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Note: This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing as a means of taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Jamais Cascio, who explained the basics of futures thinking as divined by four expectations. This one is “what I expect,” though it might also be weirder than I expect.

I hate to disappoint all the Rapture Riders, extreme eschatologists, and fundie fanatics out there who are stockpiling guns, gold, and old copies of “Planet of the Apes” as they wait for their inevitable showdown, but it’s not going to go down like that. As much as Roland Emmerich may wish it so, there’s not going to be an instantaneous zero-point End of Everything where the Final Battle is fought on the slopes of Tel Megiddo.

Why not? Because it’s already happened. We’re living in the End Times. This is the Apocalypse, the Singularity, the earth-shattering moment where Everything You Know Is Wrong, and a Change Is Gonna Come.

I first realized this a few years back thanks to the wise sage Joss Whedon, and a beautiful moment somewhere in the second season of “Angel” when Holland Manners (despite being dead) shows Angel that the Apocalypse is already happening. Wars of greed, homelessness, environmental destruction, apathy towards ourselves and one another, poisoning each other with shitty food and polluted water, and a studied indifference towards anything and everything except one’s own life and concerns. How could it be any other way?

We want to believe that it’s all spiraling towards something, some big moment when the heavens will align, the skies will rain blood, and we’ll finally have the answer to all of those Big Questions that plague us. Now, I believe that we’re definitely on the verge of big changes, but I also believe that we’re also already living through big changes, and that our movie-narrative-shaped minds don’t see them for what they are. As Cascio writes, if the Singularity occurs (or has occurred), it might not take any form you would expect. (If Twitter is, in fact, sentient, it’s doing the smart thing and keeping itself hidden.) But all around us, the world has shifted irrevocably. The media as we knew it is dead. Institutions that we counted on for generations have crumbled to dust or been radically reshaped. We are living in Extremistan, where every disruption of the system is bigger, bolder, nastier, and has much more devastating consequences than ever before. The most complex system of all — our planet Earth — is rebelling from the ravages we’ve put it through, but there’s no easy way to predict exactly when the big tipping point will come, sending us into irrevocable change.

But we don’t know the end of the story, and that’s what’s killing us. We want everything wrapped up with a bow in a neat narrative, where we (the hero) get the girl (or the guy) and live happily ever after. But life isn’t like that. Some people are taken too soon. Others live far past their due date. Some people just quietly fade away into mediocrity, while others burn bright, hot, and fast. If there is a plan, it’s either beyond our comprehension, or something we’re only beginning to puzzle out for ourselves. But the common theme of it all is that life is messy, unpredictable, brutal, short, and very rarely what we want it to be.

The narrative of the world-change helps give people focus, direction, and purpose. Some struggle against it. Others embrace and welcome it with open arms. Most of these directions are based in simple, elemental impulses. The old fear death and losing any more of what they have, which is why there’s so much resistance from seniors to health care reform. If you’re a Singulatarian/transhumanist like Ray Kurzweil, you may simply not want to grow old and die, and want to live forever. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this — these are all natural human feelings. But be honest about what you’re doing when you advocate or oppose the Big Ka-Boom–don’t dress it up with God, the Mayans, or anything else.

We want our lives to fit a mythical, heroic journey, even if that involves something as dark as the end of the world, because it helps distract us from the fact that we’re thousands of dollars in credit card debt, we don’t have health insurance, the mortgage is falling behind, the kids are hungry, and the boss isn’t pleased with your job performance. All the things we were taught to want as a society have proven hollow and fragile, and nothing we could count on has proven to have staying power.

The human species is, for all its faults, remarkably adaptable. Eight years after 9/11 supposedly Changed Everything, we ignore those stupid color-coded alerts and grouse about restrictive security at the airport because we’ve moved on. Four years after we thought America was doomed to fall into the clutches of a Dominionist power bloc run by an empty-headed madman, a 48-year-old black man (with a white mother and the middle name “Hussein”) is our President. That can’t be underestimated, no matter what your personal feelings are about Obama.

All around the world, people die by the thousands from earthquakes, fires, floods, avalanches, and the occasional tornado. Joblessness is ravaging the globe as the predator state takes what it will from the carcass of our old economy, and yet people endure. They survive. They move on. Sometimes they break. Sometimes they thrive.

Sometimes the heroic narrative unfolds in ways you don’t even expect, when simply moving on is the bravest thing you can do. The trumpets may not sound and you may not win the lottery for it, but you do what you have to do, and you face the fact that life will throw whatever it wants at you. How you deal with it–the change you make in yourself and all around you–is the real End Of Everything. I think that explains why some folks are easing up on the stockpiling and hoarding (as noted in the article I linked to above) — there’s a burgeoning sense that maybe things won’t be so bad, or that the changes we’re going through are propelling us to a better, wiser, saner world.

If you’re an astrologically-minded person, you know Pluto is now direct in Capricorn, and the big cycle of change will accelerate, wiping away everything we thought we knew and giving us the opportunity to begin again. A philosophy I was recently introduced to, anthroposophy, emphasizes the need to develop an understanding of the supernatural world with the rigorous examination of science, and the importance of understanding who we are, why we’re here, and the purpose of our lives. The first and best thing we can do is adapt ourselves to the realization that the only constant is change, and that if this is the case, we better get ready to start building some new worlds.

Now, this doesn’t mean there won’t be a big shebang come December 22, 2012. Maybe we’ll all destroy each other in nuclear fire, or an asteroid will come crashing down for a repeat performance of the Great Dinosaur Wipeout. But I think my man Kevin said it best last year, when he said:

History will change, context will always shift, the weird will get weirder, narratives and how we relate to them will continue to be in a constant state of flux, but I do not think that the Singularity as we tend to think about it, will ever come. (Emphasis added.)

The Singularity is here. The Apocalypse is now. These are the End Times. Stop waiting for your favorite action hero to lock ‘n load and signal a shift in scene to the big final battle. This is it. The battle is your life. You have a responsibility to make meaning in the world and do something useful with it.

What will you do?