Contemporary use of words like apocalypse and Ragnarok frame the events these words refer to as bad, but that’s not what the people who created these words intended. The original meaning (stories, really) behind these words are stories of life, of rebirth, of renewal.
But when you look at who changed the meaning of these words it becomes clear as to why they did it.
Ragnarok is the clearest example. There are various interpretations of the word, including “twilight of the gods” and the perhaps less poetic “the doom or destruction of the gods”.
Not exactly good news if you consider yourself a god.
What comes next is a cleansing of the world, and the rebirth of life anew.
So it makes sense that the gods of our time would want the rest of us to fear these words, and to even encourage the foreshadowing of these events to keep us in line.
If you look across various belief systems, this idea of the end and a new beginning is present in most, and as these myths and lore were mined by capitalists, the stories were changed to favor the status quo. The world created by these gods, this world.
But only gods need fear the apocalypse, the end of this world. For the rest of us, if the stories are true, something better lies on the other side.
This might sound mystical, but it doesn’t have to be. Life is a continuous cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth. The world as we know it ends every day for many of us, and we will all get a turn. But this is noting to fear, because despite the clichés, life improves with each cycle (just ask Darwin).
The only ones who need fear this are the gods, the ones who see themselves as above the lives of others. They are the masters of their particular cycle and their reign will end when that cycle ends. For them the end of the world is the end of themselves, they are, from the perspective of the living, already dead because they no longer participate in the cycle of life. They project their fear of Ragnarok onto us because they are too weak to hold it off alone. Due to the power they hold in this world, many of us believe them, at least for awhile.