If The World Was Ending
Song Meaning

“If the World Was Ending” is about fantasizing that a catastrophe would make every rational reason not to contact an ex suddenly irrelevant 1. JP Saxe has said the song imagines a crisis that would wipe out a year of work spent disconnecting from someone, asking whether, with no tomorrow, you’d come over and stay the night anyway 1. He and Julia Michaels wrote it after a Los Angeles earthquake, and the chorus lands on her line that there wouldn’t even be a reason to say goodbye 1.

The meaning

JP Saxe has been explicit about what “If the World Was Ending” is doing. “I think the song is kind of about like a little bit fantasizing about there being some sort of situation which would make all of your very rational reasons not to talk to someone no longer relevant,” he said 1. The chorus question (“If the world was ending, you’d come over, right?”) is that fantasy in one line: not a plea to restart the relationship, but a thought experiment about what would happen if the rules of the breakup suddenly stopped applying 1.

The premise was sparked by a real Los Angeles earthquake about two weeks before Saxe and Julia Michaels finally got into the same room to write 1. Saxe has said the opening line came from being in his car after dinner, unsure where to go because a plan had been canceled, when the quake hit 1. The lyric (“I was distracted and in traffic / I didn’t feel it when the earthquake happened”) turns that miss into an oddly personal reaction: he has described being “bummed” about “missing out on a shared experience with my society” rather than responding with conventional concern 1. Michaels brought her own version of that helplessness from a concert where the lighting rig moved and people started running, the kind of moment that leaves you asking where you’d even go 1. Saxe has said that in Los Angeles, “everyone spends a lot of time thinking about both the apocalypse and their exes” 1.

The verses spend a year learning how to “let you go and let communication die out.” Saxe has described that work as deliberate: after a breakup, “you put a lot of work into figuring out how to not feel connected to a person anymore,” including the effort “to not text them, to not look at the fucking photos” 1. The pre-chorus is the couple’s shared verdict in ordinary life: “I know, you know, we know we weren’t / Meant for each other and it’s fine.” In a “normal non-world ending scenario,” he said, “both of you are on the same page about it not being something you should be in” 1. That rational voice even asks, “why would I want to spend forever with someone who didn’t want to spend it with me? That sounds fucking awful” 1.

The catastrophe is what would make that year of discipline collapse. Saxe described “imagining some catastrophic event that would circumvent all of that effort and all of a sudden a year of work is just like, well fuck, does it even matter anymore?” 1. If there is no morning after, “You can make a bad decision if there is no consequences to those bad decisions” 1. “Would you love me for the hell of it?” is that permission: love without a future, because the future is gone.

Michaels wrote the line that closes the fantasy: there wouldn’t be a reason why they’d even have to say goodbye, which Saxe said “stabbed me in the fucking heart when she first said it” 1. He called that the kind of songwriting that “articulates a feeling that you’ve absolutely had but you’ve never really put your finger on” 1. What the song is actually mourning, though, is not the dramatic ending. It’s the ordinary aftermath of intimacy Saxe said still “gets to you”: “kicking it on the couch,” getting home from a night out, “just being relaxed together, just existing together” 1. The earthquake only supplies the excuse. The feeling was already there.

Last updated 2026-09-02