My Quiet Apocalypse

I was out walking my dog when the end of the world landed a few roads away. I didn't see where it had come from and, back then, I didn't know the reasons behind it. But it landed shortly after 8pm on a lazy Sunday. Seeing the distant glow, my dog whimpered. When the noise followed very shortly afterwards, he bounded away, howling in fear, or perhaps pain. I didn't chase after him because the sight and the noise had arrested my attention. I could see a distant volcano of embers showering my town and engulfing it in orange haze. I wandered, feeling strangely ethereal, towards the glow.

As I approached the pandemonium, I saw a man lying on the floor, holding his stomach tightly, trying to contain his own entrails. I gave him my coat to press against his abdomen but he fell down dead shortly after. I picked up my coat and dusted off the mess and put it back on. I walked on.

Fire rained down from my girlfriend's flat but I didn't feel it when it scorched my skin. I walked in, brushing past a red-faced screaming woman holding a blistered baby. We made eye-contact but I looked away. My girlfriend's floor had disappeared and only fire and debris remained so I walked away from the building. I couldn't see the woman, but the baby was lying in the doorway, grasping at the embers as they cascaded around it.

Someone pushed past me and knocked me to the ground. I stood up and brushed myself down, wetting my fingers in the blood of the dead man on my jacket. I tried to wipe my hand off on a nearby car, but it was hot and dusty, so I wiped it on my jeans instead. I saw people taking bottles of wine from a battered off-licence and took one from a small boy as he ran from the shop, past me. He shouted something at me but it was impossible to hear or see what he'd said, so I turned away.

My head felt hazy, and my vision began to seem blurry. I almost tripped over a corpse in the middle of the road. A thick dust descended and made it more difficult to see. Someone ran into me, screaming, red-eyed, wild. I pushed him over, feeling sluggishly aggressive. I stumbled for a few more minutes through the jungle of maddened creatures. I seemed to be going against the flow, but I found my way to the safety of a brick wall, and then a doorway, and I leant against it, coughing. Feeling ever more sluggish, I crouched down, wheezing heavily. And then I sat down and went to sleep.

Pop-Psychology

One of the great pleasures in life is shallow pop-psychology, partly because it's so useful for understanding and interpreting people and their interactions, and partly because talking about it annoys those people who've actually spent years studying the science. At this point of confrontation between the experts and the amateurs, we the amateurs chortle merrily and say, "but these are the most interesting aspects of psychology, and I can learn about them from the Internet! Why would I want to waste years scratching any further beneath the surface of this science and bore myself with facts about the efficacy of barbiturates?" I appreciate the commitment of psychologists who've done the legwork in researching and verifying experiments, but virtually no one cares about anything beyond the headline.

That's why I, and all my lazily pseudo-intellectual kind, can appreciate the genius of a website like YouAreNotSoSmart.com, a handy synthesis of psychological phenomena both well-established and recondite. Each phenomenon is packed into a web post the size of a small chapter for comprehensive but digestible consumption. What I've learnt from these brief forays into psychology is that most of the brain's pop-psychology functions are concerned with self-delusion and self-preservation.

Confirmation bias? Fanboyism? The Benjamin Franklin effect? (Look them all up. I wouldn't do them justice). All of these are concerned with keeping the brain from frying in its own contradictions as we battle through life lying to ourselves and each other. The Benjamin Franklin effect especially brings home this truth.* When confronted with a reality which seems bizarre or incomprehensible to us, do we adjust our realities and expectations in order that we may better understand our surroundings and attain an awareness of the objective "truth"? Ha, no. We delude ourselves. We retroactively adjust our goals. We even go so far as to distort the things we've actually experienced and warp our own memories, because, for some reason, this is an altogether more agreeable solution to the contradictions than, say, confronting our own fallibility.

In many ways this is unsurprising. We're idiots. We're easily led. That's not an immense revelation.

Still, that's the real beauty of pop-psychology. It tells us things we already know, but in mock-authoritative fashion.

*http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin-effect/