To be entirely fair, we are like 2 cubic meters of carbon dioxide away from total ecological collapse. Made-made climate change is now beyond any threshold where we previously had reasonable expectations of being able to prevent it. The oceans will rise, climate catastrophes will increase, and the world will become more hostile.

It kind of feels like were frogs in a boiling pot, and we're living though the apocalypse now. But the wifi still works, so scroll on and don't think about it too much.

it makes them feel special/superior.

people are addicted to those feelings

Also generations.

Old folk like me have lived through several end of the world predictions ..... I really don't care any more.

But new young generations haven't so they are more likely to believe them ... like I did the first few times it happened.

(and if you're wondering when I first believed those predictions, they were mostly before my tenth birthday when several predictions said either Jesus was coming back or nuclear war was about to happen ... all things I believed because adults said so)

..... a funny thought experiment is to think that the world did end 20, 30 or 40 years ago and this is all the afterlife .... we just don't know it.

I used to have a sticker on my beater car that read "In case of rapture, can I have your car?"

Not that I'd really want a fuckin' SUV or pickup. Those are what all those bastards seem to drive.

it's fucking beautiful...🥹

The arrogant shits think they can force God's hand. If there was a God, he'd blast them with a bolt of lightning, or at least some kind of plague.

We just need someone to declare every day that the rapture will happen. Then it won't happen during their lifetime. After the person dies, appoint someone else as rapture declarer. Voila, no more rapture.

I am watching “peers” and family retire at 62, 64, 67, or 72 an then die a year later

That happens, usually when people retire because they can't go on anymore. The other group that it happens to are the ones whose job is their whole identity. When they quit, they lose the will to live.

Then there are people like me. I retired at 55, did a lot of travel and volunteer projects, then went back to work four years later because I found an interesting job with good working conditions. Now I'm 70 and will probably work another year. I didn't quit the first time because I was unable to continue, I had other reasons, and I'm fully able to keep on keepin' on now too. I don't have any expensive vices and don't buy into consumerism, so I'll be able to retire late next year with a higher disposible income than I have now from working. I still have things I'd like to do that'll be easier if I'm not holding down a job (e.g., going on month-long bike rides). Nobody knows how much time they have left, but I'm fit and healthy and enjoy life, so chances are reasonable that I'll get quite a few more years with decent quality of life. And if not, no use fretting over what you can't control.

If fewer people thought like this, and we came together to fight what's happening, then it wouldn't be this way. But everybody just wants to sit around and be sad about it instead of actually trying to make a difference.

And I get it- it's overwhelming, and it's a lot easier to say "I told you so," than it is to say "We fought hard and won."

While I sympathize with you for feeling exhausted and depressed, it's frankly rather selfish of you to go from that to "and therefore everyone should die." There are people who are doing okay and there are people who are exhausted and depressed but who still want to make a go of it. Don't wish for the world to end because they're still using it.

There's nothing on TikTok that anyone needs, besides sponsors and influencers trying to make a buck.

That would be beautiful ❤️

Sadly, there are plenty of crazies who aren't Christians.

It's proof how much of it is performative and attention-seeking, if they actually believed in anything they would be giving their belongings away, not selling the car they intended to sell anyway.

I believe it came from American revival preachers in the mid 19th century.

Those tent-show snake-jugglers have a lot to answer for.

No one believed the Earth was 7,000 years old in the day.

Before the Victorians like Lyell started doing paleontology in a disciplined way, even many educated Christians believed the age of the earth was a few thousand years. They explained geology in terms of cataclysms-- floods, voclanism, earthquakes, etc; Lyell changed the timelines by reasoning that those cataclysms were no more frequent in ancient times than they were now, and that much of geology was instead driven by very slow natural processes.

Among non-Christians, some ancient Hindu and Buddhist writers speculated on the age of the earth and the universe and came up with enormous numbers, but without evidence. The Buddhists' point wasn't to come up with an accurate number, it was more that, even if the universe was really old, it wouldn't last forever because nothing does. Impermanence is a feature of being.

And as I recall, the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers were all over the map on the age of the earth, as they were on many fundamental questions. They were highly entertaining, but also highly speculative.