The Good Apocalypse Guide: Finding Hope and Meaning in Uncertain Times

The Good Apocalypse Guide: Finding Hope and Meaning in Uncertain Times

Alex Evans has been preparing for the end since the 1980s — fascinated by survival kits, disaster films, and the prospect of social collapse. Yet in his project and Substack The Good Apocalypse Guide, he turns that fascination inside out, reminding us that apocalypse was never meant to mean destruction. In its original Greek sense, apokálypsis means revelation — the lifting of a veil, the exposure of truth, and the beginning of renewal. Through this lens, Evans invites us to see our age of crises not as an ending, but as an unfolding — a threshold moment demanding new imagination.

In this talk, Alex Evans will tackle the prospect of apocalypse in profoundly liminal times: between worlds, between certainties, between myths. How we navigate that space depends on the stories we tell about it — whether we frame our collective challenges as collapse or transformation. The Good Apocalypse Guide reclaims the apocalyptic imagination as a source of agency and re-enchantment, asking how we might live creatively through uncertainty and recover meaning in a disenchanted world. Ultimately, Evans proposes that every breakdown carries the possibility of breakthrough — that endings, rightly understood, can become beginnings for a more conscious, compassionate, and connected future.

Come and join us for an evening of fun, provocation, hope, and possibility as Alex Evans leads a lively discussion of The Good Apocalypse Guide — exploring how we can turn crisis into revelation and imagine the better worlds waiting to be born.

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Alex Evans is a Professor in Practice at Newcastle University’s School of Arts and Cultures and a Senior Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. He is the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (2017), a widely acclaimed exploration of the power of deep stories to unlock transformational change.

Alex’s career bridges politics, policy, and public imagination. He has led major global campaigns as a Director at Avaaz, the 50-million-member citizens’ movement, working on issues ranging from Brexit and tax havens to human rights in Turkey and Yemen. He has also served twice in the UN Secretary-General’s office—first helping to organise the inaugural head-of-government climate summit in 2007, and later as the lead writer for the UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability.

Earlier in his career, during the last Labour government, Alex was a Special Adviser to Secretaries of State Valerie Amos and Hilary Benn at the UK Department for International Development. His research and commentary have appeared in leading think tanks including Brookings (US) and Chatham House (UK).

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Host or Publisher Darren Kelsey