Positive Thinking in the Apocalypse (a musing ditty)
by X. Ho Yen
17 Jul 2022
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Don't get me wrong. By "positive thinking" here I certainly don't mean ostriching about mortality or the apocalypse. No, it's the inverse of when we're trapped in our personal, torturous negativity despite mostly being okay, objectively speaking. The "positive thinking" I'm talking about is that special ability of the human mind to twist the dark reality of demise into an affirmation of our uniqueness and potential despite the inevitability of its coming to an end. In the apocalypse, learn how to trap yourself in this affirmation, right to the bitter end.
Metaphors are incredibly powerful. They tap into the deepest nature of the human mind, where the twin monstrosities Imagination and Abstraction scaffold a person's World View.
In the Apocalypse, I recommend embracing one powerful metaphor that combines two key elements:
1) your unique way of expressing or at least reveling in an affirmation of your unique existence, and
2) your unique way of accepting or at least facing the reality of not just mortality but also the real possibility that we've put too many holes in our collective lifeboat and have been too busy tussling over seats on the last part of the boat we think will go down rather than plugging the damned holes.
I'm not saying the apocalypse is a foregone conclusion. I'm only describing the fear that it might be, which can be overwhelming.
Everyone's idea of apocalypse is different. For many, it's the death of the planet, and us along with it. For most, and this is partly why the real end of the world is possible, it's the death of culture, or at least the loss of innocence, the resentment over the loss of the childish conceit that the world is what we imagined it to be at age fourteen. That is, it’s usually not the actual end of the world we experience as apocalypse, but “the end of the world as I know it.” That can take many forms, some as simple as ostriching over the reality that the world is full of all kinds of people you didn't realize existed when your inner twin monstrosities built your World View.
And so I recommend embracing a metaphor built from the aforementioned elements. I call this metaphor "your Slim Pickens moment", in reference to Slim's character, Major 'King' Kong, in the must-see, classic, absurdist Cold War farce, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."
The eponymous moment is set up when Maj. Kong is down in his B-52’s bomb bay trying to dislodge a stuck bomb. It is kicked off when he succeeds while still straddling that bomb.
He rides the bomb through the sky like it's a bucking bronco, whooping and hollering and flailing his ten gallon hat down to detonation altitude. That, my friends, was the eponymous Slim Pickens moment. Use it as a template for your own metaphor.
We all need to figure out how to whoop and holler and flail our equivalent of that ten gallon hat while riding our equivalent of that nuke from the lofty heights of our imagined safety down to the detonation altitude of reality.
Find your Slim Pickens moment (metaphor) and carry it with you. Use it, call it forth into your imagination to make you laugh instead of giving up or lashing out when faced with your personal apocalypse. If we all do this, maybe, just maybe we can plug some holes instead of pointlessly tussling our way down to a dark deep of our own making. Laughing is better, especially together.
I would be interested to know what you discover is your Slim Pickens Moment metaphor, the thing you dream up to make yourself laugh when it’s the end of the world as you know it.