Are you feeling all of the things? Like this moment in time is a lot? And you read about record temperatures and melting ice sheets and new, powerful storms and all of the ideas we had about tomorrow being like yesterday are constantly being rewritten by new expectations that they won’t be?

What do we do with all of this?

When I started reading Brian McLaren’s Life After Doom, I quickly realized that I wanted to read it with other people. People like me, who were both freaked out and wanting to know what to do with that.

But there is an important third step. We don’t just want to be freaked out or to obsess about what to do — this can be a self-perpetuating cycle that we can get radically stuck in. We need a third piece: something that acknowledges life afterward. Not just within.

One of my favorite bits of reporting in 2020 was from an interview with a researcher of the doomsday prepper community. These are the people who plan and prepare for the worst. And when COVID-19 arrived, they were motivated, saying on socials “This is our time!”

What the researcher found was something hilariously predictable: doomsday preppers were just as likely or more to panic-buy toilet paper and freak out about the moment. What he found in his research was that preppers invest their personal identity into the prepping itself, preparing for the worst. But nothing in the preparing made them particularly adept at experiencing the worst, navigating the worst, or imagining the other side of the worst. When the worst came, they continued to prepare, buying up toilet paper and bunkering like they did before.

Our approach to Doom needs a vision for after and a mind that can adapt to the options we face. This book is about that.

If you want to join me, read two chapters a week for the next twelve weeks. I’m also hosting weekly check-ins on Zoom starting tonight. If you want to know more, check out my new newsletter on Substack.