Many things changed after the pandemic. The butterfly effect now applies to face masks. Ornithologists fall ill aboard a cruise ship adrift in some place most people couldn’t even point to on a map, like Cape Verde, and suddenly people in Berlin or Paris are wandering through the mountains wearing masks. We live in a kind of permanent love affair with fear and the apocalypse. My generation has lived through two historical moments when everyone thought the world was about to end: December 31, 1999, and later, virtually every day after March 11, 2020. In the case of leftists, there is also a third apocalyptic date to add: January 6, 2021. Only an idiot could believe that some fool dressed as a Viking was going to bring down American democracy, but that is another story. The post-pandemic prophets of doom would do well to take a look at history, or simply read the Bible. The world has never been a safe place. Every civilization understood that until the boomers came along and convinced themselves that science could grant them immortality within a reasonable timeframe, enough time for the magic serum to arrive before it was too late and eternally prolong the lysergic parties of the 1970s. The end of the world has always been a business. When people believe they are going to die, they are easier to deceive and more willing to buy things they would never purchase under normal circumstances. Yes, including windmills and Chinese electric cars. That is why most successful sects throughout history used the excuse of the imminent apocalypse to rob their followers of everything they owned, allowing the chief preacher to enjoy a life of luxury and excess that, under normal conditions, would have been enough to make his flock suspect that something in the apocalyptic equation did not quite add up. Now there is a man who has invented a radar system that tracks billionaires’ private jets and monitors their movements in order to predict the apocalypse. The creator’s theory is that, when a nuclear holocaust or something similar approaches, the elites will know an hour or two before fire starts raining from the sky, and they will try to flee to some remote location aboard their luxurious planes. It is called the Apocalypse Early Warning System, and it offers users a probability scale from 1 to 5, updated every half hour: 1 means “low risk”; 5 essentially means “you’d better start heading down to the bunker.” The last major spike in activity detected by the application occurred on April 30, during the height of tensions between the United States and Iran, when the scale reached 3.1. All of this would sound absurd were it not for the fact that Rising S Company has reported that the luxury bunker market has grown by 400 percent since 2020. People are not building luxury bunkers because they expect a global crisis, or even a major terrorist attack, or even a nuclear conflict. In almost all of those scenarios, owning a luxury villa somewhere remote sounds far more appealing. People buy luxury bunkers because they believe doing so will allow them to survive whatever happens on Earth. Which brings us back to the issue of immortality. The 21st century is producing the most idiotic billionaires in history. They get rich and become far-left anti-capitalists; they get rich and become radical environmentalists; they get rich and try to force you to eat crickets; they get rich and pour vast sums into promoting wokeism; they get rich and insist on traveling to Africa to take photographs with malnourished black children so that people will not think that, simply because they are wealthy, they are bad people. In short: our nouveau riche are a pack of idiots. But secretly they fantasize about surviving an apocalypse, presumably in the company of their cats and their wine cellars, and they remain convinced that immortality can be bought. A true billionaire, at least one who has not been abducted by the rhetoric of the post-Obama Democratic Party, wants three things in life: first, to keep making more and more money; second, to enjoy it to the fullest; third, to devote himself to charity in old age in the hope of softening the heart of God, since Scripture has never seemed especially favorable to millionaires earning a seat at the banquet table in Paradise. I think the best thing postmodern billionaires could do is become journalists. I have never met a journalist who wanted to be immortal. Most are hoping that kidney disease carries them off no later than the age of 50 or 60, and they work hard to make it happen. I myself have never understood people who dream of immortality. I lead a happy life. I even manage, from time to time, to enjoy my work as a journalist, and I always hope to indulge in one final burst of rock and roll before resigning myself to the passing years. And yet, whether because I am a journalist or because I am a Christian, the idea of still being here in my wheelchair when one of Obama’s great-great-grandsons wins the election with the slogan “We Can Too” and the world plunges once again into a spiral of stupidity and misery does not thrill me in the slightest. One of the advantages of being Catholic is that, although you know the Apocalypse may be terrible, it is difficult to imagine that God, who is also our Father, is going to torture us beyond endurance just before ushering us into the great hall where He will host His grand gala banquet. I think that when the Apocalypse finally arrives, instead of running for the bunker, I will step outside and, arms flailing forward in a Milei-like rock and roll frenzy, cheer on the archangels in their final mission. Translated by Joel Dalmau.  READ MORE by Itxu Díaz: Hantavirus Isn’t Especially Dangerous… Except That It’s in the Hands of the Spanish Government Have You Tried Turning Your Brain Off and On Again? The NASA Chief’s Ears Are Endless, and Kimmel Isn’t Funny