The news that the Doomsday Clock now stands at eighty-five seconds to midnight is not, in itself, the most important thing about this moment. The number is arresting, and the coverage tends to amplify its urgency. But the deeper question raised by this year’s announcement is not how close we are to catastrophe. It is how we are learning, or failing, to attend to the conditions that make catastrophe thinkable in the first place.
What the Clock reflects is not a single looming disaster but a convergence of unresolved tensions from nuclear instability, ecological breakdown, accelerating technologies, and political fragmentation (not to mention our spiritual crisis and the very real scenes we’re seeing with our own eyes in each of our communities with federal authorities and directed violence here in the United States).
These are not isolated threats. They form a dense field of entanglement, reinforcing one another across systems we have built but no longer fully understand or govern. The Clock does not merely measure danger. It reveals a world stretched thin by its own speed.
One risk of symbolic warnings like this is that they can tempt us into abstraction. “Eighty-five seconds to midnight” can feel cinematic, even mythic, while the realities beneath it, such as warming soils, poisoned waters, eroded trust, and automated corporatist decision-making, remain oddly distant. When risk becomes spectacle, attention falters. And when attention falters, responsibility diffuses (part of the aim of keeping us distracted with screens and political theater).
This is where I think the Clock’s real work begins. It presses on a crisis not only of policy or technology, but of perception. We have grown adept at responding to emergencies that suddenly emerge, and far less capable of staying with harms that unfold slowly, relationally, and across generations. Climate disruption, ecological loss, and technological overreach do not arrive as single events. They address us quietly, repeatedly, asking whether we are willing to notice what is already being asked of us.
In earlier posts, I’ve suggested that empathy is not first an ethical achievement but a mode of perception, or a way “the world” comes to matter. Attention works in a similar register. It is not merely focus or vigilance. It is a practiced openness to being addressed by what exceeds us. The Doomsday Clock, at its best, functions as a crude but persistent call to such attention. It interrupts complacency not by predicting the future, but by unsettling how we inhabit the present.
And here is where something genuinely hopeful emerges.
The Clock is not fate. It has moved away from midnight before, not through technological miracles alone, but through shifts in collective orientation, such as restraint, cooperation, treaty-making, and shared commitments to limits. Those movements were not perfect or permanent, but they remind us that attention can be cultivated and that perception can change. Worlds do not only end. They also reorient.
Hope, in this sense, is not confidence that things will turn out fine. It is the thing with feathers and the willingness to stay present to what is fragile without turning away or grasping for false reassurance. It is the discipline of attending to land, to neighbors, to systems we participate in but rarely see or acknowledge. It is the slow work of empathy extended beyond the human, allowing rivers, forests, and even future generations to count as more than abstractions.
Eighty-five seconds to midnight is not a verdict. It is an invitation to recover forms of attention capable of holding complexity without paralysis. An invitation to let empathy deepen into responsibility. An invitation to notice that the most meaningful movements away from catastrophe begin not with panic, but with learning how to listen again to the world as it is, and to the world as it might yet become.
The question, then, is not whether the clock will strike midnight. The question is whether we will accept the invitation it places before us to attend, to respond, and to live as if what we are already being asked to notice truly matters.