“A report, published today, claims to identify the point at which the average office worker reaches ‘their most unproductive point of the day.’ And the answer is 2.55pm.”

“The new dark-romantic adventure is the latest in an interesting trend, following similar games celebrating the music of Skrillex and Kreayshawn, among others.”

“A cat has been found trying to enter a prison in Russia, with mobile phones taped to its stomach.” I am not much of a cat fan, but I have to say, this photo is astounding.

Ahhhhh, they found the real-life Sebastian Flyte, who was Evelyn Waugh’s loooooooover.

1) Don’t think of this as “The End.” Technically, it’s the end of the world. But every end brings a new beginning! Instead of focusing on the bombs and the toxic clouds and the eventual death of every living thing on earth, consider, instead, what might spring to life next. A vibrant and adventurous new species that thrives on the ashes and nuclear toxins we left behind? A deeply intuitive breed of mutant slugs that can suck oxygen out of the tiny bubbles found between styrofoam Hardee’s cups, seeping car batteries, and decomposing copies of Snooki’s autobiography? When one door closes, another one always opens. In this case, there won’t be any more doors anywhere, closing or opening. But what kinds of doors will those adventurous mutant slugs create? Perhaps they’ll dare to live without doors, thereby keeping themselves utterly open and present to the world around them! Sometimes just considering how much more centered the next living creatures on earth might be can provide a gentle solace as everything you’ve ever known is destroyed before your eyes.

2) Try to put your life into perspective. Watching everything you care about go up in flames can be pretty stressful. Debra, 55, a bank executive with four children in Des Moines, Iowa, says that there are days where she can hardly stand to make dirt soup for her family. “Killing the dog and curing its meat was especially hard on the kids,” she explains. “But then I think about the dinosaurs, who lived here for millions of years. Our lives are just a blip compared to that!” It’s true that we’ll go down in history as the one generation to destroy our entire planet and everything on it in a single lifetime. But thankfully, there won’t be any history books to record our great big, super-embarrassing blunder! Sometimes you have to take a few steps back to see just how trivial and silly saying goodbye to your family and friends and the entire planet can look, in the big scheme of things.

3) Consider all the terrible stuff that will never happen now. It’s never a good idea to fill your head with countless negative possibilities — unless you and everyone else in your life is about to get snuffed out like a light! Now is the time to unleash all of your worries about the future like never before. Since you have no future, that means that you won’t get cancer to die in a plane crash or get maimed in a freak accident like you always suspected. You also won’t get fired from your job, you won’t lose your house to bankruptcy, and your dog won’t die of some terrible dog disease (You just killed her to make dog jerky, remember? Phew!). And just think, now your husband will never leave you for his sexy younger coworker. And let’s be honest, that was totally on, right before the bombs dropped. Think of how betrayed and humiliated you would’ve felt for the rest of your life if an affair had been revealed! Now, instead of dying a bitter old woman who complained relentlessly about her son-of-a-bitch husband and his filthy slut of a second wife for the balance of your days, alienating your children, your siblings and every last friend, you can die as a courageous mother with a devoted spouse, both of you looking out for each other until your dying breath!

4) Focus on your apocalyptic blessings. You may be quite literally starving to death right now. Or, you may be fighting off hoards of hungry neighbors by brandishing sharpened gardening tools. But even if you’re considering cutting off your own foot so you can roast it for dinner, remember: Only thoughts can stand in the way of your happiness. Telling yourself a really depressing story about the blood-thirsty desperation of the end times will only lead to more agony. Research shows that embracing a more uplifting story, filled with love and gratitude and acceptance of what is, will increase your happiness by a teensy, tiny little bit. Every little scrap of happiness helps, though! (Studies indicate that results may vary, depending on your access to lethal narcotics/huffable spray paint.)

5) Ask yourself, is this really how I want to suffer and die? This question might sound a little tortured at first, but if you ask this enough times in a row — say, when you’re actually in the process of suffering and dying — you might just have a breakthrough. Every time you ask, you’ll open up the possibility that you could discover some little choice, seemingly minor, that could make your untimely demise all the more delightful. Helen, 35, a schoolteacher in New Paltz, NY, reports that even after her boyfriend perished from malnourishment and she was too weak to saw his bones apart, she kept challenging herself to find some new choice that might shift her whole experience. Finally, a creative solution dawned on her: She could drag his rotting corpse outside to stave off the pack of prowling wolves gathered in the empty lot behind the crumbling remains of her apartment complex! As she sat and watched the wolves tear meat off her dead boyfriend’s femur from her collapsed second story window, a funny thing happened: She was filled with an inner glow of satisfaction, knowing that she’d kept some other living beings alive for just a few days longer!

* * *

Here in the Living Lady! underground bomb shelter/alien-retardant bunker — built years ago under the guidance of Staff Clairvoyant Marsha Rittenhammer — we have enough green tea, flax seeds and smoked salmon to last us through the next decade or so. But we’ve still been marveling at the rawness and vulnerability of Helen’s tale over mani-pedis and deep tissue massages in the Imagination Room each day. Remember, it’s the little things that make a big difference when the world is ending. Once you recognize to how full of invigorating unknowns the apocalypse is, you can start to shift your whole way of experiencing Armageddon!

Heather Havrilesky is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Top models shot by “Ryan.” Bottom image by Lisa Omarali. Handsome lady by the trash by “thierry ehrmann.”

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Why, just last week the Awl Network team chose the efficacy of sunscreen as its topic for our daily debate (this morning we were discussing the best recorded performance of Mozart’s horn concertos; as the voice of reason I naturally plumped for Dennis Brain’s 1953 collaboration with Herbert von Karajan, but the rest of the group, ornery with the insolence of youth, insisted upon Anthony Halstead and the Academy of Ancient Music; I chose not to argue the point too fiercely, confident in my choice and certain that as the ravages of time descend upon my young colleagues they will indeed come to appreciate the wisdom of my selection), and here now comes news that “people instructed to apply sunscreen every day showed 24% less skin aging, as measured by lines and coarseness of the skin, than those told to use the cream as they usually do.” Does this undermine my assertion that pretty much any moisturizer, spackled across your cheeks and crevices with regularity, will prevent skin damage? Of course not. (Nothing undermines my assertions.) But I guess your real takeaway here is that if you want to stay looking young you need to trowel on the slimy stuff. And of course you want to look young. How else are you going to keep up with the generation responsible for this? God forbid your face suggest you have actually been around a bit and learned a few lessons on the way.

We try to only take note of milestone birthdays here — decade-starters, attainment of senior citizen status, etc. — so the fact that Eldra Patrick DeBarge turns 52 would not normally qualify, but you know what? If I’ve got to have “Rhythm of the Night” stuck in my head all morning, so do you. Thank me, it could have been this.

Man, that was some decade.

“Butt wipes is a category we’re really excited about.”

Here is the new thing they are trying to foist on men, as per the June/July issue of Details: “chinos” with one single pleat. Not zero pleats; not pleats on both sides of your forward-facing business. Oh no. Just one asymmetrical pleat, in an otherwise equally ill-fitting and rather awkward pair of summer pants. This is upsetting on a number of levels: capitalist, aesthetic, moral, social, sexual, emotional.

And from where do they get these uniform-faced whites who are so willing to debase themselves as single-pleat models? It’s sad.

None of this is okay.

Update: OH THANK GOD, this really is a hoax… of the eyeballs at least. After talking to fashion experts, and looking at this sneakily lit photo for yet another hour, they really are just pleated chinos. (Which are still disgusting! Death to nearly all pleats!) But so much less terrible than I’d feared. God bless America and God bless pants.