End of the world postponed
Deleting and redownloading social media from my phone is an activity that I greatly enjoy. It is exhilarating in both directions. The former gives me a sense of direction for some new way of living that I will adopt for the rest of my life, offering structure and purpose. The latter, which usually occurs within a week of the former, gives the feeling of supreme satisfaction and indulgence. The entertainment offered by social media is unparalleled. The videos aren’t entertaining because they are good — almost none of them are. I would theorize that there is something in the flashing lights and colors that entrances me enough to suffer through political commentators reacting to clips of South Park next to footage of some new and unspeakably horrible mobile game.
What caused me to lapse into an all-time peak of social media consumption and then a total renunciation (which by the time this goes to print will almost certainly have ended), was the religious side. Christian Instagram Reels are like crash footage for me. Once I’ve tapped on a Christian reel, the algorithm is pretty good at understanding what it is I’m after. Most are pretty normal, but the further down you scroll they tend to get increasingly strange. Conspiracies about weather patterns begin to creep into the discussions of the Bible. What stopped me in my tracks was the discussion of last Monday’s eclipse. There was a rumor quietly circulating several online networks that Earth would be coming to a grand finale.
While it is easy to point and laugh at all end-of-times predictions in the past, the ones in the very-near future come with a side of dread. Slowly, I began to believe that there were some truths to the claims. In Matthew 12:39, Jesus says that the sign of Jonah will befall an evil and adulterous generation. Instagram experts noted that the eclipse’s path of totality would dance through several U.S. towns with the name Nineveh. It was also reported that Israel would be sacrificing special red cows and that the CERN particle accelerator would be opening a portal to another dimension. Both of those were obviously false, but compellingly so.
On the day of the eclipse, I sat outside of Krueger, with the artificial waterfall bubbling pleasantly behind me. I pulled a plastic bag out of the small pool at the bottom and wondered if it would matter. Pulling a plastic bag from an artificial waterfall without any living things in it is more like decorating than helping. One friend appeared, then another, then a small crowd of us. I look around at them and experience an absolute state of gratitude and fear. I’m reminded of a line from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 regarding delusion: “Cherish it! … What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle … Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.” When the moon and sun finally broke contact, and no trumpets sounded, I looked at the crowd around me and I was grateful.
By Luke Morris