You're going to live a long time. Congratulations! That's good! There are zero ways that is bad news! Yet if you talk about our future 50, 40, or even 10 years from now, people might tell you that's fantastical wishful thinking. They may say the environment/politics/economy/incoming meteor dooms us all no matter what we do, so who cares. Why is assuming the world's going to end so common? How come people talk about it with a wry jokey glint in their eye? And why does every generation tell that "joke" even though the world keeps on spinning?

On this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt sits down with Jason Pargin (who writes for Cracked as David Wong) to dig into what you need to remember about our wretched hellscape. They'll pick apart the fearful thinking that deactivates lots of people for no positive reason. They'll examine how people actually behave when the world actually is ending. And they'll explore the fantastic news that you'll probably live to see a future Past You would kill for.

Footnotes:

5 Crucial Things To Remember About Our Wretched Hellscape (Cracked)

Truman by David McCullough

Sweet Meteor O' Death on Twitter (@smod4real)

Red Dawn 1984 (Box Office Mojo)

Red Dawn 2012 (Box Office Mojo)

July 26, 1943: L.A. Gets First Big Smog (Wired)

What It's Like To Live Through Cape Town's Massive Water Crisis (TIME)

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

Among many Afghans, 9/11 remains unfamiliar or poorly understood (Stars and Stripes)