8pm: Waiting for Death

Sorry about any typos or meandering...I rushed this one.

Today's 8pm deadline feels like we've been called back to the doctor's office to receive bad news. As the appointment arrives, we wonder how bad the news will be.

Your stomach first dropped a week ago when you got the message to book a follow up appointment. Now, 8pm, the doctor is talking but your mind is numb. The "someday" you always expected is now here. You are cornered by time.

You have just learned you have two months to live. Or maybe one. Or maybe its over in a blinding flash. The cancer you first discovered during a routine exam months ago is spiraling out of control. Your body is being attacked by chaos, and is losing the fight.

You caught it early. You're young. You live a healthy life. You were supposed to be one of the happy statistics. From day one, you were optimistic. You thought you had time to change, to figure things out. After all, you always have.

You took some time away from work to give 100% of your energy to fighting this. You are lucky to have a fair employer. The card your coworkers signed was filled with messages that helped convince you this was only a temporary setback.

But today, the temporary has become permanent and what you couldn't fathom is now definitive. The end is here.

Soon we will all face this. We know an "end", whether individual mortality or collective civilizational collapse, is coming, but when and how is unknown. Today, the ambiguity of the end provides enough cognitive cover for us to live as if it weren't real. Except, now we have an 8pm deadline to count down to.

If not tonight, someday something will happen for us to see clearly our days are numbered. A cancer prognosis, a major crop failure, nuclear missiles flying overhead.

When the illusion of immortality is shattered, the mental shift is dizzying. I can see it happening right now.

It is difficult to fully accept the situation, but we can learn from others' experiences.

Some describe receiving a terminal diagnosis as an unwinding...a sudden, forced clarity where the peripheral noise of life was suddenly cut away. You see the sunlight on the floor and realize you will only see it sixty more times. This is the compression of grief. You bargain with God in the morning and stare at the ceiling in stoic silence by dinner.

During my own stroke, I lost coordination and speech instantly. My right side became paralyzed and I collapsed to the floor. While the event was transient, for about an hour the effects felt permanent. I felt death breathe down my neck. I felt a profound wave of sadness, quiet and painless. I was disappointed that life was ending, yet I felt a strange peace. My body eventually cleared the clot with the help of medical science, and I recovered, but the memory remains with me.

My experience certainly isn't as heavy as the cancer patient told to put their affairs in order. But I share my experience because it made clear my mortality.

Everyone meets their end. While it's a shared commonality it isnt necessarily a shared experience. How can we prepare for our own end without seeing mortality through others.

In the mud of the Somme, Sergeant James Littler wrote in his diary that "everybody seems to expect to die." He described a "hell-hole" where the parson reminded the men that many would fall before the sun set. There was no prepping for the next day, only the endurance of the current minute.

During World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots faced a wall of time. Captain Furukawa Takao wrote to his wife just before his final sortie: "I find my thoughts returning continually to you and our soon-to-be-born child... Now, more than ever, the fleetingness of human life astonishes me."

Like the terminal patient, these soldiers stopped planning for a career or a retirement and focused entirely on the weight of their present expressed by intimate final words.

Now project this onto our current global situation. We feel the heat and hear the digital hum of systems that no longer serve us. Great powers are cornered by a system they created. The 8pm deadline. The illusion is approaching a breaking point.

We often talk about prepping as if a pressure canner or a hidden stash of grain provides a permanent escape. We act as if a radical audit of our households will grant us an exemption from the end. But the pantry eventually goes bare. The tools break. The tribe you built for survival eventually faces the same empty fields and dry taps as everyone else.

The future, the decades of work, the home, the family, could simply cease to exist.

I dedicate a significant portion of my life now to ensuring that stroke doesn't happen again. I do my best because that is within my control. But there will be a day when death is certain. We all know this day is coming. For most of us, the expiry date remains unknown. It could be tonight. It could be decades from now.

Someday, the event will arrive. The skies will blacken. The crops will wither. We will watch our cupboards run bare and our taps shut off. That is the moment we receive the terminal diagnosis for our civilization. At that point, the foundations of our survival have rotted away. There is no longer a store to go to or a skill that can summon food from radioactive soil.

The most difficult lesson of the terminal patient is witnessing the impact on those you love. In a systemic collapse, this is the moment you must watch your children starve. There is no more medicine to hide behind. You are forced to confront the absolute fragility of the human condition.

In this final stage, the goal is dignity. When the pantry is empty phase begins, your neighborhood becomes a hospice ward. You must move past the "this can't be happening" phase into a state of radical presence. Radical presence is the choice to remain when there is nowhere left to go. It is the act of sharing the final cup of water from a dry tap, knowing it will not save anyone. It is the weight of shared silence between neighbors who have stopped fighting for scraps because the scraps are gone.

Oliver Sacks, in his final days, wrote of the privilege of being a thinking animal on this planet. You must find that same clarity when you hold your child’s hand in the dark, focusing entirely on the warmth of their skin rather than the hunger in their belly.

A terminal patient who finds peace is the one who accepts that the struggle to remain is over. We must prepare for the possibility that our civilization’s finish is not a problem to be solved with more gear. If you are mentally prepared for the absolute end, its arrival will not paralyze you.

We are all on a timeline that leads to a zero-point. The difference between a frantic scramble and a meaningful end is what you do when the supplies are gone. The clock is ticking toward the total failure of the status quo.

When there is nothing left to do, sit in the quiet. Feel your heart beat. Listen to the breathing of the person next to you. The end is a physical event. Meet it with a physical grace. Watch the sunlight move across the floor one last time, and hold the hand of the person in the room with you until the light is gone.

Thank you for reading.

My name is Sarah and I examine existential civilizational risks. It is a passion project to explore humanity's frightening future - a topic traditional media ignores.

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Thank you.

Sarah