My friends and I have begun taking bets on when the apocalypse will happen. The years we picked did not matter so much as the fact that we all agreed that we would see it in our lifetime. In fact, everyone in my generation that I’ve talked to confesses almost shamefully that at the back of their mind, there is a sense that everything is going terribly wrong. The apocalypse, for our generation, can be best understood as — and sometimes at — an all-you-can-eat buffet. Every time I visit a buffet, a wave of nausea and dread washes over me. People rush past each other with dishes stacked with delicacies, from tropical fruits to steaming meat. The floors and tables are sticky with the memory of countless food spills past. Dishes of half-eaten food are whisked away by unseen waiters, presumably to be discarded by the truckload. While I bite down on the leg of a turkey and its juices run down my chin, a mother carefully divides her rationed bread and hands her starving child the bigger piece in Gaza, in Sudan, in Haiti. For environmentalists, the apocalypse is the still-rising GHG emissi