Why tens of millions of Americans now believe the end is near 

America used to reserve doomsday talk for the guys who stored beans in their backyard and argued about the Book of Revelation on AM radio. Now, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one-third of the country quietly suspects that the end will arrive before they get the chance to draw down their 401(k) plans.

Historically, apocalyptic thinking had a specific address. It lived in church basements, in prophecy charts that looked like bad subway maps, in the vocabulary of premillennial dispensationalism — a word almost designed to keep outsiders out. The end of the world was a conviction reserved for a certain kind of Christian, who awaited it with a feeling somewhere between dread and satisfaction. These were the kind of people for whom catastrophe would finally settle an argument they had been having for decades. Everyone else just changed the channel and went back to refinancing their mortgages.

That separation is gone. When the U.S. and Israel chose to attack Iran and kill that country’s supreme leader, the phrase “World War III” began trending on the phones of mechanics in Des Moines and software engineers in Austin.  

The researchers found that more than 100 million Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. This not some vague anxiety, but a concrete belief that colors how these people think about climate change, nuclear war, economic collapse, and artificial intelligence. That is your neighbor, your barista, your Uber driver, and the manager at work who just updated the remote‑work policy. 

Apocalyptic belief behaves like its own psychological operating system. It’s not just pessimism or generalized anxiety with a religious........

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