I recently had a dream, in which the world had fallen under some kind of Zombie Apocalypse. The world fell in ash, people became sick, zombies began to walk among us, you know the works, but my dream isn't what this is about…well not entirely anyways…
The first “Apocalypse” of the century was probably Y2K. For those of us who don’t really know what that stand for. Y2k is a numeronym and was the common abbreviation for the year 200 software problem. The abbreviation combines the letter Y for “year”, and K for the SI unit prefix kilo meaning 100; hence, 2K signifies 2000. In those last years of the 90’s when Y2K became a public issue it was popularly referred to as Year To Kill. The initial fear behind Y2K for the public was that all the computers of the world would crash, the stock market would fail completely, and of course all the technology of the world would rise up against its human creator and enslave us( or something along those line, but really just wow -_-)
In all actuality this Millennium Bug was really just that; a bug in the system. The Y2K bug was a flaw in the code system in which programmers represented yearly dates using the last two digits of the year, i.e. 85,86,87,89,90 etc. This was pretty much done to save space in programs. programmers of the time only thought their programs would be around of a few years not 20 to 30 years after they wrote it. So essentially the Y2K bug struck fear because when the new year came in programs would have logic failures from changing the dates from 99 to 00. It took extensive time and work to go back in and rewrite this problems even then some companies and the gov’t didn’t go in and fix this issue until the last minute, but Y2K bug was blown way out of proportion then what it really was.
One of the most recent apocalyptic phases that we’ve gone through is the 2012 phenomenon. This belief of endworld comes from a large calamity of misinterpreted ideas from the Mayan calendar. There is a strong tradition of “world ages” in Mayan literature, but the record has been distorted, leaving several possibilities open to interpretation. So, its understandable that some people would take it was a endworld prediction.
On a continuous note the Zombie Apocalypse has been an on going fad that is probably the most popular of them all. One of the largest scaled commercial representations of this fad could be traced back to the Resident Evil franchise. Releasing its first debut onto playstation in 1996 and releasing something new every consecutive year afterwards leading up to now even.Another example of the popularity of the zombies franchise is movies. Sony kicked it up a notch by releasing a movie in 2002 of their game Resident Evil that had formidable success in the U.S. and still they continue them movie franchise with a new movie in the making. Another example of popularity is the movie Zombieland. Which was ranked in the top ten under the post-apocalyptic genre in the box office.
All this leads me back to my original question. Why do we fantasize about the end of our world?
As I told you, I recently had a dream that was about the world coming to an apocalyptic end. Well, the more i think about it the clearer it is that my dream wasn’t about the world just coming to an end. It was about me surviving this “Zombie Apocalypse” i created in my head. And I won’t lie about it, because I’m sure almost everyone has done it. I made myself the hero of my story, I suddenly had the strength to overcome opponents twice my size, and I had leadership skills I can only hope to one day possess.
Going back to a previous ex. I gave; Zombieland. The protagonist of the movie was a scrawny teenager who figured it all out. He developed a list of rules to follow and by following them he would ensure himself survival through any obstacle he faced.
Like wise Resident Evil does something similar but instead of giving rules to follow, you follow along with the main character and her story and you get to see how she survives and how others of their world are surviving.
So it’s not that we want to fantasize about the world coming to a gruesome end. We want to put ourselves in the heros position; to be able to find the strength that is needed to survive, the smarts, and all the courage that comes with it. We all have this innate desire to be the hero of our story, and a post-apocalyptic world would be the perfect way to make that dream become a reality.
