Throughout history, there are indeed "bad times" or periods of widespread suffering or "endings," so to speak. But these bad periods can emerge out of periods of plenty - if given enough time - or stagnant periods for that matter, and then the bad times themselves do eventually dissolve into the air from whence they came.
That bad period has a certain character that coheres into an image in the perception as an apocalypse so to speak, and the opposite is true for good times. It is tempting for us finite beings, with our need to anticipate or orient ourselves to a given state of affairs, to assume a character of optimism or pessimism that is large part of our identity, which can be in accordance with - or completely discordant with - a given state of affairs.
That need to anticipate intensifies with power and the potential for loss, which is largely a state of consciousness, as demonstrated by mystics "living in the present" with their given practices. One suffers when one attaches to an image that contradicts a given state of affairs, especially when met with disbelief from one's peers, and when one's actions in the present don't accord with the surrounding reality, though this can eventually be validated in something like a written work which outlives one's own life.
And by the same coin, one can be viewed as a prophet in one's own life, or have one's actions accord with the surrounding state of affairs, and then have writings or records survive one's life and then one is labeled a fool in a different era that follows. And so on.
These aren't all just parlor games. After all, for the person being stabbed in a time of "good and plenty" there is certainly a small apocalypse being experienced. In the same way, a billionaire may perceive the gated palace in the midst of calamity as a small patch of heaven.
