With apologies to the band R.E.M., and everyone who now has an earworm of the chorus.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It lets historians (who are also writers, because we have to proclaim to the world what we find in the archives) pronounce that “[EVENT] was the end of the Pax Romana” or “The collapse of Old Kingdom Egypt began with …” or “The demise of the Ming Dynasty was triggered by …” A couple thousand years, or a few hundred years, later, with the right combination of documents and archaeology (and rump-in-chair work) it is occasionally easy to point to the beginning of the end and say “it started here.” What we later readers and writers seem to forget is that the people on the ground didn’t see it that way. Often the people knew that something wasn’t right, but no one in AD 160 looked around and said, “Ah, dang, the Pax Romana has been great, but it’s time to move on. Stock up on grain storage and hide the silver, Fulvia, the good old days are about to wrap up.”

No, people in the middle of the event don’t see things that way. Nor do they see the confluence of 1) drought in Egypt, 2) harsher weather in northern Europe and the Caspian and Black Sea steppes, 3) the plague, and 4) imperial spending habits that would combine to undermine the power and economic strength of the Roman imperial system and start the slow collapse of the western Roman Empire. They saw plague, and grain fleets not arriving on time, and heard whispers about barbarians in Pannonia and Noricum. They also sought cures, spent money getting out of town if they could, and groused about Christians causing problems and the guy in the taberna who couldn’t hold his wine and who was running for office.

We as writers need to remember that for our “end of the world” fiction. Yes, some stories do have everyone staring at the Huge Chunk O’ Rock, gasping like landed carp, and thinking, “Oh [BLEEP!]” Or “Heh, I don’t have to go to work tomorrow!” But in most cases, the end of the world creeps in, with an unrelated or vaguely related series of things that are only apparent years or decades, or centuries later. Sometimes, people assume that the change is purely temporary, and that things will return to normal in a week, or month, or next year, or soon, and so no one should change what he’s doing, or break any rules.

It might be a while before people accept that the times have changed, and that the traders with amphorae of wine and olives are not coming soon. You can play with the tension between the “just a short while and normal” folks and the “chuck the rules, we have to adapt and survive” crowd. Add that to the already stressful situation of something like the Antonine Plague, or a great storm like the ones that swept the North Sea coast in the 500s-600s (or later, see the St. Elizabeth Day Storm), or three years without a growing season (the origin of the Fimbulwinter idea), and there’s a lot of writing space for character development and exploring coping skills.

Or you might write about how some group didn’t cope, and so archaeologists or survivors from a different area arrive and find …

Major changes are always the end of a world, or of an era. Sometimes we see it and recognize it, but at other times it is only years, or decades, or centuries later that the signs of what led to the end and when the end came become visible.