On Wall Street, the horsemen have begun to circle. You can smell the ozone in the air. Forget government debt, rising sea levels, or the collapse of meaning as we know it. The real four horsemen are arriving at auction: Steve Jobs’ neckwear, moldering journals, and the indelible musk of 1970s optimism ground into the grain of a used desk. If you are not already stockpiling canned beans and commemorative Apple 1 promotional posters, brother, you’ll want to after this news. John Chovanec, an unwitting prophet in the wasteland, was handed the sacred relics of Steve Jobs’ adolescence not by fate, but by the baroque machinery of divorce and remarriage. The universe has a sense of humor so bleak it might as well be running a fintech startup. Chovanec’s only credential is proximity, yet he found himself assigned to the holy stewardship of Jobs’ personal effects: manuals to keep your VW alive (impossible, believe me—I tried with my own soul), vintage Dylan 8-tracks, presumed to contain the blueprints for decoding the matrix, and enough bow ties to start a cult with mandatory neck fashion. These relics are, naturally, being auctioned. Not a simple Craigslist face-to-face with cash and a handshake. No, these are deemed so significant to the cosmic order that only the most powerful cabal—RR Auction, clad in aprons woven from the promises of forgotten tech tycoons—can shepherd them into the world’s hands. Some people invest in gold or cryptocurrency. True doomsday preppers are bidding on the annotated high school doodlings that preceded the iPhone. Pause with me here, reader, and reflect on what exactly this means. The arc of Western civilization bends not toward justice, but toward whoever will pay half a million dollars for the check Apple wrote before it was even technically Apple. Yes, you read that right: $500 for some circuit board work. A check so potent, so redolent of the raw fumes of capitalism’s burning engine, that collectors expect it to clear a half-mil. A dot-matrix baptism—signed by both Jobs and Wozniak in a ceremonial act akin to nuclear fission. Picture it: somewhere in suburbia, a disillusioned ex-Pixar stepbrother dusts off a drawer and finds, amid the Werther’s Originals and back issues of Byte magazine, the talismanic objects that once propelled mankind into an era of touchscreen enlightenment (and persistent notifications). Jobs’ horoscopes. His secret thoughts on Volkswagens. At this point, burning sage is not just spiritual practice, it’s basic cybersecurity. But I digress, as the world crumbles. Consider with me the coming plague of motivation-poster speculators and memorabilia hedge funds cornering the market on historic bow ties. Will the buyer use the desk as a workstation, or as an altar? Will the Apple poster become a warning sign on the gates of our refugee encampments as we barter for batteries and slow WiFi? It is all as the ancients foretold: those who do not study Apple history are doomed to pay $135,261 for a check to a company called Ramlor. Why, you ask, is this happening? Because financial nihilism clings to us like a 70s polyester tie—laboriously tied and fundamentally unnecessary. Steve Jobs, who once chose Bob Dylan over business school, must be somewhere, turtleneck askew, watching auctioneers chart the new ghost economy from the comfort of some circuit-board afterlife. There, even now, he may be explaining to Moses the finer points of pixel density for his next set of commandments. Do you smell that? It is not merely nostalgia; it is the slow-roasting aroma of the end. Not with a bang, but with a gently used Trapper Keeper and the whiff of vintage Old Spice. This is how the world ends: bidders on the floor, raising paddles for one more piece of the archeological record. But when everything is collectible, nothing is sacred. Prepare accordingly. Apocalypse waits for no one, but sometimes it puts a starting bid on eBay.