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Lac-Mégantic burns after last weekend’s horrific train derailment.Jean Gauthier/Reuters

As you've doubtless heard, it rained this week in Toronto. Admittedly, Torontonians are quick to turn any hiccup here into national news. But this was bad: 126 millimetres of rain in just a few hours, shattering the city's daily record, exceeding the average rainfall for the entire month of July. Streets flooded, roofs collapsed (mine included), tens of thousands lost power, a water snake boarded a stranded commuter train. Tragically, a swamped Ferrari had to be abandoned on Lower Simcoe Street.

But Toronto's trickle was nothing compared with the rampaging flood waters endured by so much of Western Canada mere weeks ago. That disaster (and the powerful stories and indelible images emerging from it) has genuinely moved the nation. And it's but one of many terrible situations endured here and abroad in recent months; as hard as it has been for us, it's far worse elsewhere. Runaway trains, political upheavals, natural disasters, wars, massacres, drone strikes, bombings. This week, an ice shelf eight times the size of Manhattan broke free from an Antarctic glacier, and presumably ocean levels inched a bit higher.

There is a palpable feeling that things, generally, are bad, and deteriorating rapidly. We see it in the news, with what feels like an ever-amplified parade of horrors. We see it in our books, such as Dan Brown's new bestseller, Inferno, which is basically a screed against the dangers of overpopulation.

We even see it in the nightmarish embodiments of our fears that fill the multiplexes. This weekend, you can take in World War Z, which is exactly what it sounds like once you realize that the Z stands for zombies.

On Monday night, as I hoisted my wife so she could use a nine-inch kitchen knife to puncture the aquatic boil protruding from our ceiling, I thought of all these things – because the end of the world is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Despite seeming reasonable in other areas of my life, I believe that we are quite likely living in or near the fabled end times. Not necessarily a Book of Revelations type of end; now it's easier to imagine a secular version caused by climate change, which is quite possibly irreversible, or nuclear war. Both options seem more probable at this point than an assemblage of horseman. And I think that this belief is increasingly common. That, whether it's articulated as such or not, it's becoming easier and easier to feel that the shadow hanging over us isn't just another massive rain cloud. That it's something bigger, something worse. And that it's moving in awfully quickly.

In moments like this – extreme weather, extreme bad news, extreme trauma around the globe – it's easy to fixate on that terminal fear. What if these are our final days? What if the rant-and-rave routine with which I've ruined countless dinner parties is actually accurate? What if we're running out of time? And, I'd add, what if that's a good thing?

The end may feel new again, but of course it's an old idea, dating back to some anxious Assyrian tablets from 2800 BC. They warned that "bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching." Sound familiar?

Some ancient Romans thought that their civilization would last no more than 120 years – a decade for each of the 12 eagles that had revealed the party's curfew to Romulus. In 1260, lingering worry over the predictions of an Italian monk named Joachim of Fiore bloomed into out-and-out hysteria across Europe, with reports of earthquakes and other natural disturbances seen as confirmation of the worst. Soon thereafter came the bubonic plague, which one would have been hard pressed to see as a sign that things were on an acceptable track.

Predicting doomsday essentially became a high-stakes parlour game, with new dates floated continually. More recently, the 20th century, with its persistent evangelical bent, brought countless missed opportunities. We've been scheduled to go out in a massive flood, or at the hands of a bizarre planetary alignment. One of the more memorable (and outrageous) predictions was made by Sheldan Nidle, the founder of a UFO religion, who said the end would be brought about by 16 million spaceships arriving in 1996. Some foresaw nuclear disaster, comet strikes, even the good old-fashioned Rapture. To say nothing of the Mayan maybe that was 2012.

While prognosticating may be the domain of an eccentric, enlightened elite that is equally adept at moving the yardstick, the idea of the end belongs to us all: It's one of our primary cultural obsessions. Countless films, books, television shows and, more recently, video games have let us explore various scenarios, satisfying a point of fundamental curiosity. If things do indeed wrap up here, few of us are likely to make it into whatever plucky band of survivors will roam the countryside, looking for untainted canned goods, watching out for zombies. It's always nice to know what we're missing out on.

None of these depictions, in my opinion, is as enduring as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is one of his lesser novels and yet also among our more haunting visions of what may be coming. In it, a nameless man and his nameless son wander the land, heading vaguely south, where they hope that things will be better. A fine ash, apparently the residue of some unspecified disaster, covers everything. The two scavenge for food in abandoned houses, avoid roving bands of cannibals as best they can, and sort of just hang out.

It's depressing stuff – repetitive and a bit boring, yet somehow impossible to stop reading. The one bright spot comes from the two reminding each other that they're "the good guys," and that they're "carrying the light." It's this light that interests me most of all. In the novel, it's a simplistic yet powerful symbol of the love the two have for each other, the love they protect. In our world, it's why I'm convinced that things would be a lot better, were we to start to expect the end. We fear it, we suspect it, but we need to embrace it.

For me, Nostradamus was the gateway drug, via a camp counsellor who inadvisably told us of the French seer's prophecies at story time each night. I obsessed over his predictions, somberly whispering them around the schoolyard like especially damning gossip. It's embarrassing to admit, but I so feared Y2K that I refused to leave the house until well after midnight, when I was certain the power grid wouldn't be destabilized.

But that was a technological problem for which we were able to prepare. We don't have that luxury for other threats. I continue to believe that we are on an irreversible path that will soon enough reach its end, whether against the headwaters of a rising ocean or in the bright flash of a detonation.

On Monday night, Twitter was packed with Torontonians offering strangers places to stay and something to eat. We've heard the same stories out of Alberta, countless tales of complete strangers helping each other to rescue homes and livelihoods. The city of Calgary took out an ad in the Edmonton Journal to thank its civic rival for showing such support.

Researchers routinely find that we're at our best in disaster. In fact, it seems to be a marker of maturity: A fascinating study conducted by the University of Toronto and other schools in the aftermath of a 2008 earthquake in China found that older children became more altruistic in disaster and younger children less so. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the subjects' altruism returned to normal within three years of the quake.

This may seem naive and optimistic, but what if that didn't happen? What if, instead of responding to disaster with kindness and support, we were just kind and supportive? What if this were how we lived?

Anticipation could become its own governing principle. I do not believe in God per se, but I believe in our ability to destroy ourselves promptly. And in a sense, that's faith, a kind of spirituality, a secular system through which morality can be filtered, priorities weighed, decisions made. And through which togetherness and belonging can be found.

I carry this particular light with a feeling approaching joy, because believing in the end makes the present so much better. We've all been asked what we would do if we had hours, days, weeks or months left, a thought experiment meant to compress our passions and compassions into hard jewels of meaning. Believing that our age's crescendo of disaster, its heightened hatred, is the beginning of the end allows us to take those priorities out of the realm of the theoretical. It permits the type of emotional honesty that might otherwise be deemed maudlin or excessive. It allows us to think and feel and act in ways we otherwise might deny ourselves. It encourages us to be more direct, more honest, more loving. It says, in fact, that we must.

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