The real reason 2025 had us ready for the rapture

According to Britney Spears, this was all supposed to be over a long time ago. In 2011, the pop star released the music video for her single “Till the World Ends,” an electropop fist-pumper packed with “woah-oh-oh-oh”s, where Spears, our shepherd through the apocalypse, pledged to, you guessed it, “keep on dancin’ till the world ends.” The dystopia-set visual opens with a cheeky wink as “December 21, 2012” — the famed final day on the Mesoamerican calendar — flashes across the screen, before Spears and her harem of leather-clad, grease-stained survivors scurry down a manhole from the streets of a crumbling metropolis. In the sewers, they engage in sweet hedonism — grinding, partying and woah-ing without care. Technology has fallen, cities have gone dark and fear has united humanity as the world chokes on its dying gasp. Pop’s princess and her crew don’t just await Armageddon; they welcome it. Spears’ message was simple: If the 2012 rapture comes, the party’s going with it.

The vibe was decidedly different this fall, when the rapture once again became a blip in the culture conversation after word spread that the apocalypse was coming on September 23. This time, there was no underground rave, no desire to live out our final hours on Earth fornicating and feasting on the simple joys of life — and certainly no Roland Emmerich disaster movies named for the occasion. Instead, there were merely sad videos posted to the internet, where gullible Christian influencers and doomsday preppers outlined their plans for Jesus Christ’s return to Earth. In a now-deleted video, a woman named Melissa Johnston showed off the Bibles she bought for the sinners left behind, complete with messages of faith handwritten inside the cover. One Louisiana-based mom, Hannah Gallman, said in a TikTok video that the September rapture date confirmed that leaving her dream job the year prior to devote her life to Christ was the right move. One man claimed he sold his car because he’ll no longer need it; another woman told her followers to remove the passcodes from their phones so those left behind could find fellow survivors. This small but mighty movement even formed its own TikTok hashtag: #RaptureTok.

Obviously, #RaptureTok was wrong. The apocalypse did not come. Christ’s followers were not reunited with their savior and everyone dutifully prepping for September 23 was forced to wipe the egg from their faces and move on. Nevertheless, I was struck by all those dollar-store Bibles inscribed with messages for the sinners left to walk the Earth, seeking redemption. What a perfectly concise symbol of rampant hyper-consumerism meeting our new-age, tech-fueled naivete, and all in service of the ardent belief that this material-obsessed lifestyle is the correct one. If Christ’s chosen people are bulk-buying Bibles from Temu and spending their days glued to their phones in an endless scripture scroll, God help us all — not even the pious can wrangle themselves free from modernity’s wicked web. If this is how it’s going to be from now on, I’d like to be raptured, too.

When I was in high school during the early 2010s, the rapture was still a punchline. If a classmate bombed an AP English exam, it didn’t matter; the world was going to end in 2012, anyway. I was a fresh-faced high school senior, living out the prime of my teenage youth in an increasingly progressive world where fundamentalist doomsday prophecies were lobbed around in jest. There was enough hope in everyday life to hold onto, and the starry-eyed vision of the future made the rapture’s fearmongering futile. The idea that we weren’t already living in paradise was unthinkable. Buzzfeed was cool! Barack Obama was president! H&M was about to launch e-commerce in America! Life couldn’t get any better. If the clomping hooves from the first horseman’s approaching steed got too loud, we’d just turn the music up.

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.

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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.

And, really, can you blame them for welcoming the rapture? I certainly can’t. The videos of Christian TikTokers “accepting” the rapture or detailing their preparation sank my heart to my stomach. Considering doomsday prophecies from a podcast with a paltry 68 total star ratings on Spotify is one thing, but believing them is another entirely. The fact that enough social media users believed in the September 23 rapture prediction to make it a viral moment, and not just some tiny glitch in the system, is horrific. That people are so susceptible to what they read, watch and listen to online is perturbing enough as it is. But the demoralization really comes when you pause for a beat and realize that, behind every single #RaptureTok video, there’s an unspoken yearning for relief.

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.”

In researching this piece, I found a TikTok that Melissa Johnston, the woman who bought the Bibles to leave behind after the rapture, posted in the days leading up to September 23. As I listened to the details of what else she was doing to prepare for the rapture, I noticed that she was sporting a shirt with Charlie Kirk’s name on it. It was a sad sight, then comical, then stupefying. Here we were, two people of completely different politics and ideologies, considering that a biblically apocalyptic event might be the only way for humanity to come together, to bring us the relief we can’t seem to scrape together ourselves. If the desire to be released from this Hell reaches across the party line — if it’s affecting everyone, everywhere — is there any escape at all, any way off this hamster wheel? Maybe divine intervention wouldn’t be such a bad thing if utter subservience to billionaires, technology and manufactured loneliness is the alternative.

Ironically, I scrolled past a tweet recently that gave me some hope. It read: “I used to crochet, I used to read, I used to game, I used to draw, I used to, I used to…,” trailing off into the nostalgia for a life when we had no trouble prioritizing hobbies over screen time. I was moved that the replies weren’t just from those commiserating, but rather, people offering helpful solutions to this cyclical malaise. Another tweet I saw just this week read, “Didn’t think it was possible, but I think I may actually finally be losing interest in the internet. It only took around 15 years. What do I do now?”

Similarly, this question also received a sincere response from people tired of the homogeneity of the contemporary digital experience, fatigued by ads and AI. But there’s a beauty in that question — “What do I do now?” — that stirs me. It’s exciting, not knowing what comes next. Our phones have made it so easy to plan our lives to the minute, or to fill every moment of silence with noise or occupy our eyes with a quick scroll. Without being tethered to a device, we’re free to move as we wish. I realized that, when you boil it down, that’s what #RaptureTok was anticipating: the thrill of starting fresh, redeemed of past burdens and mistakes. If getting offline is the difference between living in the world and actually experiencing it, I’ll happily spend the new year pursuing this alternative, device-free form of salvation. Christ is running late, anyway. I don’t feel like waiting by the phone for him to text.