Inner Apocalypse Fantasy Test

The grid goes down, the cities empty out, and society collapses. For most people, the end of the world is a nightmare. But for a specific subset of the population, it is a recurring, almost comforting daydream. Psychologists note that imagining the apocalypse isn't just about fear. It is often a mental rehearsal—a way to project our own views of human nature onto a blank, ruined slate.

This 12-item test measures your inner apocalypse fantasy as a single psychological construct. It evaluates how intensely you daydream about societal collapse and whether you are drawn to the morbid curiosity of doomsday scenarios. Your score reveals if you use these fictional wastelands merely as passing entertainment or as a deep psychological coping mechanism.

While pop-culture quizzes about your "apocalypse archetype" are everywhere, the actual science of doomsday ideation is a synthesis of three established psychological domains. The foundation begins with the Post-Apocalyptic and Doomsday Prepping Beliefs Scale (PAPBS), developed by Adam K. Fetterman and colleagues to measure how we project our worldview onto societal collapse¹. This is combined with research on fantasy proneness, first identified by Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber in 1983², and modern work on morbid curiosity by Coltan Scrivner at the Recreational Fear Lab³. Early critics dismissed Wilson and Barber's original 27-person sample of "fantasy addicts" as a non-representative fringe group drawn from hypnosis workshops. However, modern meta-analyses confirm that while only 2% to 4% of the population are extreme "fantasizers," the trait is a stable, measurable spectrum that does not inherently indicate a detachment from reality⁴.

Your inner apocalypse is shaped by three interacting forces. Post-Apocalyptic Beliefs dictate the rules of your imagined wasteland. Do you envision a zero-sum, violent struggle for scarce resources, or a cooperative community rebuilding from the ashes? This ideological framework collides with your level of Fantasy Proneness, which determines how vividly you experience the simulation. For some, the end of the world is a fleeting, abstract thought; for highly fantasy-prone individuals, it is a deeply immersive, emotionally resonant daydream complete with sensory details and rehearsed dialogue.

These two traits are activated by Morbid Curiosity, an evolutionary drive to gather information about threats. When high morbid curiosity meets high fantasy proneness, the apocalypse becomes a psychological playground. As anthropologist Chris Begley argues, these fantasies often have little to do with actual survival and everything to do with a desire to "start over" and shed the exhausting burdens of modern life—debt, email, and social isolation. But the flavor of that reset depends entirely on your beliefs. A high scorer in pessimistic doomsday beliefs combined with intense morbid curiosity will experience paranoid, hyper-vigilant fantasies of defending a bunker from looters. Conversely, someone with optimistic beliefs about human nature might daydream about leading a peaceful, agrarian survivor colony, using the apocalypse as a symbolic decluttering of society.

Your percentile reflects how intensely you engage with these catastrophic simulations compared to the general population. High scores in this construct do not predict a break from reality, but they do predict distinct behavioral patterns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals with elevated prepping beliefs were significantly more likely to engage in actual stockpiling and survival strategizing, even in community samples⁵. Furthermore, research shows that high morbid curiosity and engagement with "prepper" or horror media actually predicted greater psychological resilience during the pandemic. By voluntarily exposing themselves to fictional disasters, high scorers informally train their emotional regulation. However, extreme scores coupled with highly pessimistic views of human nature are strongly correlated with lower agreeableness, heightened cynicism, and a susceptibility to conspiracy mentalities¹.

This test uses 12 items across a mixed-response scale to evaluate your imaginal engagement, threat-approach tendencies, and social expectations under collapse. Raw responses are calculated into factor scores and mapped to percentiles to reveal your specific apocalyptic profile. Mixed profiles are the norm rather than the exception. For example, the "Cooperative Doomsayer" might score in the 90th percentile for fantasy vividness and morbid curiosity, spending hours consuming dystopian media, yet score in the 10th percentile for competitive paranoia, firmly believing that humanity will save itself through mutual aid.

Footnotes

1. Fetterman, A. K., Rutjens, B. T., Landkammer, F., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2019). On Post–Apocalyptic and Doomsday Prepping Beliefs: A New Measure, Its Correlates, and the Motivation to Prep. European Journal of Personality, 33(4), 506–525. doi:10.1002/per.2216 ↩ ↩²

2. The fantasy-prone personality: Implications for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena. | Semantic Scholar ↩

3. Scrivner, C. (2021). The psychology of morbid curiosity: Development and initial validation of the morbid curiosity scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 183, 111139. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2021.111139 ↩

4. Merckelbach, H., Otgaar, H., & Lynn, S. J. (2022). Empirical research on fantasy proneness and its correlates 2000–2018: A meta-analysis. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 9(1), 2–26. doi:10.1037/cns0000272 ↩

5. Smith, N. & Thomas, S. J. (2021). Doomsday Prepping During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.659925 ↩