Welcome to Your Doomsday Cabin, a Weekend Paracosmic Escape

Today, I learned a new word: paracosm.

It’s a kind of imaginative play that starts in childhood. You create a vivid world that offers a safe space from the hardships of reality—an escape. Over the last few years, more artists and creators have been exploring their potential for processing negative emotions, healing trauma, and solving problems. They’re calling it paracosmic thinking, and it’s something many of us have done intuitively. Maybe we didn’t talk about it. Maybe we even wondered if it was good for us.

Turns out, the answer is yes—within reason. Just like everything else, excessive paracosmic thinking can cause problems.

You can let it go too far, but…

I’m not sure I’ve ever been at risk of letting my fantasies go astray. You? They’re just a nice way to give yourself a break. After all, when you’ve read hundreds of studies about pretty depressing stuff, and you’ve concluded that our future lies somewhere between a massive population collapse and total extinction, and you’ve truly accepted your chances in that, I’d say you’ve earned the right to build a paracosm and visit it for a little while each day. There’s a difference between paracosmic thinking and fantasizing. When someone fantasizes, they often convince themselves they can make their fantasy come true. While paracosmic thinking might give us ideas or shape our attitude, we return to reality—and we know we’re not going to build a giant starship and fly away. We’re pretending.

To some extent, even when we’re building our dew catchers and growing vegetables in our yards, or packing bugout bags, we’re still engaging in something like paracosmic thinking. Maybe it won’t save us, but it improves our odds. It exercises our critical thinking skills, and it makes us feel better.

It grounds us.

You can make a paracosm as elaborate as you want. Some of them turn into entire lines of fantasy games and novels.

For a while now, I’ve wondered how I can temper the hard truths delivered here without edging into unethical territory, offering the same kind of toxic optimism and homesteading fantasies I critique. If that’s something you’d like to do, let me know. Feel free to build your own paracosm and share the details.

All that said, let’s bug out to your doomsday cabin. The first one is rustic. Maybe next week, we’ll imagine a cyberpunk one.

Yes, it has a bunker.

Why not?