The End of the World (and Why It Feels So Close)

I fell into a pretty deep dark hole a few weeks ago. I hinted at it here. I wrote about it, then shelved it, publishing something more “positive” for that Monday’s Mental Health and Meaning update.

But then, this week, I saw a lot of my clients in that hole – and it was pretty hard to bring them out of it. Actually, it was a new hole, now that I think about it – not just “the state of the world”, but with added Super Bowl half-time show division (I still struggle to believe we let that be a “thing”), and the constant stream of “Epstein info”, if you so chose. Not to mention the constant coverage of that poor elderly woman lost in the desert. For many, in different ways, it feels like “The End of the World”.

Cultural conversations feel surreal. People are anxious, angry, polarized, exhausted, and strangely disoriented.

To understand this moment, I want to draw on the work of Jonathan Pageau, particularly his four-part documentary The End of the World. Despite the ominous title, Pageau is not predicting planetary destruction or indulging in doomsday speculation. Instead, he offers a framework that turns out to be surprisingly useful for mental health.

His central claim is simple but profound:
“The end of the world” does not mean the destruction of the planet—it means the collapse of a shared structure of meaning.

What Do We Mean by “World”?

When ancient religious texts talk about “the world,” they’re not referring to a spinning rock in space. They’re describing a lived reality:
a shared symbolic order that tells people what matters, what is sacred, what is up or down, inside or outside, good or dangerous.

A “world” is made of:

Hierarchies (what has priority and meaning)
Boundaries (what belongs and what doesn’t)
Stories that help us interpret suffering, success, failure, and death

When those structures collapse, people don’t just feel confused—they feel unmoored. From a psychological perspective, this is crucial. Humans don’t merely need comfort or pleasure; we need orientation. We need to know where we are and why we’re here.

When that orientation breaks down, anxiety skyrockets.

Apocalypse as a Pattern, Not a Prediction

Pageau reframes apocalypse not as a future catastrophe but as a recurring human pattern.

Apocalypse literally means revelation—a tearing away of what no longer holds. Historically and psychologically, these moments follow a familiar arc:

An existing order becomes rigid or corrupt
Symbols lose credibility
Meaning fragments
Chaos erupts
Something dies
A new order eventually emerges

We see this in history (the fall of empires), in religion, and—importantly—in individual lives. Personal crises, identity collapses, and even depressive episodes often function as mini-apocalypses. Something false or brittle breaks apart, exposing what can no longer support the person.

From a therapeutic standpoint, this reframing matters. It shifts the question from “How do I stop this from happening?” to “How do I participate wisely in what is happening?”

Why the Modern World Feels Apocalyptic

Pageau argues that modern Western culture systematically flattened meaning:

Sacred and symbolic language was reduced to “just metaphors”
Hierarchies were treated as inherently oppressive
Everything became equal—and therefore interchangeable

Psychologically, this creates a problem. When nothing is higher than anything else, nothing can stabilize us. Meaning becomes fragile, identity becomes negotiable, and anxiety becomes chronic.

We now see the symptoms everywhere:

Fragmented identities
Culture wars that feel existential
Hyper-literal thinking and moral panic
Nihilism paired with desperate utopian fantasies

In mental health terms, this looks very much like collective dysregulation. People are reacting not just to stressors, but to the loss of a shared map of reality.

The Therapeutic Insight: Death Before Renewal

The final—and most clinically relevant—insight Pageau offers is this: renewal does not come from avoiding collapse, but from passing through it correctly.

In Christian symbolism, the ultimate “end of the world” is not destruction but the crucifixion—followed by resurrection. The pattern is not chaos → control, but chaos → sacrifice → transformation.

Translated into psychological language:

Not every breakdown is pathology
Not every collapse should be immediately medicated away
Some forms of suffering are invitations to re-orient rather than to escape

This does not mean glorifying pain or rejecting treatment. It means recognizing that mental health is not just about symptom reduction—it’s about right participation in meaning.

Why This Matters for Mental Health

Many people today are asking, “What’s wrong with me?”
A better question might be: “What world am I trying to live in that no longer exists?”

When meaning collapses, distress is often a signal, not a defect.

Our task—individually and collectively—is not to panic, predict the future, or cling to rigid ideologies, but to cultivate humility, responsibility, and a willingness to let false structures die so healthier ones can emerge.

That’s not the end of the world.

It’s the beginning of a new one.