How's It Going to End: Wrestling with Humanity's Ultimate Question

Somewhere between the first breath and the last, every conscious being stumbles upon the same haunting question. It arrives uninvited during sleepless nights, creeps into conversations about climate change, and lurks behind every dystopian film we watch. The question isn't just about personal mortality—though that's certainly part of it. It's bigger, more encompassing: how does this whole human experiment conclude? Whether we're pondering our individual stories, civilizations, or the universe itself, the ending remains stubbornly unknowable, yet irresistibly compelling to contemplate.

I've spent years collecting perspectives on endings—from physicists describing heat death to theologians mapping out eschatology, from Silicon Valley prophets preaching singularity to indigenous elders sharing cyclical worldviews. What strikes me most isn't the diversity of answers, but how the question itself shapes us. The way we imagine endings determines how we live today.

The Personal Thread: Your Own Final Chapter

Let me start with something uncomfortable but necessary. Your personal ending—yeah, that one—influences every major decision you make, whether you acknowledge it or not. I remember sitting with my grandmother during her final weeks, watching her sort through photo albums with a peculiar mix of urgency and peace. She wasn't afraid of dying; she was afraid of leaving things unfinished, unsaid.

This personal reckoning with finitude does something profound to our psychology. Ernest Becker argued in "The Denial of Death" that our entire civilization is essentially an elaborate defense mechanism against mortality awareness. We build monuments, write books, have children—all in some attempt to outlast our biological expiration date.

But here's what I've noticed: people who genuinely grapple with their ending often live differently. Not necessarily better or worse, but with a certain... intentionality. They stop postponing difficult conversations. They quit jobs that drain their souls. They finally take that trip to Morocco. It's as if acknowledging the ending unlocks something in the present.

The medical field has given us glimpses into common deathbed regrets—working too much, not expressing feelings, living someone else's expectations. These aren't just morbid curiosities; they're instructional manuals written by those who've reached the final pages. Bronnie Ware's observations from palliative care reveal that most people don't regret what they did, but what they didn't do. The ending, it seems, clarifies everything that came before.

Civilizational Conclusions: How Societies Crumble and Transform

Zoom out from individual endings, and we hit civilizational mortality—a topic that's gained uncomfortable relevance lately. Every empire that ever existed probably thought it would last forever. The Romans certainly did. So did the Mayans, the Ottomans, the British. Yet here we are, building our smartphones on their ruins.

Joseph Tainter's work on societal collapse reveals a pattern: complexity increases until the system can't sustain itself. It's not usually one dramatic event but a cascade of interconnected failures. Sound familiar? Between climate change, political polarization, and economic inequality, we're checking a lot of historical boxes for civilizational stress.

But—and this is crucial—collapse isn't always apocalyptic. Sometimes it's transformation. The Roman Empire didn't vanish; it morphed into something else. The Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Catholic Church—all carried forward elements of Rome. Even today, we use Roman law, Roman letters, Roman months.

I find myself thinking about this whenever doomscrolling through news about democracy's decline or environmental tipping points. Yes, things might end—but ending and transformation aren't always distinguishable in real-time. What feels like collapse to one generation might be evolution to the next.

The indigenous peoples of North America have something to teach us here. Many tribes speak not of linear progress toward an ending, but of cycles—creation, destruction, renewal. Their worldview doesn't promise permanence but accepts impermanence as natural, even necessary. Perhaps our Western obsession with permanent progress blinds us to the rhythms of rise and fall that define existence.

The Cosmic Finale: Universe-Scale Endings

Now for the really big picture—the ending of everything. Cosmologists paint several scenarios, none particularly comforting. There's the Big Freeze, where the universe expands until stars burn out and black holes evaporate, leaving nothing but elementary particles drifting in infinite darkness. Cheerful stuff.

Or maybe we get the Big Rip, where dark energy accelerates expansion until it tears apart galaxies, solar systems, atoms themselves. Everything that can be separated will be separated, down to the fundamental level. The universe essentially pulls itself apart at the seams.

The Big Crunch offers a different flavor of doom—gravity eventually wins, pulling everything back together into a singular point. Like running the Big Bang in reverse. Some physicists theorize this could trigger another Big Bang, making the universe cyclical. We might be living in cosmic attempt number trillion-and-one.

What fascinates me—sorry, let me rephrase that. The thing that keeps me up at night is how these cosmic endings mirror our personal and civilizational ones. Entropy increases. Things fall apart. Energy dissipates. Whether we're talking about your body, the Roman Empire, or the Andromeda Galaxy, the same principles apply. There's something both terrifying and oddly comforting about that universality.

But here's where it gets weird. Quantum mechanics suggests the universe might not have a single ending at all. In the many-worlds interpretation, every possible ending happens somewhere. There's a universe where heat death occurs, another where intelligent life prevents it, another where physics works differently entirely. Our ending might just be one note in an infinite symphony of conclusions.

Technological Endings: Singularity, Simulation, and Silicon Dreams

The tech crowd offers its own eschatology, and honestly, it's just as religious as any traditional belief system. Ray Kurzweil and his disciples preach the coming Singularity—that moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and everything changes forever. It's basically the Rapture for people who prefer Python to prayer.

The argument goes: once AI can improve itself, it'll do so exponentially. Within days or hours of reaching human-level intelligence, it'll become godlike. Then what? Nobody knows. That's why they call it the Singularity—like a black hole, we can't see past the event horizon.

I've sat through enough Silicon Valley presentations to recognize the pattern. They always start with exponential curves—Moore's Law, computational power, data processing. Then comes the hand-waving about consciousness, usually glossing over the hard problem like it's a minor debugging issue. Finally, the promise: upload your mind, live forever, transcend biology.

Maybe they're right. Maybe consciousness really is just information processing, and we'll all end up as immortal software. But I can't shake the feeling that this is just another denial of death, dressed up in technological terminology. Instead of heaven, we get the cloud. Instead of resurrection, we get reconstruction from backup files.

The simulation hypothesis offers another techno-ending: maybe we're already in a computer program, and "ending" just means someone pulls the plug. If our universe is simulated, our ending isn't even real—it's just the conclusion of someone else's experiment or entertainment. Comforting thought, right?

Environmental Endings: The Planet's Patience Wears Thin

Climate scientists don't talk about endings; they talk about scenarios. But read between the lines of IPCC reports, and the endings are there—coastal cities underwater, breadbaskets turned to dust bowls, mass migrations that make current refugee crises look quaint.

The environment offers a different kind of ending than cosmic heat death or AI singularity. It's messier, more gradual, more unequal. Some places become uninhabitable while others might temporarily improve. Some species vanish while others explode in population. It's not apocalypse so much as reorganization—brutal, chaotic reorganization.

What strikes me about environmental endings is their self-inflicted nature. Unlike asteroid impacts or solar flares, we're authoring this conclusion ourselves. Every flight taken, every burger eaten, every vote cast—we're all co-writers of this particular ending.

Yet even here, ending might mean transformation rather than termination. The Earth has survived worse than us—asteroid impacts, volcanic winters, ice ages. Life finds a way, as they say in Jurassic Park. The question isn't whether life will continue, but whether human civilization as we know it will be part of that continuation.

Indigenous wisdom resurfaces here too. Many traditional cultures speak of humans not as owners of Earth but as temporary caretakers. Our "ending" might simply be Earth reclaiming its autonomy, shaking off a particularly troublesome species like a dog shakes off fleas.

The Stories We Tell About Endings

Every culture has its apocalypse myths, and they reveal more about the culture than about actual endings. Christians have Revelation—judgment, resurrection, new heaven and earth. Norse mythology gives us Ragnarok—gods and giants in final battle, then rebirth. Hindus describe cycles of creation and destruction spanning billions of years.

Modern secular culture has its own ending myths. Zombie apocalypses reflect fears of mindless consumption and loss of individuality. Nuclear war scenarios process Cold War trauma. Climate disaster films work through environmental guilt. Even Marvel movies, with their universe-threatening villains, let us rehearse endings while eating popcorn.

I've noticed my own ending stories shifting over the years. In my twenties, I imagined dramatic conclusions—revolution, collapse, transformation. Now in my forties, I see endings as more gradual, more ordinary. Things don't usually end with bangs but with whimpers, with forgetting, with slow transitions barely noticed until they're complete.

Living Toward an Unknown Ending

So where does this leave us? We know endings are coming—personal, civilizational, cosmic—but not their nature or timing. We're characters in a story whose conclusion remains unwritten, or at least unread.

Some respond with paralysis. If everything ends, why bother? Others find liberation—if nothing lasts forever, might as well enjoy the ride. Most of us oscillate between these poles, sometimes within the same day.

I've found something like peace in accepting the uncertainty. Not knowing how it ends means every moment could be significant or insignificant, final or merely transitional. This uncertainty isn't a bug; it's a feature. It keeps us present, prevents us from skipping to the last page.

The question "how's it going to end?" might be the wrong question entirely. Maybe better to ask: "How's it going?" Present tense. Right now. Because whatever the ending—personal, global, universal—we're not there yet. We're here, in the messy middle, where choices still matter and stories still unfold.

The ending will come. It always does. But until then, we write, we love, we build, we dream. Not because these things will last forever, but because they won't. The ending gives shape to the story, but it's not the only thing that matters. Sometimes, it's not even the most important thing.

In my grandmother's final days, she stopped sorting photos and started telling stories about them instead. The ending was approaching, yes, but the stories—they were alive, present, vital. Maybe that's the secret: the ending matters less than what we do while we're still in the middle of the story.

However it ends—with bang or whimper, fire or ice, upload or download—we won't know until we get there. And by then, we'll have lived a whole life, a whole civilization, a whole universe of moments. The ending is just punctuation. The sentence itself—that's where the meaning lives.

Authoritative Sources:

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1973.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005.

Tainter, Joseph. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Ware, Bronnie. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. Hay House, 2011.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Cambridge University Press, 2021.