I think on some levels, people really do yearn for apocolypse. Sure, it means terror, evil, ugliness, chaos, and worst of all, change. It's not a good thing. But. At the same time, people are drawn to the clarity it brings. The superficial and the secondary must be thrust aside, and everyone has the opportunity to feel their back against the wall, to decide what really matters. The chaff blows away from our lives; we remember how big love is and we discover what it means to fight for life.
No one wants this scenario. No one would choose it. But there is, in some some sense (if our Hollywood blockbusters are any indication), a collective cultural longing for it. Or maybe it's just a longing to feel like it's OK to say "the hell with x, y, and z."
This is probably just the intertia of our modern, advanced society. Survival, by now, is pretty much a given. Now it's all about how you accessorize your survival. We don't conciously realize what a luxury and a gift it is to live this way.
So why are we so enchanted wth apocolypse stories -- with movies where life and good must fight and fight and don't enjoy anything but the possibility of survival and a shot at victory?
Perhaps it's not "meaning" we seek in our malaise of modernity so much as imperitive...for our lives to have urgency and real danger. Morbid..perhaps...or maybe after millenia of living in such a tooth and claw way, we're having trouble adjusting to lif as something so mild in its daily threats and challenges. Death is an occasional, not a constant, foe. And we feel like workaholics dumped on vacation -- stressed, bored, and confused. The thrill of outrunning immenent danger and impending death was our fuel for thousands, millions of years. And now, for most of us, our fuel is just Starbucks.