I think the reason our generation can laugh at it is because we lived through a period when we really wouldn't have been surprised if the world ended up in complete conflagration. The time of the Cuban missile crisis.

Its really odd how some people seem to need the end of the world. Are their lives that bad? certainly they must be unsatisfactory in some way - that they need to comfort themselves with this stuff.

I think it must be a bit like the way some people decide to be serial killers. They can't accept reality as a nobody much. So they select a sea change into something strange and terrible. Just total detachment from the experience of being a human being.