The real reason 2025 had us ready for the rapture

The real reason 2025 had us ready for the rapture
In September, #RaptureTok prepared for the end of days. It was the natural result of humanity seeking connection

By Coleman Spilde
Senior Writer
Published December 21, 2025 10:30AM (EST)


(Salon) ....(snip)....

Life could, however, get worse. And it has. In the 13 years since 2012, all four horsemen of the apocalypse have rocked up to the party and put a stop to the dancing and jubilation. Under their rule, most of us have been banished to our houses, where our punishment for daring to enjoy life is to swipe our thumbs across a smartphone screen for hours on end each day. On the occasion that we’re let out of our house, our screens come with us, acting as an extra limb or a tool to curb solitude. When a friend uses the bathroom at a restaurant or after a movie, do you reach for your phone while you wait? It used to be a reflex for me, but lately, I’ve caught myself resisting it entirely in favor of looking around and people-watching, maybe even reading the menu or pacing around the theater lobby. Anything is better than plugging back into digital oblivion, where nothing but predatory, algorithmic evil awaits.

It’s hard not to believe that #RaptureTok isn’t just the latest symptom of our tech-induced mania. There have been dozens of false rapture dates that have popped up over the decades, sure. But September’s was a special, modern kind of disheartening, given that this particular speculation began on a little-known video podcast called “I’ve Been Through the Most,” seemingly targeted toward fundamentalist conspiracy theorists and soap opera enthusiasts. From what I can surmise, the hosts — two twins named Innocent and Millicent, known as the CENTTWINZ — will have just about anyone on their show, as long as they have some outrageous story to tell. On the June 17 episode of the podcast, a South African man named Joshua Mhlakela shared that God came to him in a vision and told him the world would end on September 23. Leave it to the collective channels of internet brainrot to turn Mhlakela’s baseless prophecy, harnessed for clickbait, into scripture ready to be disseminated directly into the algorithms of similarly fanatical Christian microinfluencers.

....(snip)....

Fundamentalists are people like you and me. They experience the same ravages of time, and they’re subject to the same echo chambers that the modern digital experience demands. They were witness to humanity’s swift decline into a more isolated, cruel and selfish species. Incessant scrolling, posting and the rapid, gluttonous consumption of that awful word, “content,” fatigues all of us, whether we admit it or not. By now, one starts to wonder, “Is this really what we were made for?” The September rapture started as a seed planted on a video podcast, then turned into a frightening TikTok trend and ended with Christian YouTubers chiding believers in hour-long videos. In every case, someone is sitting in a room, in front of a camera and microphone, almost totally alone. Suddenly, a rapture doesn’t seem like such a bad thing after all. It even sounds exciting, like it might be the answer we’ve waited for, something to save us from the attention economy’s ceaseless detachment

I can’t say there isn’t some charm to the idea. The proliferation of AI this year alone has done more psychic damage to my soul than I ever knew possible. Smartphones have made us addicted to convenience, and now, millions of people are willing to hand over their critical thinking skills to LLMs like ChatGPT or Grok. (Yet, when I suggest that using every possible digital shortcut is making people dumber — or, God forbid, bring up the amount of energy and water that AI data centers use — I’m the bad guy.) Or, what about the Netflix and Warner Bros. merger, where the streamer equated “Casablanca” to “Stranger Things” in an email sent to its millions of subscribers announcing the intended acquisition. Bleak stuff, though no worse than switching back to cable and hearing the president call a woman reporter “piggy.” .......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/21/the-real-reason-2025-had-us-ready-for-the-rapture/