There are, by our present count, 103 active movements organized around the belief that the world is ending, transforming, or preparing to. Nineteen were founded this year. Forty-one have already passed a date on which they predicted the end and have continued regardless — a category we track separately, because it is the fastest-growing one.

The shape of the thing. In the 1970s, the Data Desk’s predecessors logged two or three new movements a year and considered it a busy decade. The line has not been flat since. It bent upward through the millennium, again after the financial crisis, again in the isolation years, and it is now close to vertical. We do not offer a single cause. We offer the count, and the observation that a curve this steep usually means a population is bracing for something.

What they have in common. Very little, doctrinally. An accelerationist compound in Sonoma and a rainbow-body sangha in the high desert would not recognize each other as kin. What they share is a posture: the conviction that the ordinary world is a departure lounge, that a threshold is near, and that belonging to the right small body of people is the difference between crossing and being left. Our reporters have learned to hear it as one sentence spoken in a hundred accents.

Eschatological Tension: ELEVATED. This is our own gauge, and it is not scientific. It reflects the rate of formation, the frequency of revised end-dates, and the tone of the tip line. It has not read Calm since we began keeping it.