“The earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.”
— Assyrian tablet, c. 2800 BC
Let that sink in for a moment.
That quote — which could easily pass for a Facebook rant from your uncle or a cable news opening monologue — was chiseled into clay 4,800 years ago in Mesopotamia. The “good old days” were already bad, apparently. Humans have been convinced the end is nigh for damn near five millennia, and yet here we are, still griping, still doomscrolling, still posting memes about it.
The Mesopotamian Worldview
The ancient Assyrians and Babylonians believed the gods created humans for one purpose: to serve them. You were made to bring beer, bread, and burnt offerings to your local temple, keep the irrigation canals flowing, and not annoy Enlil too much. That was the deal. So when a scribe scratches out a complaint that “the earth is degenerating” and children are disobedient, what you’re really seeing is an ancient boomer rant — a guy who’s mad that the cosmic order he signed up for isn’t holding together the way it used to.
The irony, of course, is that Assyrian civilization itself would collapse a couple thousand years later. Nineveh fell. The library burned. But guess what? The world didn’t end. It just kept spinning, and new people showed up to complain about their own kids and their own corrupt politicians.
Enter the Wojak
Which brings us to the bottom half of this masterpiece. On the left, an actual photo of the Assyrian tablet — the real artifact, the physical proof that ancient people were terminally online before the internet existed. On the right, a Doomer Wojak face slapped onto the body of an Assyrian warrior, complete with striped tunic, sword, and a giant rainbow shield, standing in a palace. His speech bubble: “It’s so over.”
This is the ultimate cosmic joke. The Wojak — modern internet shorthand for existential despair — is standing next to a 4,800-year-old text that proves humans have always felt this way. Every generation thinks theirs is the last. The Romans thought it. The medieval plague survivors thought it. The Cold War kids thought it. And here in 2026, we’re posting AI-generated memes about ancient clay tablets to say the same thing.
It’s never been over. It’s never going to be over. The apocalypse is the oldest tradition we have, and we’ve never once been right about the date.
The Philosophy of “It’s So Over”
There’s a strange comfort in this. Knowing that a Mesopotamian scribe in 2800 BC was already complaining about the youth and the state of the world means that this feeling of impending doom is baked into the human experience. It’s not a sign that things are uniquely bad — it’s a sign that things are normal. The neural circuitry that makes us catastrophize has been running the same firmware for five thousand years.
The Wojak saying “It’s so over” while standing on 4,800 years of uninterrupted civilization is the perfect visual punchline. We’ve been saying “It’s so over” since the invention of writing. And civilization, despite every prophecy of its imminent collapse, just keeps going — awkward, messy, corrupt, degenerate, and somehow still here.
So no, the world isn’t ending. It’s just Tuesday. And somewhere, 4,800 years from now, some descendant of ours will be posting a meme about how degenerate things have gotten, and they’ll be right — and they’ll be wrong — in exactly the same way we are.
It truly never is over. ~w~
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