It is important to keep in mind that Jesus didn’t list these things—false messiahs, wars, famines, earthquakes—so that his followers could know that the end was near but that they wouldn’t be unduly concerned or alarmed by the occurrence of these things. They weren’t signs of the end, and Jesus distanced these ordinary but destructive events of human history from “the end.” In the Old Testament, the metaphor of “birth pains” is often connected with the destruction of a city, so “end” here likely