Living With It

In 2013, visiting Japan for the second time, there was constant talk about Kim Jong-un potentially lobbing a nuclear missile at Tokyo. Nobody seemed actually frightened—it was just part of the landscape, like the humidity—but when anti-missile defense stations started appearing across the city, something real shifted. You’d walk past these structures and feel the weight of the threat materialize.

Last night, it happened. A missile went up from somewhere near Pyongyang and traveled about 2,700 kilometers before falling into the Pacific, way past Hokkaido. It didn’t hit anything. It wasn’t meant to.

But people in Japan woke up to their phones screaming. Emergency alerts. Get to a shelter now. Someone on Reddit described being in a game, chatting with friends, when the notification hit. Their first thought: this is it, I’m about to die in a nuclear explosion. That gap—three seconds maybe—where abstraction turns into something you can feel.

What’s strange isn’t the missile itself. It’s how quickly you adjust to knowing that death can arrive with a notification. How people install the apps, get the alerts, and then scroll through their feeds. The threat becomes infrastructure.

I keep thinking about that moment for the person at their desk. Not the missile, which is abstract, part of geopolitics or posturing or whatever. Just the specific human experience of getting yanked into mortality for three seconds. Phone lights up. Instructions arrive. Everything shifts in the time it takes to read them. Then nothing happens, and you go back to your game.

Living somewhere that’s possible is its own kind of dissonance. Not the threat of annihilation, which feels almost normal by now, but the knowledge that you could be ordinary and fine and then a notification arrives, and for three seconds you genuinely believe it’s ending.