<p>The most pressing problems of the current historical moment are being framed as existential threats—including fears over pandemics, wars, democratic backsliding, declining birth rates, accelerating climate change, and advances in artificial intelligence. Such threats represent turning points that fundamentally reshape how societies function and have significant implications for sociology. This paper argues that sociologists need to take real and perceived existential threats more seriously. Existential threats demand new conceptual tools and reorientations of sociology’s key assumptions. The paper first examines the challenge existential threats pose for the discipline. When the media and public discourse increasingly frame issues as existential threats, social sciences need to take notice. The paper then assesses the problem of sociologists pushing existential threats to the discipline’s margins. It also identifies opportunities for sociologists to reexamine the discipline’s work on social forms, processes, mechanisms, distributions of outcomes, and actors. These core sociological concerns have remained largely unchanged since the discipline’s inception and are now challenged by the omnipresent spectre of existential threats. The paper concludes by arguing that such threats bring a unique opportunity for reflexive renewal of the discipline: to reimagine sociology’s frameworks to help societies navigate uncertain futures.</p>