Reverse Mental Entropy

Every few years, there seems to be some sort of conspiracy theory about the end of the world. Y2K. Harold Camping. The Mayan Calendar. They’re nonsense, and you dismiss them as such. Everybody does… right?

But isn’t there a little tiny part of the back of your mind that’s afraid that it could be right? Everything logical says that there’s no way it could be true. Still, for a few seconds every once in a while, at least a little part of you fears that it will all come true, and that the world will end.

But maybe it’s not really fear in the back of the your mind. Maybe it’s hope. Hope that when you die, the world will end. That the world you know will never change, that the world will never exist without you in it and observing it. Maybe what we really fear is that when we die, the world won’t notice, and it will keep on spinning and changing for thousands of years, without us ever knowing, until we’re forgotten and the world is completely different from anything we could ever have imagined.

Why else would we keep making these incredibly irrational theories? The record is zero to a few thousand, but people always make new ones, and people always listen. What other reason is there, other than human arrogance and cowardice, an unwillingness to accept our importance in the grand scheme of things. I expect that they’ll continue to persist, and continue to prove false. But a tiny part of us will still fear the worst - what fate that is I cannot tell.