But… Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world!

Every generation feels like it’s living through the end of the world—at least the end of the world as they know it. As technology advances at an ever-faster pace, that unsettling sense of the world ending will only continue to intensify.

But it’s important to remember that we humans love a good doomsday narrative. Everyone wants to believe that what happens during their lifetime is significant. We are most likely evolutionarily programmed to seek out historic adversaries, real or imagined, against whom we can construct identity and purpose.

Those who lived through the mass scare of 1999 will remember global news broadcasts featuring technology experts who feared our entire international banking system would crash in the year 2000.

The problem? Most banking systems at the time were built using two digits to represent years instead of four. This meant that computers couldn’t distinguish between 1900 and 2000. On New Year’s Eve of 1999, millions of people anxiously watched their computers, petrified as the clocks ticked from 23:59 in 1999 to 12:00 in 2000. Fortunately, not a single one of the doomsday predictions came true!

Predicting the end of the world is humanity’s favorite pastime. Ironically, the more we practice it, the more likely we are to finally get it right!