DO you ever think about what would happen if the world ended?
To some it might look like the planet erupting in a ball of flames, or mobs of rogue thugs running the streets, maybe the island would sink overnight in some people’s minds or the ground wouldn’t produce any more food.
On the flip side, perhaps the end of the world is a good thing, and the ones who choose to believe it would ascend a marble staircase into a bright white light.
Whatever your view of the end of the world, and however convinced you are of its imminence, turns out you are not alone in those catastrophic thoughts – a comforting message presented by journalist and comedy writer Tom Phillips in his recently published non-fiction novel ‘A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World’.
Asked why he decided to delve into the existential topic in the fourth book of his ‘A Brief History’ series, which is an area he’ll explore further during his appearance at this year’s Jersey Festival of Words, Mr Phillips explained he had always been fascinated by the subject thanks to his childhood in the sci-fi loving 80s.
“The 80s had a sort of background hum of nuclear paranoia and then somewhere in the 90s, we weren’t all concerned about it quite as much but then it came write back with climate change,” he explained.
“So, the end of the world has always really been there [for me].”
But the author said what really spurred him to take a closer look at what turned out to be a continuing ironic trend of the idea came from the previous book in his series, which explores conspiracy theories largely based in the American right wing.
“I started to notice that almost all of them [conspiracy theories] had apocalyptic beliefs in them and that the two things were really closely connected,” Mr Phillips said.
But what took him by surprise the most was how present ideas of the apocalypse still are – in the final chapters, for example, he touches on the rise of climate advocacy group Extinction Rebellion.
“There are people for whom [the end of the world] is actively driving their worldview, their politics and is actually making a big contribution to the state of the world today,” Mr Phillips explained.
The timing of pitching his novel to publishers was near perfect, he noted, as it coincided with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which only increased its relevance.
“Talk of possible imminent nuclear conflict was really on the front pages of all the papers [at the time], he said.
“So, this sense that the end of the world had been lurking in the background was suddenly at the front of everybody’s mind.”
Considering its catastrophic – and, at times, violent and sadistic – contents, readers should be assured that The End of the F*cking World is not a depressing read.
In fact, the consistency of belief systems that have plagued certain communities around the world for millennia led the author to construct the narrative to view the concerns we have today with hilarious irony.
“They were all wrong,” Mr Phillips said.
“It’s not that it takes away from the completely reasonable and legitimate fears that we all have today, but it does give you a slight check to your more despairing thoughts, because these people were equally certain [the world would end],” he added.
Even if our predictions of inevitable doom are correct, Mr Phillips said he aimed for the book to discuss the best way to act in those situations.
“Even if we do face catastrophe, despair isn’t helpful in that situation. We’ve made it through a lot of terrible things in the past. So, [the novel] is a reminder that, however bad things are getting, we can get through it.”
However, as the novel describes, that message did not quite get through to people in the 15th century. Even though humanity has learned a lot since, the novel also highlights how strikingly similar our apocalyptic fears remain to those of our ancestors – we just express them through different means, like the news or social media.
The fact that ‘the apocalypse’ as a concept has persisted so strongly over time signals that it is deeply embedded in our collective psyche.
“There is something that’s very appealing to us in that we seem to not be good at saying ‘things are bad’ rather than ‘terrible’,” he said.
“According to us, things must have the worst possible outcome. Look at newspapers, and the classic thing of, ‘if it bleeds it leads’ – they never have front pages saying the latest crime figures are pretty good.”
“Everything is very much ‘not fine’ [in our world], but that’s not the same as the end of everything,” he added.
The idea of apocalypse is more complex than the planet “going boom”, as Mr Phillips puts it, and someone’s view of ‘the end of the world’ may be better described as ‘the world around them‘. This, Mr Phillips explained, was somewhat of a “lightbulb moment” he had when writing the novel.
“When we say ‘world’, we mean a certain way of life, a certain set of expectations about what the world is, how the world works, and how you move through it,” he said.
“Some people are often not literally thinking that the world will blow up,” the author continued. “What they actually mean is that they won’t recognise the world, and the things they’ve taken for granted won’t be there anymore.”
“That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to have fears about,” he added. “The world does change and you can’t really stop that. But that is not the same as the end of the world, even if sometimes it can feel a bit like it.”
At its most extreme, Mr Phillips said apocalyptic ideology, whether religious or not, is “one of the most polarising things imaginable” – something which creates division and turns into an ironic “self-fulfilling prophecy”.
“Once you’ve dismissed the vast majority of the world as being wrong, then you have brought your world to an end in a certain way,” he explained.
“There’s so much irony in this,” he added laughing.
But the humorous stance he took on the subject was one that worried him at first.
“I was a little bit concerned that people would think ‘How can you joke about something this serious?’,” Mr Phillips said.
But that balance seems to have been well accepted since the novel’s hardback copy was published a few months ago.
“This isn’t a book that’s telling people what to think or telling people what to do, but I hope that it provides a framework, or a mental toolkit for thinking about things in a slightly different way and calibrating our responses to all the challenges we face,” he explained.
The irony in this book goes deeper, as reading Mr Phillips’ novel about the end of everything makes one think about the future.
“Thinking about the future is a very important thing for us to do, because without that you run the risk of screwing things up for the next generation,” he said.
He added: “When you stop caring about the future, the present becomes broken as well.”
The many predictions groups may have about how the world will end also stem from what Mr Phillips describes as a “disgust with people” – the ‘Population Bomb’ of the 1970s being one such example – and another toxic trend in thinking Mr Phillips said took him by surprise.
“So many of the predictions of doom revolve around an absolutely bleak view of human nature,” he said. “And that civilisation is a paper-thin facade of every man for himself savagery, and that’s not true.”
Using his book to actively defend the sanctity of human kindness, he said he also wanted to send the message that “people are altruistic and do cooperate and help each other”.
Equally, some people’s views of the end of the world are pictured as a utopia – a line of thinking which may well inspire a fifth book in the series…
Tom Phillips will discuss the novel at the Jersey Arts Centre on Saturday 27 September.
You can purchase tickets and view other events in the festival programme by heading to. www.jerseyfestivalofwords.org.
