic cleansing.
Humanist Application: In our hyperconnected world of constant crisis, we need secular rituals that protect psychological space from constant emergency. Regular digital sabbaths, community meals, seasonal observances, and civic ceremonies can anchor us against the psychological fragmentation of the attention economy.
3. Values Hierarchies Provide Decision Frameworks
Religious traditions establish clear hierarchies of value. In Jainism, ahimsa (non-violence) takes precedence above all. In Christianity, agape (selfless love) becomes the highest virtue. In Taoism, alignment with the natural way (wu-wei) supersedes human ambition.
Humanist Application: Facing AI development, climate crisis, and demographic shifts requires clear value frameworks. What matters most? Human dignity? Biodiversity? Democratic access? Without explicit value hierarchies, we default to prioritizing economic metrics alone, leaving deeper values undefended.
4. Transgenerational Thinking Expands Time Horizons
Religious traditions operate on expanded time scales. Indigenous Australian Dreamtime connects present actions with ancient ancestors and future descendants. Seventh Generation Principle in Iroquois decision-making requires considering impacts seven generations forward. Buddhist practices contemplate the vast wheel of rebirth spanning eons.
Humanist Application: Our current crises require thinking beyond quarterly profits and election cycles. Climate adaptation, technological governance, and social infrastructure demand perspectives spanning centuries, not quarters. Religious time-scales offer models for expanding our temporal imagination.
5. Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty
Zen Buddhism embraces paradox through koans like "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Jewish Talmudic tradition preserves contradictory interpretations side by side. Taoist yin-yang symbolism recognizes that opposites contain each other.
Humanist Application: Our greatest challenges involve complex systems where simple solutions fail. The paradoxes of AI (freedom requires constraints, progress creates vulnerability) and climate action (we must transform while preserving) require comfort with cognitive dissonance and provisional knowledge.
6. Transformative Practice Over Intellectual Assent
Across traditions, religion is something you do, not merely believe: the Muslim practice of salat (prayer five times daily), Hindu yoga as embodied spiritual discipline, Christian communion as participatory remembrance. Transformation comes through practice, not intellectual agreement.
Humanist Application: Facing existential threats requires more than intellectual understanding or emotional concern. Regular practices of civic engagement, sustainable living, and ethical technology use build capacity for collective action. The practices we perform repeatedly shape who we become more than the values we intellectually endorse.
7. Holding Both Destruction and Creation
Hindu cosmology envisions Shiva simultaneously as destroyer and creator—recognizing that endings make room for beginnings. The Jewish Kabbalistic concept of "breaking the vessels" acknowledges that sometimes structures must break for deeper repair. Indigenous fire management practices recognize that controlled burns prevent catastrophic destruction.
Humanist Application: Our industrial, economic, and social systems require significant transformation. Some institutions and practices must end for new possibilities to emerge. Religious frameworks offer models for navigating necessary endings with wisdom rather than clinging to unsustainable patterns or embracing nihilistic destruction.
Collective Code for Surviving the End Times
The challenges before us require integrating the wisdom of our ancestors with the unprecedented realities of our time. As Alain de Botton notes, "Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone." Religious systems developed over thousands of years to address the fundamental human problems of meaning, cooperation, and resilience in the face of uncertainty. They succeeded long enough for us to inherit their lessons.
While fundamentalism offers false certainty and secular nihilism accepts paralysis, a humanist approach can extract the social technologies of religion without requiring supernatural belief. We need not adopt religious cosmologies to benefit from religion's hard-won insights into human psychology and social cohesion during crisis.
De Botton observes that secular society has struggled "to find a successful replacement for many of the calming and organizational structures of faith," leaving us ill-equipped for the existential challenges we now face. Yet by approaching religion as a reservoir of social technologies rather than supernatural claims, we can access these tools without abandoning our contemporary understanding of the world.
Perhaps the most profound lesson from religious traditions is that weathering uncertainty is inherently a collective project. No religious practice is designed to be experienced in isolation—even seemingly individual practices like meditation or prayer ultimately connect the practitioner to a larger community, tradition, or purpose.
Starting Points: No Cheat Codes, Only Through
I desperately want to have concrete answers. I found myself looking over my bookshelves today, searching for titles that felt like holy texts that could tell me what to do. For a meditation or prayer that could reset my settings. But there are no cheat codes. The only way is through.
So I'm trying a few different things:
I'm turning off my phone on Shabbat and not reading the news for those 24 hours. This small ritual creates a container where the world isn't ending, even if just for a day.
I'm trying to sit on the floor and make space for my grief instead of doomscrolling. Letting myself feel the full weight of what's happening rather than numbing it with endless content.
I'm walking daily and measuring time by how many trees I've passed rather than the calendar pings until my next appointment. Reconnecting with natural cycles that existed before and will exist after our current crises.
I want to plan a funeral for all the hopes I had for my government and to share that grief and anger with others so that we can move through it together. Ritual helps us metabolize what feels too big to process alone.
I'm trying to be humble and soft and small and remind myself that change is the only constant. I am not responsible for healing the whole world—but neither am I free from the responsibility to do my part.
These aren't grandiose solutions. They're small, human-scale practices that acknowledge both my limitations and my agency. They're what religion has always offered: not escape from uncertainty, but ways to live within it with grace and connection.
If you're feeling crushed by uncertainty as I am, perhaps the starting point isn't finding the perfect answer, but finding people willing to sit in the uncertainty with you. A "Tech Shabbat" with friends. A grief ritual for what's being lost. A commitment to tend something that will outlive you. A regular practice of noticing beauty amidst destruction.
The world as we've known it may indeed be ending, as worlds have ended before. But throughout human history, communities that developed robust social technologies for uncertainty have shown extraordinary resilience. The very act of coming together around these practices begins to address the paralyzing isolation that makes existential threats feel unbearable.
Our individual anxiety about the future—that crushing weight of uncertainty I feel in my worst moments—transforms when shared and held collectively. This may be religion's greatest wisdom: we were never meant to face apocalypse alone.
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