apocaholism

 Human beings have an obsession with disaster that is part pessimism, part schadenfreude.   Gloom and despair will get you more media coverage than hope and optimism. And we cannot help the sneaky pleasure we feel when contemplating a disaster that did not involve us.  The notion that some kind of world disaster is looming has created the zombie apocalypse fiction genre whose followers half-believe, half-don’t-believe, that the world is about to be overrun by zombies.  But there are other disasters that excite the contemporary imagination.  The group who believe in any of these catastrophic endings are known as apocaholics, and their beliefs labelled apocaholism.  The term was coined by the American writer Gary Alexander who began an article called Apocaholics Anonymous in this amusing way:

Hi, I’m Gary and I’m a recovering Apocaholic. I am currently Apocalypse free for nearly 18 years. I left the church of the Religious Apocalypse in 1976, over 30 years ago, and I resigned from the secular church of the Financial Apocalypse in 1989. Yes, I still feel the urge to proclaim the end of all things, from time to time, but I white-knuckle my way to a history book for a little perspective, and then I breathe easier. If you wish to join AA, the only requirement is that you give up the adrenaline rush of media-fed fantasies.