The sky is falling! The end is near! It's the End of Days! Feels like it sometimes doesn't it? Like we're all just surviving in what's about to be Ryan Murphy's next installment of American Horror Story. It's always one of life's greatest fears.
And you have to ask yourself sometimes, when nobody is home... if you were a key player in the Apocalypse, like say you get to be the infamous, feared '5th Horseman'... what do you do to make your Apocalypse, unique?
Redditor u/TeddyBearToons wanted to know what sort of ideas one could come up with during the end of the world... Congratulations! You've been selected as the fifth horseman of the apocalypse! What plague will you bring upon humanity?
Infrastructure is already crumbling so, why not?
Either insanity or infrastructure collapse. The horsemen are supposed to bring the end times, not just cause suffering. So, either destroy the minds of everyone or destroy the physical embodiment of society.
Pestilence is too on the nose...
I feel like insanity would already be covered by pestilence though. At least how I imagine it, he wouldn't just cause physical illnesses but also mental.
So, funny thing about Pestilence as a horseman; that's most popular in fictional media that wants to signify the horsemen as all different forms of destruction or curse upon humanity. War means strife between people, famine is starvation, and so pestilence as disease of any kind feels fitting in thematic way. But, death is death, and that is generally the end result of the other three anyway, so it seems a little odd if you think about it.
Original biblical translation of the Book of Revelation doesn't say the first horseman is pestilence though. It's Conquest or Victory depending on translation, and this is strange to think as fitting the theme of the four horsemen. That's likely because they aren't meant to be forms of doom, they are a series of events foretelling the doom of a society, or in the case of the Bible the doom of all humanity.
Their order of arrival is important: First a society thrives enough to commit conquest of other nations, swallowing them up and destroying them. The swelling of a nation into a kind of superpower after conquest is thought to lead to war within the nation, struggle between fellow citizens in all forms. Then the nation finds itself without enough resources and necessities, food primarily but this might mean any other break down in the society's function. Finally, that nation is dead.
There's a theory that prophecies in the bible are actually a projection of things which had already occurred for the scribes of biblical text, history they project as events will repeat in the future. The fall of the Roman Empire could be seen as the inspiration for Revelations and the four horseman metaphor, mainly due to specific details about the horseman, each a stage of Rome's eventual collapse.
Know who you are...
Self-awareness. Turns out you are not as smart or attractive as you thought. Your chances of becoming a millionaire are not that high, either.
Self-awareness is a social skill that I think is really underplayed these days. Improving your self-awareness can help you in ways I really can't describe.
Dear God NO!
Slow Internet.
"And lo, came the fifth horsemen, and with him a landline and dial up connection which disconnected when anyone called."
No thank you...
Apathy.
Apathy seems like a pretty good thing to have if the entire world is engulfed in inescapable conquest, war, famine, and death. "Oh is this the end then? Well go on, get on with it." seems a lot better than "OH GOD NO PLEASE TAKE MY BABY BUT NOT ME"
How dare you!
Missing semicolons.
Or worse; misused semicolons.
I get to keep my pills right?
Never be truly comfortable while sitting or laying down.
Add just pure insomnia and constant restless leg syndrome.
Any other video... please!
You internet connection is almost always slow. Sometimes the page will take a few seconds to load, but you're used to it taking a long time, so you click reload right as it loads and it takes another 5 minutes to load. Half the videos you watch are just Bill Clinton saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
Heed the signs!
Procrastination. Civilization will crumble... tomorrow, or maybe next Tuesday.
This. We are able to do something against war, famine and disease, we're just not doing it.