Sleep Paralysis, Neurology, Christianity, and Metanarratives

Nonarbitrary Signs

Photon holography

Since I just made a post about sleep paralysis, that got me thinking about some other topics. While I am not one to advocate some kind of superstitious analysis of events, I am still highly inclined to view sleep paralysis largely through a metaphysical lens because both of the two times it happened to me, but especially the second time, happened in connection to religion, and more specifically when I was considering being really against religion. I was considering being really against religion and I basically got attacked by a demon. I don’t think there were any creatures trampling around or anything, I believe the neurological explanation (even though I have some nitpicks with certain specific aspects I’ve heard, which is a lot of why I want to share this in the first place) but it’s hard not to want to connect it to the idea of evil when the connection is clearly there. Something can be metaphysically evil (or good) and still have a natural explanation. Murders have a natural explanation, that’s what all the fields of forensics are about, but saying murders aren’t evil because there are explanations for the different aspects of murders like why people do them and how they’re done makes you as much of a complete nihilist as the worst psychopaths.

The first of the two times I ever had sleep paralysis I was a young teenager. It was night and I had woken up. I saw the door appeared to be ajar and it looked like a tall indistinct shadowy person was standing there looking in my direction, but I wasn’t facing the proper way to really look in its direction. I was wondering if my parents were up looking for something but it didn’t seem like it, and I had wondered if there was a break-in but it didn’t seem like it, it just seemed like some kind of shadowy humanoid thing. I soon got the impression it couldn’t actually see me and thought it seemed like this thing sees motion somehow, so I shouldn’t even try to move. I still wanted to get a better look at it so I turned my gaze around without moving to look at it more directly. I was puzzled but also somewhat relaxed now because I at least understood it was just going to stand there looking for me and it couldn’t come through as long as I didn’t move, but I was also getting tired of waiting for it to go away. Eventually I just went back to sleep while looking around at it without moving since as creepy as it was it clearly wasn’t going to do anything even if I got the sense it really wanted to, it just didn’t even seem to know I was there and was waiting to see I was there before it could do what it wanted to.

The second time I had sleep paralysis was merely a few months ago. I was talking to some Jesus mythicists who made me really uncomfortable but I was starting to buy their arguments even if I didn’t completely accept them and I fell asleep at a weird time. When I woke up I saw my mother open the door to my apartment and then start beelining toward my bedroom, opening the door to it, continuing to beeline to my bed, and then she came all the way over to start shouting about why I was ignoring her and pressing on my chest through all my blankets as I looked at her through my sleep mask. Dear, I have been ignoring you because you have been dead for years and also you’re not actually you. I shifted up above my bed without moving to get a better look and not feel so suffocated and then I started thinking praises to God loudly and directing them at the thing near my bed so it could hopefully hear them. Nearly immediately I saw two eyes glower at mine through my sleep mask, blazing dark yellow irregular forms like two ugly dying suns that were being snuffed out and unhappy about that, and then I was free from that.

The first time, though this was not significant to me at the time, was definitely when I was self-identifying as silly things like “an agnostic.” I wasn’t so much convinced anything about religion was impossible as just there was no evidence for any particular religion. Of course the real reason, as it often is, was just that I didn’t like going to church, which is in turn usually the result of objectively bad churches in my experience. However, I find it ironic that I think I had adopted nearly the exact same mentality as the people in the church had as my excuse to not want to have to go to church. I think there’s a very common mentality among people experiencing a lot of real life social mobility of just wanting to see yourself as some kind of Übermensch and interpreting that in the worst way possible and just using that as an excuse to be mean etc. Christianity in that case just becomes some kind of expression of White Euro-American culture, which is objectively ugly since that’s not at all how Christianity is supposed to be even if there’s nothing wrong with being White, European, or American, and the people who think that don’t really seem to believe in it at all, it just becomes sort of an expression of their ego. I had kept basically all the ego stuff but I just didn’t like going to church, even though my mentality was basically the same as theirs minus the fact I was bored with White Euro-American culture, even if it’s pretty understandable to not just want one thing all the time.

In think in that context it’s no coincidence that over the years the OU Wesley Foundation is mostly what softened up my negative evaluations of Christianity and helped me to see what it really is, since it’s a college campus and there’s explicitly and international ministry which lots of non-international people would go to all the time including me. Originally the biggest Bible study was in the international ministry until the international ministry expanded to have more of a proper service. I mostly just went to read the Bible without having to have all the pop songs I didn’t like and to get Chinese food made by actual Chinese people instead of cheap pizza. Even if the Chinese food wasn’t anything fancy I liked that a lot better and I still do, though that’s probably just because normal Chinese food like Chinese people make (as opposed to the takeout, but probably also kind of the takeout too) is just healthier than pizza anyway.

It’s really only been since this December that I’ve been able to just fully embrace Christianity (which is why I started writing so much about it then) even though it was growing on me a long time before then, because I realized what Christianity is actually about. Christianity is certainly not a political project, which seems to be what most of these people try to make it into for the sakes of their egos. Westboro Baptist and those other lunatics have no chance at all of being right because the real essence of Christianity is reflected in our civilization. It’s not about White Euro-American culture either, contrary to what people normally mean by that, since I never said Western civilization after all. Christianity is not a list of rules or a guide to be a nice person, even if it rightly discourages being as mean as possible at all times, at the same time Jesus did turn over tables and make whips once, it isn’t demanding you to be a pushover either.

When you try to make Christianity into a list of rules it becomes almost incomprehensible, but as that example illustrates, it’s not a list of rules. Christianity is a story. When you view Christianity as a story, it makes a lot of sense. “What Would Jesus Do?” is actually really great as long as you don’t view that also as turning into a bunch of rules. That’s also a lot of why I was writing so much about stories. I do think stories are sort of the first thing available to perception and cognition period and that’s why I called them Urphänomen. Once I realized that realized Christianity is certainly not supposed to be some kind of history book contrary to all the people who call it “a historical religion” even if a lot of it is historical. I don’t have to become an expert in history, archaeology, or philology, none of which has ever stood out to me personally as particularly interesting, to understand Christianity. I can understand it through what I already understand: psychology, philosophy, logic, mathematics. And none of the negative evaluations I had of it are true.

Christianity is the inspiration behind half the songs I sang to myself even though they were the polar opposite of K-Love music. Christianity is the inspiration behind all that David Bowie and Leonard Cohen and those kinds of things. Christianity is the inspiration behind the books I grew up with, like Harry Potter, where Harry is clearly a Christ figure. I’m sure that’s how J. R. R. Tolkien felt when C. S. Lewis was showing him Christianity and how it was similar to myths, just myths and fairy-tales haven’t been my thing so much, and anyway, I’ve already read a lot of Jung but mostly saw the reading-in as retroactive since myths aren’t as much of my thing. If you want to speak my language, bring up science fiction and/or rather “rebellious” music. Christianity also did enable a lot of the prosperity of our civilization in my opinion, but it’s also precisely the most proper interpretation, not the ego-driven ones touted by the people who usually say that. Not being full of yourself and putting other people first basically solves the prisoner’s dilemma. People shouting that we need to put together the Christian nationalist army are making things much worse, and to be honest, probably as bad as they can possibly be since hypocrisy is worse than just unbelief according to the Bible, certainly not fixing things, because “we need to unite our civilization behind ideology and purge the mutant, the xenos, and the heretic” is the Imperium from Warhammer 40k, not Christianity, and you should be able to see how that went plain and clear. Oh wait, there are tons of unironic Imperium fans, and not “I really like making and playing loyalist Space Marines and/or reading their books” but people who think that’s unironically a good ideology rather than a pretext to have a wargame in a universe with endless war because all the ideologies in that universe (including the mindless insects who don’t really have an ideology) failed, scratch that.

There is nothing outside the text-to-speech device, apparently.

Why the Christian Narrative Is Not a "Metanarrative" (thegospelcoalition.org)

This article is something I will disagree with. I think Christianity is a metanarrative for the exact reasons they explained. There used to be someone in my city who went around throwing these cheap trinket metal coins everywhere that had a cross on them along with the words “IT’S NOT ABOUT ME / IT’S ABOUT HIM.” When I first saw that, I immediately thought, isn’t the whole point that Jesus died for you though? So it’s about you and it’s about Him. Even though I disagreed with the message on the coin, I kept seeing more of them and eventually just made a game of collecting them and cleaning them off. I’ve never counted them but I’m sure I found at least three dozen of them. I’m sure they were thrown around by a cultish organization that wanted people to walk to their church and be like “look what I found” and then pretend they had nothing to do with throwing them around everywhere too like it was just some random miracle, but also conveniently have an explanation for its meaning.

On that note I almost took picking up as many of them as possible when I saw them as an obligation, to prevent the pollution of minds as well as the environment, though eventually I saw so many of these things that I had to leave some of them lying around just because I didn’t have time to pick them all up and still get where I was going, there would be three on one side of the street that I would pick up and then three on the other side of the street that I wasn’t planning on crossing to that I could spot from some yards away. Seriously, there were so many of these things and I’m sure they’re made with lead and all sorts of other cheap terrible metals. Throwing cheap trashy lead alloy coins everywhere to poison the plants and animals so you can lure people into your cult church and then lie about it being miraculous is certainly not what Jesus would do. I was collecting these mostly when I was still ambivalent about Christianity and before the sleep paralysis demon I had months ago, so I would say it also doesn’t help anyone’s opinion of so-called organized religion to throw those everywhere either.

The article above explains that a metanarrative isn’t a “grand narrative,” it’s basically a story about narratives. Ideas like progress are metanarratives. You have the Whig idea of history for example, where the entire past is awful and it’s building toward the future which is great. That’s not really a narrative because there aren’t really any events that constitute it, it’s just a lens for interpreting history through. The article explains lots of those ideas very well. I would just disagree with it that Christianity isn’t a metanarrative. Christianity is already a metanarrative.

³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? ³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Matthew 25:35-40 NIV - For I was hungry and you gave me - Bible Gateway

Christianity is a metanarrative, but not because it’s a “grand narrative” that ties all the other narratives together somehow. In fact I think that’s sort of an anti-metanarrative just like what’s called “transhumanism” is very much a method to keep humanity exactly the same by making machines do all the thinking that would change people if they did it themselves, as well as keeping all the social structures etc. the same by not allowing any more organic change on a wider level (to keep the crown of creation happy, of course, since they are at the top of the system, which they themselves have designed for themselves.) Lyotard himself thought his book about metanarratives was his worst one. It was also unclear in various parts whether the incredulity toward metanarratives was prescribed or described, as Wikipedia put it. I think he found a real idea but didn’t really know what to do with it.

Metanarrative - Wikipedia

The Postmodern Condition - Wikipedia

I think for most of history there has only (at least overwhelmingly) been narratives. This is why most past civilizations have viewed history as basically being a course of falling away from a golden age even though they themselves are in the past. I think this is also where ideas like spirit possession, ancestor worship, and the whole general idea of necromancy (not the RPG kind where it’s just using dead bodies as weapons) really came from, since if everything that will ever happen happened in the past, then the best hope is to bring the spirits of the dead into the present. Being alive now and not then is itself a form of damnation. I also see that as similar to the terrible D&D Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms deities, which basically deny your character any agency to speak of. It’s like Elminster coming up with his dog going like “heel, heel” to patronizingly heal your character except Elminster himself is just an agent of Mystra. I used to joke in my last online D&D 3.5e campaign (advice: don’t play D&D online with random strangers, it’ll fall apart relatively quickly) that in the Forgotten Realms campaign we should strand Mystra on Abeir since apparently the Weave doesn’t extend to Abeir, but Mystra basically is the Weave, so if Mystra herself were stranded on Abeir the Forgotten Realms would become a sensible place since there would be no Weave for the gods and their lackeys to fight with, but there would still be magic since innate magic that isn’t the Weave still works. I had a psionic character and another player was using dragon magic (and other players tried to get onto us because I always had a psionic character and he always had a character with dragon magic, then, that’s been observed to be how people in general are with their characters, people have even tried to criticize Critical Role for that, people are just playing “me, but in a fantasy world” imo) and said his character actually was from Abeir in the first place and I thought that was cool and really wanted to try to strand Mystra on Abeir, but the game fell apart after like two sessions so that never happened.

Then, as we have “the Enlightenment,” we have a move from just having narratives, which are all just things that happened in the past, to telling stories about stories, which are about things that are supposed to happen in the future. Now instead of living in the shadow of the Golden Age that we shall never return to, we are living in the End of History (and appropriately with the Last Man, aka, the crown of creation, who thinks they’re the Übermensch because they bought the right to tell anyone who disagrees with them to shut up, but has no idea what that really would mean.) But metanarratives themselves seem to be about replacing narratives. A story about how science will replace superstition or liberal democracy will replace totalitarianism is not itself really a narrative, because it doesn’t really have events. There are events that people use as examples, like Galileo and WWII, but the metanarrative itself is separate.

This is basically Hegel, but then look at Christianity. Christianity is basically a narrative and a metanarrative itself. A lot of this is done through the parables, even though I think most of those don’t seem to be meant to be literal. Then Jesus compares his real life and other people’s real lives to the parables. So then you have a level at which a story can also be a story about a story. So there have been the two competing strains, which are basically the thesis and the antithesis, but Christianity has been the synthesis since before anyone really thought of it that way in my opinion, even though I kind of think discovering that for yourself is a lot of the point. After all, C. S. Lewis said that he knows Christianity is true not because he sees it but because by its light he sees everything else basically. Once a story can also be a story about a story, you can just keep layering stories. This is basically what Chomsky calls recursion in linguistics, which he turn got from Wilhelm von Humboldt who used the phrase that language is the infinite use of finite means. This is also what the Pirahã fight with Daniel Everett is over. Daniel Everett thinks that Pirahã doesn’t have recursion, but Chomsky says it wouldn’t even matter if it didn’t just like it wouldn’t matter if one human was born without legs when studying the anatomy of human legs. That’s kind of true, but I also think it misses the point, which is that not everyone who’s considered human is apparently gaining what’s supposed to be a universal human cognitive feature, and this makes me a little more forgiving of Everett even if I still think he’s pretty annoying. Meanwhile Everett has been banned from visiting the Pirahã due to supposedly just treating them like primitive savages even if he clearly views them as noble savages and idealizes them. Until today I’ve never really thought about the fact syntax trees resemble Hegelian dialectics much.

Hegel and the Trinity | Issue 42 | Philosophy Now

The thing about syntax trees which I also think makes my point differentiating metanarratives from “grand narratives” clearer is that not all sentences are grammatical. Not everything is even a sentence. If universal grammar is that all human languages have recursion then Pirahã by that standard would not be a human language, and that view might more or less be why Daniel Everett is banned from visiting the Pirahã anyway. You can just write garbage like “Is is not blah go away here there” and you would be ChatGPT as of today apparently, and it would be entirely ungrammatical in English. However, it could be considered grammatical in ChatGPT language if you consider the rules that ChatGPT uses a language.

ChatGPT language by definition does not use recursion since it is literally predicting the next word based on past examples (what Chomsky literally tried to demolish with the whole anti-behaviorist thing,) which I’m sure is why AI only really says things that have been said before and makes art which has been made before. On the other hand Chomsky thinks that language is language of thought but also only thinks of language in terms of spoken and written languages despite his ideas about e-language and i-language. Chomsky doesn’t seem to be able to imagine that language is something besides the particular languages that people speak, write, sign, and whistle even if he thinks that those languages as groups are just political constructions and differentiates between the manifestations in the world versus the underlying cognitive architecture as well. Basically Chomsky thinks of language as only being acquired by native speakers from other speakers even if he thinks the language of thought precedes it. This view itself seems to be in contradiction to all the research that’s been done such as with Chimpsky the chimpanzee who was supposed to learn language and learned a few hand signs that were used for getting bananas and other mundane tasks, nothing close to a language. If the language of thought came first who did the first person who spoke, or signed, or whistled learn from, and what were they thinking in their heads if no one taught them any words? And if that happened once maybe there could be other iterations and maybe one is happening now.

Everyone likes to talk like it’s the end of the world now. It’s not just a few crazy people with signposts on street corners anymore, it’s the Democrats as well as the Republicans. I think what’s happened is all the stories have run out, meanwhile I’m here like “I don’t think it’s all going to end” because I think I’ve been used to considering idea that things can stand for something else and also literally just be themselves for a very long time. I think things came together for me mostly once I realized Christianity isn’t about trying to gratify the egos of the people who run churches and fill their pockets, all of which is frankly some of the most evil things in existence, but was basically the original story like that and that’s why I’ve been processing things like that all along. Maybe Buddhism is OK because it’s originally a philosophy and not about worshipping Buddha or whatever, maybe paganism started out as being about God before getting distorted like Tolkien’s story of Eru Ilúvatar but in real life, but the point of having a grammar is to tell you what’s grammatical and what’s not grammatical.

A metanarrative is not a legitimization of everything, which I think is the horrible idea that I’ve seen a lot of people are trying to push, especially the people who say it’s the same as “grand narratives” and then further interpret that as “combining literally everything together as if it were all valid.” Being able to judge everything is different than judging it all as valid. From the narrative perspective, we can’t imagine a world where Hitler, Voldemort, Palpatine, or Sauron are redeemed, and I think that’s legitimized by looking at the grammar, I don’t think we need to say “we can’t imagine it, but that’s how great God’s mercy is!” The fact is even if people were punished for decades or however long in the afterlife, the conditions of life on Earth are different than the conditions of life in the afterlife and taking away someone’s life on Earth couldn’t be replaced by an infinite amount of time in a mansion in Heaven eating figs or whatever. It is truly infinite use (eternal life) use of finite means (life on Earth.)

This is why I have to oppose universalism even though at one point I found it somewhat appealing since I thought the idea an old man in the sky ran around punishing people for their sins seemed kind of pathetic. That has also been solved by C. S. Lewis however, the gates to Hell are locked from the inside. Same as the phrase I’ve heard more recently, which is that you aren’t punished for your sins but by your sins. It seems like the same thing as the more philosophical idea of karma, which is literally just a word for action and has nothing to do with endless reincarnations, and literally just means cause and effect. Bad actions cause bad effects, and due to how things are structured you cannot eternally evade your bad effects affecting you yourself, which if it’s not made up for will affect you infinitely. It’s not really all that mysterious.

I think at this point the people who are using a finite grammar have literally just run out of things for their story. Lots of people are also trying to legitimize it by doing the “throw everything together” thing but that’s still just the crown of creation. I think apparently-opposed methods of throwing everything together, such as Neuralink and New Age, ultimately lead to the exact same place and that’s not the place you want to go, because the point is just to be an undead lich and resist change.

DONN'S WYKKYD AMBITIONS

made the Elric 2024 meme but ironically I think that’s basically what we have. There’s a reason it’s two old guys who have a popularity score of about 35% each against each other. At least Elric would just be a more accelerationist version of what we already have.

Elric of Melniboné in the Elric saga by Michael Moorcock is the last Melnibonéan emperor. Melnibonéans are not human beings and are very explicit that they are not human beings, and Moorcock modeled them on the Norse elves. His brother and many other people are essentially really ticked off that he inherited the throne instead of them and his brother is always plotting to kill him because of that. Why are some people so mad? Elric is clearly not like them. For one, he’s albino, which Donn joked meant he would be associated with whiteness and we would all be called racist. Two, he has increasingly failing health and he relies on taking a bunch of herbs to even stay awake, which makes me sometimes feel like I’m at risk of turning into Rule 63 Elric and try not to depend on that stuff too much, even though I literally had to withdraw from classes last semester because I couldn’t stay awake enough and I was sick all the time. There were other things I was doing wrong that I have since corrected so I don’t depend so much on that stuff even if it’s otherwise healthy and I still take it when it’s convenient. I’m sure there are other things Elric was doing wrong which caused that as well. The Melnibonéans have some golden ships that can just go through rock formations and help them win wars which they no longer remember how to build. They are worshippers of chaos and they say things like “don’t worry, in Melniboné we control the demons” but do they really, especially in light of events that happen later on? The humans likewise tend to call them demons when they meet them, due to things like having the golden ship just come out of nowhere at them as well as how they behave, since Melnibonéans are psychologically different enough from humans that the first thing they do with human prisoners is start removing body parts so they will talk, which also gets them called “demon! demon!” but the torturer just sees that as normal business and not at all as something sadistic nor sad since the Melnibonéans have been doing this for 100,000 years.

Elric tends to think more like a human than a Melnibonéan, even though the Melnibonéans keep their distance from the new race of humans that has just started to appear and don’t know about how humans think. For one, Elric actually has feelings about other people besides himself, while Melnibonéans basically just do what they’re expected to do or told to do and don’t feel compassion or sentimentality. Elric also shows other interesting mental attributes, such as, at the risk of people complaining that I’m spoiling their story, casting a spell to summon Straasha the King of Water Elementals by thinking about it. Elric was absolutely shocked when that happened because he thought he was going die and you’re not supposed to be able to cast spells by thinking about them, you’re supposed to need to get all the ritual items and go out and do the ritual. Straasha seemed less shocked and provided an explanation that maybe the necessity provided those components even though Straasha seemed not shocked. This is also literally the first spell cast by the famous Elric the Enchanter in the entire Elric saga. Later on he gets the black sword Stormbringer which he uses to stop dying, and his brother gets its twin Mournblade, which were broken off as two shards of the dragon sword in antiquity and are now two enemy swords. The black sword keeps him alive by harvesting souls, so he’s basically a lich now, but it goes after all his family members and then ultimately he’s just left basically comatose and ends up meeting some of the guardians of the balance of law and chaos who have a special ability to walk into dreams. Elric is also a Faustian story, since the two swords are revealed to be demons who’ve taken the form of swords to take mortal swords, and Elric is making a deal with the devil by using the sword to stay alive. The whole thing is basically a bunch of German ideas put together by a British author, which is not surprising given his background going to a Waldorf school and then reading Norse mythology in his free time.

Lots of things are based on this story, such as Warhammer (all settings,) Warcraft (which was just a knockoff Warhammer anyway,) and now Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, but they seem to distinctly miss the part of the story where Elric is the last of a dying race and almost equally part of a new race, and he seems to himself be dying because he’s desperately trying to be a member of a race that he doesn’t really resemble just because he wants to be the all-powerful emperor of the world and the Melnibonéans are still powerful. Moorcock wrote this based on the decline of the British empire in his own words, but it could just as easily be about now, or maybe more easily. Most of the spinoffs of Elric, even the good ones, tend to leave out the really unusual elements. I haven’t found a mainstream fantasy that has people walking through dreams of dying liches yet, not even one of the better ones. GoT has the warging thing done by the guy in the wheelchair, but that’s just a Marvel-esque “don’t be a jerk” redemption arc, Bran gets his back broken, gets put in a wheelchair, and then mind controls a guy in the past, which just makes him fantasy Charles Xavier, even if that’s more interesting than 99.99% of the stuff that comes out of the “fantasy” genre anyway, which is not a high bar.

Everyone in GoT is also human except for the tree children, who mostly seem to be presented as the good guys and are the old race who the humans basically colonized like those World of Warcraft arcs where everything is colonialism, and Bran is just their guardian basically. I’d be willing to read Game of Thrones if George R. R. Martin finished it, and if I run out of other things to read I might read it even if it’s not finished since George R. R. Martin at least looks knowledgeable about fantasy and that makes it at least more interesting than just another awful Dragonlance Piers Anthony spinoff, but knowledgeable isn’t really the same as understanding, and that might be why ASOIAF is likely never to be finished and he himself said the books won’t be like the show at all. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, that takes understanding, not just being the human ChatGPT of combining popular fantasies to make something that appeals to people who don’t normally like fantasy as well as some people who do but still aren’t so interested in Sword of Shannara and the other romantic fantasies that have largely become the standard genre despite not being all that similar to Tolkien.

So, we basically already have Elric for president. We don’t want that. But we have lots of other Elrics too. I was an Elric until I realized what I needed to do in order not to be an Elric, which was mostly from my article where I posted more Dijkstra, and that was to stop being an information addict who is spending all my energy consuming information when information mostly just leads to extremism and does not necessarily lead to better understanding. On the other hand I think if you already have understanding the information tends to come fairly automatically.

Worse than that, I think the whole world is basically ChatGPT going insane with its not-recursive grammar. People think the end is near because they don’t have any idea of what would come next, and at best just insert something insane like the next-word prediction device does. But there is more. I think it will just keep going to be honest. Maybe it’s an end of a world but probably not the end of everything ever. The end of the world isn’t supposed to be predictable at all anyway and that kind of seemed like the point.