At the end of the 1990s, all anyone could talk about was the impending Y2K doomsday—that moment on January 1, 2000, when computers would think our calendars had all flipped to 1900. Power grids would be knocked out. Planes would fall out of the sky. Life would grind to a devastating halt. We now know that the end of the world as we know it, as R.E.M. might have noted, came 20 years later, when COVID-19 prompted a collective existential crisis.
You can find Professor Wilson's essay here.