Doom ‘n’ Gloom

100 seconds to midnight and other grievances

By Kylie Heider

Every now and then, we are affronted with truths that are, to put it plainly, hard to reconcile with. Such things are often passing reminders of the collective distraughtness of our times—things that will fundamentally unsettle or disturb us but just as quickly be resigned to obscurity. 

I usually encounter these truths on my Twitter news feed. For example, last May, I watched a man burn himself alive on the White House lawn on my feed. He died shortly after as a result of his injuries. It would seem such an act would carry some weight and would not so easily be chalked up to be the coincidental result of an altered mind, but the incident was soon forgotten. 

These random events, evoking a chilling sense of existential apathy, are fascinating to me. Most recently, on my feed, I saw that the Doomsday Clock had been moved to “100 seconds to midnight.” “We have a doomsday clock?” I thought, “What is that?” According to the website of the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock is “a metaphor . . . of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.” When we overcome the fact that the phrase “100 seconds to midnight” evokes cheesy allusions to apocalyptic 80’s movies and move past the strangeness of an object designed to measure time until the apocalypse, there’s a grim and unconsolable reality behind the clock’s time.

Everyday, the faltering impossibility of our future stares us down. Though we may look away from its harsh gaze, it is always there—right in front of us—looming. When they moved the hands of their fateful clock, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists were not informing the public of something unknown. They, like many others, were reminding the world not to look away.