Who would you want to be after the world ended?
I don’t have to explain why I’m thinking about this. Existential anxiety hardly requires one’s finger on the cultural pulse. But perhaps it’s best I explain the question, as it’s not per se an anxious one.
How would you picture yourself existing if every system and norm that you know and trust in life simply… disappeared? Roleplay for a moment.
This sounds like a question of fundamentalism and getting back to basics, but for myself, I find that it isn’t. I’m not the kind of person who finds myself adhering and ascribing to tried-and-true cultural narratives of “pure values” and moral expectations. Your answer might be “I’m a parent; I’d take care of my family” or “I stay busy, so I see myself working the land.” Or maybe you would answer more like me.
When I think about the world ending and systems disappearing, I don’t just imagine what I would be like in a post-order America. Instead, my mind goes to literature and to D&D. Who would I be if I was fully removed from the context of my life? Or at the very least, who would I want to be?
I want to be Jim Hawkins. I want to be ready for adventure. I want to be Scrooge’s nephew Fred. I want someone to say of me, “What right have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
I don’t know about you (and your sense of existential object permanence) but I find it hard to make plans for next week when I don’t know how to picture next month. What do I prioritize? What foot do I lead with? What plans am I trying to actualize because what plans are even possible? Am the only one having these deeply unhelpful intrusive musings??
In screenwriting, we blow a lot of hot air about “Goals.” It’s a characters goals within a scene that drive their actions, how they engage with a problem, what directions they take and how they interact with other people. But if the goals feel like they’re nailed in a quantum state of executive dysfunction to some dystopian roulette board spinning beneath the fingers of madmen (and thereby unavailable at the moment), perhaps an alternate goal lies in that old adage, “be yourself.”
Be yourself. But not passively. No, this is an active assignment. Don’t just be. Choose yourself. Choose who “yourself” is, and spend the day committing to that.
Take You for example (and I’m sorry I haven’t asked your name until now) but let’s say your name is Sam. Then your motus operandi is, “I am Sam. I want Sam to be this kind of person, who comes from this place, who is part of this story so far, who enjoys these things and fights for these vibes. What am I going to do today and next week? Whatever tells the story of Sam.” — So maybe send that bit to your friend Sam!
A few years ago, most of us knew what we wanted. We had a plan (most of us). Our goals, at least long term, were clear. But over the course of the last however-long, an unexpected myriad of possibilities more or less evaporated. Thanos-snapped from your 5 year plans. No buying a home. No personal loan. No blue-collar grind in arts and entertainment. No safe pregnancy. No holiday with part of your family. No faith in your economy, your legal institutions, or so much as the weather report. And now yet another trauma is setting in for a chronically destabilized zeitgeist: that you cannot continue the way you once anticipated.
It’s at this point in such uplifting reflections that many folks feel that itch to just check out. Pack it in. Keep your head down. Go back to bed. “Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, so enjoy what you’ve got while you’ve got it.” And I cannot dissuade that. Hold your life close. Hold your peace close. Cherish it. But until the unplannable and uselessly improbable intervention of ludicrous extremes interrupts our known universe, I argue that we all must accept one small correction: Tomorrow is always guaranteed.
If the world ends, it will only be the world as you know it. Almost certainly. Now of course you may die and that would certainly close the book on your reality, we imagine, but insultingly enough, the rest of us would continue. Without laws, without systems, without expectations, without context that you take for granted to construct your goals and your calendar plans, void of structure and familiarity entirely, the world would in fact continue. And so would you.
Consider who you are when you recontextualize yourself. Imagine that person—what it’s like the be with them, what they enjoy, how they treat others. This is the person who slips from your mouth when you’re visiting a new town and greet the stranger at the antique shop where you did not expect to wander. This is the person who orders from a menu of food items where everything is alien to you.
The world is constantly ending! The next time might be bigger than the last, but your expectations and narratives are always built on foundations so tectonic and shifting that you are neither the first nor the last generation to observe it. Consider it a shade of the old quote, “You can never go home again.” The world you built your dreams in will always have changed just as you finish your plans for achieving them. And there will be a thousand other endings. Every lost relationship, every pack-up-and-move, each time you need to start over.
So I’m thinking about who I am when worlds end. And I’m thinking about who I am when I find myself in a new one. And I look forward to seeing who you are, too.
© Nathan Cook 2025
The Favoring Wind 