Over 100 Million Americans Now Expect the End Could Be Near, Survey Says

More than 100 million Americans believe the world will end within their lifetime. That is not a fringe estimate buried in a conspiracy forum. It comes from a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which surveyed over 3,400 people across the U.S. and Canada. Nearly one-third of the 1,409 American respondents said they expect the world to end before they do.

Not long ago, doomsday thinking had a predictable home: church basements, AM radio, prophecy charts photocopied and passed around after Sunday service. The people who believed the end was coming tended to belong to specific religious traditions. They awaited catastrophe with a mixture of dread and vindication. Everyone else refinanced their mortgages and changed the channel. That cultural wall is now gone, and the research makes clear that what replaced it is something far more widespread and complicated.

The study was led by Dr. Matthew I. Billet, who conducted the research as a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia and is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine. His team developed a new psychological tool called the End of World Beliefs Scale, measuring five dimensions of apocalyptic thinking: how soon people expect the end, whether they blame humans or divine forces, how much personal control they feel, and whether they view the outcome as ultimately good or bad. Those dimensions, it turns out, predict behavior in ways that political identity alone cannot.

This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team for accuracy and clarity.

It Isn’t Just Religious Anymore

Apocalyptic belief is not simply pessimism dressed in religious language. The study found that believing the world will end soon actually predicted greater support for extreme action to address current threats. In other words, people who think humans caused the problem want to act urgently to fix it. But those who believe a divine force has already scheduled the end see little reason to intervene. The same conviction, filtered through different narratives, produces radically opposite political instincts. The stakes for policymakers are enormous.

According to Dr. Billet, different narratives about the apocalypse lead to very different responses to societal issues. Someone who believes climate change will end civilization is far more likely to support aggressive environmental policy than someone who believes God controls the timeline. These are not just philosophical differences. They shape how millions of people vote, consume, invest, and respond to government action on nuclear risk, pandemics, and artificial intelligence. Mood and belief architecture, the research suggests, may matter more than income or party registration.

Earlier research had suggested apocalyptic believers simply have shortened time horizons and care less about the future. The new multidimensional framework reveals far more nuanced patterns. The specifics of what someone believes about the end matters far more than whether they believe in it at all. Researchers now argue that dismissing these beliefs as irrational misses the point entirely. Understanding the internal logic of apocalyptic thinking is becoming a prerequisite for effective public communication and crisis policy. The next section explains why the timing of this research could not be more urgent.

Wars, Machines, and Melting Tipping Points

Geopolitical shock and technological disruption are arriving at the same moment, and the combination is doing something new to the public imagination. When the U.S. and Israel struck Iran and killed its supreme leader, “World War III” began trending on the phones of mechanics in Des Moines and software engineers in Austin. The abstraction of apocalypse suddenly felt concrete. Energy markets jolted. Shipping routes tightened. And investors relearned, once again, that the phrase “risk-free” was mostly a marketing exercise that worked best in peacetime.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has quietly become a structural threat to the white-collar workforce. Entry-level job postings have declined roughly 35% since January 2023, according to Revelio Labs data cited by CNBC. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in 2025 that AI could eliminate roughly 50% of white-collar entry-level positions within five years. The corporate promise has been that AI will “augment” workers. The lived experience for many young graduates has been something more abrupt: the role they trained for simply no longer exists in the same form.

Microsoft’s 2025 data identified five million white-collar positions, including management analysts, customer service representatives, and sales engineers, as facing extinction. This flips the conventional automation narrative. For decades, the assumption was that automation threatened blue-collar and routine physical work first. AI’s current wave targets cognitive tasks: writing, analysis, coding, and research, which are the core competencies of white-collar employment. When the same technology driving war coverage is also eliminating the careers of people watching that coverage, apocalyptic thinking stops being entertainment and starts functioning as realism.

When Expecting the Worst Becomes a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The new apocalyptic coalition is not what it used to be. It now includes evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture, climate scientists tracking feedback loops past every promised tipping point, and AI researchers running scenarios where autonomous systems stop accepting instructions. According to Dr. Billet, these beliefs are held widely across diverse populations and have real consequences for how societies confront global risks. What makes this moment different is that preppers, prophets, modelers, and geopolitical analysts can now all point to different dashboards flashing red at the same time.

There is a specific danger embedded in that convergence that goes beyond whether any one prediction proves correct. A country collectively braced for collapse has a way of producing one. If people genuinely believe the system is beyond saving, the incentives to invest in institutions, to compromise, to build long-term projects, erode quickly. Research on automation anxiety, distinct from actual job loss, already shows measurable impacts on mental health, family stability, and community engagement. Economic fear and existential belief are not separate phenomena. They reinforce each other at the household level, long before any headline confirms the worst.

Americans have always carried an undercurrent of millennial anxiety. What is new is the breadth and the sources feeding it simultaneously. The question that remains open is not whether apocalyptic belief is rational, but what a society actually does when the feeling becomes the majority position. Rather than dismissing apocalyptic thinking as irrational, researchers argue that understanding these beliefs is essential for effective communication and policymaking in an increasingly divided society. The harder question, the one no survey can answer yet, is whether understanding these beliefs will be enough to prevent them from becoming a blueprint.