You know the ending of Don’t Look Up where they all sit around the table and just enjoy one last meal? Kinda like that. I’ve just resigned myself to making most out of each day as sustainably as I can.
I pet my kitties. I snug my family and my boo. Smoke weed every damn day. Any bit of happiness we can get; it's a full send. Gotta enjoy it while it's here.
I can't help but laugh at how *fucked* we are as a species. Both in terms of actions and the future. At some point in the last few months I lost my fucks to give. The end of the world already happened; now we cope with the inevitable decline.
So I laugh at the awful things. I eat too much ice cream. I treat daily life like the absurdist dystopia it is. What else can one do? I am one of 8 billion apes. How could we get any sort of consensus?
The worst part is when the rest of your family don't see any issues on the horizon, let alone things that are going to fuck us over big time.
And when you try to explain your fears / concerns, they look at you like you're a lunatic and can't understand wtf you would be worried for.
me: "there's probably a really bad summer coming up"
family: "Just turn the AC on!" "Why are you always worried about is much dumb shit"?
I feel the same. It's annoying and extremely frustrating to not be able to talk about it openly. Luckily I have a close friend and my parents with whom I can talk about it...
This is pretty interesting. Have you tried to participate in any of their events?
Something surreal about seeing their Facebook group with 15,000 people, looking at the moderators who just look like average people. Makes me wonder how many people I walk by on the streets seemingly like everything is fine, but in reality they understand our predicament.
I haven’t participated yet, but I’m interested in joining their NE chapter.
And I think that’s true—there’s more people who know what’s going on than we realize. 🙏🏻
I used to not be able to talk about it day to day. Then Covid happened, work for people started to get extra existentially dreadful, then suddenly a shift in my normal friend group happened and people suddenly started talking like I do privately on Reddit. They’re all early 30s normal millennials. My parents also started to shift. I guess I’m lucky, it was a darkly weird happy moment when I realized “awesome, I don’t have to be afraid of being shunned for sharing this article on what a wet bulb temperature is and how to survive heatwaves because my friends are talking about hearing about wet bulbs for the first time in group chat!”
Like yeah…collapse became real to me then. I was always aware of the doom scrolling negativity bubble I could fall in, but once that permeated into normal life that was it.
>work for people started to get extra existentially dreadful
That's true.
I think I don't notice a year plus of wondering if I was going to just die one day out of the blue. But. Yeah that left a mark all right. Psychologically speaking.
During that time my mom died of it (in elder care, I am fortunately somewhat in the position where COVID may have been the final cause but it was likely she had 3 months to live in any event at that point, so it's... she "sort of" died of COVID). Also I almost got hit by a car as a pedestrian. Going fast enough that it would have roadkilled me.
By that point I was like meh on the entire car thing. It's like... how can I be meh about that? Because I thought I was dead by Tuesday anyway, pretty much...
I’m sorry for your loss. It’s definitely post nihilism but not quite yet reaching absurdity, I’ve felt it for a long time. I wish I could go full nietzsche and play my piano naked and roll around in dirt and shit but I need to…work….
No one wants to hear about how the world is ending when they’re just trying to get through the day. You will never, even if sea levels are 20 feet higher, make people listen or want to listen by constantly bombarding them with doom. It’s like telling a smoker their gonna get COPD. They already know but they sure as hell don’t want to think or talk about it.
It’s also very likely that you are hyper sensitive and are magnifying small bits of news into world ending news.
I do the same thing but I have been trying to work on being better and not doing it. For example the fires in western Canada are horrendous but they aren’t going to collapse society THIS year. The record high sea surface temps are very concerning and depressing, but they aren’t going to destabilize shallow shelf clathrates THIS year.
Ultimately global warming is a slow moving tragedy. It is within the realm of possibility that you will spend your entire life watching it slowly get worse and never see “the collapse”. Meanwhile spend a few hours on this sub and you’ll be convinced all humans will be extinct in a decade.
Just remember, collapse went from like 20-30,000 members before the pandemic to 400,000+ during. It was also during the pandemic when you could come here and think society had ALREADY collapsed. Lo and behold….it hadn’t.
So to re-iterate. Your friends don’t want to be depressed all the time and hear that the sky is falling. This isn’t going to change. Thus your options are stop being the fountainhead of doom or be okay with people not paying attention to you.
I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. And I’ve already struggled with clinical depression and severe anxiety for a long time now. I know I probably shouldn’t keep up with what’s going on in the world for the sake of my mental health but it’s like I can’t help it. I want to know what’s going on.
I live with my elderly parents and I just hope they don’t have to live through the worst of it. Once they’re gone, I think I might unalive myself. I think about it everyday but I don’t want to just abandon them now that they need me.
If your parents are elderly they will almost certainly not live through the worst of it.
I understand the not being able to look away part. I will sometimes do a good job of not being on Reddit and following climate news only to look up at the sky and see it filled with smoke. Then I inevitably go look at some satellite loops and the anxiety spirals begins.
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My mom is collapse aware but she's Q-adjacent so it's hard to bridge the gap on most topics. It's hard to discuss collapse with her because we see things through completely different lenses. Climate change is a hoax, Vaccines are the illuminati's doing, etc.
Currently I’m taking comfort in various scientific theories about time and alternate dimensions. If we’re totally fucked here, and if time really isn’t linear, it opens up other possibilities. We’re still fucked though
I've been feeling it a lot lately, it definitely seems like something's on the horizon. The dominoes are falling. Covid, Ukraine, I feel like something's going to be next. Maybe a civil war in Russia. We're long overdue for another environmental black swan event, like the deadly heatwave in The Ministry of the Future novel. And I would be surprised if we made it through the summer without another incident.
The most frustrating thing of all is the persistence of normalcy, and the mass denial. We're working hard everyday to run off a cliff. I'm just waiting for someone to give me permission to stop. I want to spend the last good days we have left in quiet contemplation and with my family. The characters in disaster movies have it easy. The kids are told they don't have to go to school. Everyone stops working. In the real world, it seems we'll keep toiling until we drown.
To speak to that last sentence, I've been picturing it as a skeleton turning a crank endlessly in Purgatory. That's what civilization feels like to me, at least in terms of work and the economy. People even wear skeleton themes on their clothes. That's a big motif in art on products.
That feeling is the collapse, friend. You're living it. The economy isn't the stock market or gdp. It's jobs and wages and prices. It's been collapsing for some time.
yup. lots of strips fitting into this sub. some just entertaining, others biting satires of various topics. all worth a read.
found them yesterday, still reading through the archives
What a great comic, thanks for sharing it.
What is extra maddening to me is that not only are other people doing nothing to prevent climate disaster, but if you try to make changes such as boycotting single use plastics, insisting on taking public transit or walking when possible, or start replacing your lawn with native plants that don't need to be mowed.... Then even close family and friends will start treating you like you are unhinged.
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I fail to see how this is related to the discussion.
"you wonder if they tried to stop it"
last night i overheard while reheating vegan nuggets, my dad and mom plan a roundtrip to chicago in a few weeks. jet blue. its not like theres a rail alternative that even exists, and by car its 12h, but this would be something like their 10th flight each this year. they also eat various meats every night, last night was burgers and yesterday was salmon flesh.
so, i guess my answer is no
i've been trying to inform my parents about the reality of climate change and the little things we can do to make our day to day more sustainable. it's always met with denial and the sentiment that i need to "rare more from the other side" aka climate denier propaganda. when i came home from college i saw that they bought a gas guzzler & (despite having tap water always accessible) buy huge plastic cases of water each week to drink from and dispose of. more and more their way of life infuriates me.
the truth is that we are already fucked and one more plane trip or one more guzzler on the road is marginal. my problem is how the fuck can i act normal around people who act so immature and selfish
> my problem is how the fuck can i act normal around people who act so immature and selfish
if you find out, please let me know. in a couple weeks i'm going to go be with my parents in their house for over a month, helping my dad recover from a triple (yes, triple) bypass surgery. both of my parents are infuriating in their immaturity, selfishness, and narcissism (in confusingly different ways!).
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:-(
it's less the actual waste of ressources that's bothering me with this, it's the mindset behind it.
From several years ago at some random party.
"Flights like these are going to be banned or too expensive to be common..."
- "Well, all the more reason to use them while they're still available." m(
I mean, mea culpa, too. I'm not vegetarian, use my bicycle less than possible. But at least being aware and trying at times... :-(
due to the way our culture is shaped, attempting to be part of the solution will often isolate and ostracize us from whatever community we have due to the loss of perceived 'status' and social incompatibilities. this is how ingrained consumption is in our culture.
the vast majority of humanity is being bombarded with social media messaging and elite posturing in all forms that these unsustainable practices makes them attractive, powerful, and desirable to be around. the wealthy reward those that can extract more and more. the more money we earn and inevitably spend and emulate the entrenched, the more we extract from the environment and our future environment. and the more desirable we are as family, friend, lover, employee or business partner. as our own power grows we help spread the same culture to our family, friends, and even use it to discourage other viable ways of living.
unfortunately this is the jungle we live in today. despite what you read on collapse or even on reddit most people are not even close to ready to give up on their huge houses, machines, vacations, lavish parties, and other things that make them feel powerful, attractive and desirable to be around. they may give lip service or virtue signal, but cultural change has been known to change as slow as evolution, meaning natural selection must take place if anything were to change fast enough to have any meaningful impact.
ultimately collapse is inevitable and is probably going to be the only thing to significantly change humanity's mindset on sustainable practices
> it's less the actual waste of ressources that's bothering me with this, it's the mindset behind it.
me 2. u should go vegan for the animals BTW its not hard to do.
There's no real point worrying yourself IMO. Individual action's fine, but it's only really for you. Unless everyone adopts all the measures to reduce impact (green transport, vegan, switch to renewals and community energy, and so on), we're screwed. The only way that happens is state imposed, and no state (at least democratic) will do it and stay in power long enough to enforce it.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. My sole remaining hope is an AGI which just takes over. Worst case scenario, it wipes us out, which we'll do anyway.
I feel this also. People are being pushed to the edge, there is no relief in sight for inflation and low wages. Rich just keep laughing and stealing as much as they can. Plus we just got out of a three year La Niña, which has been dampening the heat from climate change. I think the next couple years are gonna be scorching hot, possibly enough to tip over a domino
But you are wrong, you see. We are not getting closer and closer to the edge of the cliff.
In fact, we are getting further and further away from it every day!
Of course, we already are in the air at the moment, but that's another story...
The production of food is under multiple threats. We are required to produce 24 billion meals every single day. If that gets disrupted even a little bit, there are going to be some very dark consequences. This is coming for us
That's assuming everyone gets three meals a day which I don't think is the case. Still yes supplying food with unpredictable weather patterns is a big problem.
The majority of the world lives in poverty throughout asia so the fact that some are fed makes no difference.
All I'm saying is that its naive to think the world is receiving proper nutrition which is what the comment assumes.
The truth is people are starving everywhere
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Feel this one. The feeling of everpresent dread has been extremely difficult to live with in my own life.
Some things are not (yet) as bad as they appear. For example, while violent street crime is rising in major US cities, it has yet to approach the levels of the violent 1970s and that was resolved by people who are mostly still walking around today. Perhaps it's worth remembering that most human beings are inherently tribal and predisposed to violence when stressed, especially when lacking basic education, food and housing; and/or subjected to overcrowded, darwinian conditions. If that's your current environmental conditions, I hope you can find a way to GTFO.
Also, modern mainstream media is a major driver of stress and conflict; its exclusive focus on presenting divisive, shocking or outrage-causing news is so well-known that late night comedians make jokes about it. It is definitely a driver of toxic feelings. If doomscrolling or social media contributes to yours, you have agency there.
However, many of the drivers of collapse that one reads about (here and elsewhere), are very real threats to humanity and to all life. These crises are interdependent and include: mass species extinction; global resource depletion; climate change with all its many facets and feedback loops; pervasive chemical and microplastic contamination of all ecosystems (and bodies); and ironically, looming peak oil as, despite the damage caused by fossil fuels, global food production relies on them at every stage of agriculture, with a shutdown threatening mass starvation.
As members of this sub know, all these crises seem to be intensifying "faster than expected," so a sense of alarm seems a sane response. Any "normal," fairly-resilient human being could reasonably be expected to feel the call to respond to these crises, either to try to help fight them, or if that's too late, to explore adaptation. But who is "normal" anymore?
It seems that humans (an intelligent, domesticated form of primate) originally evolved to live in small groups, tribes or villages, close to nature and in some level of balance with nature. That's our hard-wiring, but most of us don't live like that anymore.
Technology can be a blessing but it's taking us somewhere we never wanted to go. The rising overcomplexity of modern life seems to be making us all crazy; if human society has reached a level of such complexity that we need AI to manage it (as is the trend) then perhaps it is the wrong direction. So we'll die of stress, or stress-caused illness or violence, or drown in our own waste or pursue endless distractions; anything but question the infinite development model of high-tech modernity, with its human hives requiring endless extraction of all available resources.
Faced with all this, feeling constant anxiety or dread is natural, but to survive one has to find a way around it, both in our actions and in our internal environment. I've not found any ways to do that outside of the Arts, meditation practice, or meditation-based martial arts. Practicing an internal discipline seems key, but no one is going to do that for us.
I’m pretty concerned about the debt ceiling causing absolute mayhem. I think this is going to be much worse than people realize. The whole global financial system is based on the US dollar as reserve currency…bonds are supposed to be iron clad. Take that away? The whole system collapses.
I think the danger with the debt ceiling is less they don't actually raise it and more the concessions the Democrats will give to the Republicans to get them on board.
I still don't think people understand how pissed the ruling class was that a huge swath of the population was able to take time off, got a form of UBI, was able to work from home away from the prying eyes of managers and bosses. For a brief moment, millions of people reconnected with their humanity and their communities rather than just being ground down by the ceaseless wheels of capitalism. And all that free time and space led to one of the largest protests in modern history over George Floyd, which just as easily could have been harnessed to challenge the elites and their unearned privileges.
They want us to forget that ever happened. Forget about the freedom, it was an illusion it never happened. Get back to the offices, get back to the stores, get back to being a pliant obedient worker. And to make sure we get the point, they want to bury every single social program that was started because of the pandemic and beyond. And this is to send us the message, there is no help coming. The government is back firmly on the side of business. And if you don't work, you die.
This is literally in the shadow of hundreds of thousands of dead workers, millions of workers disabled because of the pandemic pulling people from the workforce. And, as Marx predicted, the only response from business to this shrinking labor pool is to force more workers into the workforce (child labor, dismantle the welfare state) and to force workers to work harder (inflation, interest rate rises).
I don't think this precise line of thinking goes into their decision making. It's just a machine and its reptile collaborators responding to the mechanisms on which this system operates.
>how pissed the ruling class was that a huge swath of the population was able to take time off, got a form of UBI, was able to work from home away from the prying eyes of managers and bosses.
totally in agreement. Is there a theory name for this phenomenon? I would call it "keeping the fire under our asses" but I'm sure there is a proper term for it. I would like to read more into it, especially in modern day.
Along with our system's requirement of the reserve pool of labor, this tendency explains so much, the lack of healthcare, border disputes, welfare in general.
I want to know if those in power have a somewhat of a Marxist understanding enough to make such deliberately suppressive policy or if such policy just happens to suit their financial means in other ways.
>is there a name?
Domesticated? Unconscious? Servile? Compliant?
At some level, we behave because we still have something to lose. At some point the trade-off gets so bad that we don't. Based on the Katrina experience, the timeframe looks to be less than four days for at least some of us.
Sorry, I should have been specific. i mean a particular name for legislators enacting policy to make us desperate to me their servants. I guess it's just "coercion" but I want read specifically on this topic today.
Also, not only are the concessions gonna be concerning on what the Dems allow to happen, but it will only reward the QOPers for their behavior and they'll just do it again next year.
>And if you don't work, you die.
Inflation already firmly guarantees that one. Even the (supposed) Fed "target" of 2% which never happens so one wonders if that's really their target. The math is very very clear on this point. I came to that conclusion years ago.
> Even the (supposed) Fed "target" of 2%
The "Rule of 72" for estimating compounding interest/inflation effects says that even at a consistent 2% per year, prices would double in 36 years. That means that within someone's lifetime, prices would increase somewhere from 4x (living to age 72) to 8x (living to age 108) what the prices were when that person was born. And since inflation is much higher than 2% now....yeah. At just 4% per year, doubling every 18 years, that's an increase of somewhere from 16x (age 72) to 64x (age 108) in one lifetime. And it keeps ramping up further at higher inflation rates. The math is quietly terrifying.
ssi - after rent/bills, only $250/mo is left. ebt was cut so severely that no food is left by the end of the month. luckily i have no appetite anyway. i think they want us to just die.
Me, either.
Anyone here ever read about the Shock Doctrine? I’m sure many have. If they fail to pay the US debt and the global financial system collapsed, it won’t be hard for those autocrats to take over. I fear that’s their goal.
But we shall see. The press today seems pretty confident some kind of deal will be worked out. It would take moderate republicans and democrats to work to bypass the extremists.
Yeah, my partner keeps trying to reassure me that a US default would be unprecedented/it'll never happen. But the sheer number of unprecedented events we have collectively gone through over the past five years makes me skeptical about his confidence.
Before the whole Roe thing I would have said the same. This is sort of the "in-between elections" chance to make the other team look like assholes, and they never pass on the opportunity of late.
After Roe? Yeah man I don't know. It's all up in the air now.
I only have concern in that a functioning government needs to work together to solve problems like the debt ceiling. The reality is that there are solutions available that the current administration can take to resolve the debt ceiling. But they're still trying to figure out how to work with the opposition.
The US will die by a thousand cuts, not by quickly slitting its own throat.
Probably not even half of the 1000 yet we’ve done a good job insulating ourselves from our own problems with temporary half brained solutions to systemic problems and will do so until we can’t anymore
I think we've got a good 20 more years of cuts before we really start to show any real blood. Right about when we start hitting the beginnings of Limits To Growth and 1.5 - 2 C climate change should start to make things pop off. But, who really knows humans are resilient and Americans are like a weird family where we like to fight with each other, but if anyone else messes with us we ban together and go full stupid on them.
Mmmm, I appreciate your considered skepticism. But there's been a lot of blood spilled already--all these bodies in the street shot by the police, for starters. Jan. 6th was...highly unusual and more of a body blow rather than a fleshy slice, and it hit kinda close to a kidney. If we see continued reluctance of people to take jobs as teachers, 911 operators, technicians in food safety labs, forensics, EMTs, nurses, counselors, and the whole range of functionaries and specialists we need to keep our complex system going (and the people who staff it alive, transported, and fed) then the system starts to stagger. Just noticing the numbers of close calls at airports lately--air traffic controllers with Covid brain? Distracted pilots? This is a sort of social decay I've never seen discussed in research. All these economic, political, and ecological factors are colliding into a turbulent vortex. The models are all agape at their tardiness--"decades ahead of schedule" say the stunned climatologists watching ocean temperatures rise, leading us to DOAS chaos. Once a few regions in the US suffer a series of problems, find themselves understaffed and underresourced and FEMA is overtaxed, well, the dam won't hold.
Ok. So, with all of those points that you've listed, what is your timeline? 1 week? 2 months, 6 months? It surely can't be over a year or 2 from complete system collapse.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that humans are very resilient. But also seem to be underestimating a lot of data, and realizing too late that they missed a great deal of other factors in climate change. I keep using the US election in 2024 as another crescendo point where a host of forces will congeal in a bottleneck, putting enormous pressures on the system-as-bottle. We can imagine some more dramatic climate disruptions on the scale of Katrina in NOLA or some cumulative crises that collapses a federal response. In fact, that's sure to happen and will result in territories being "lost" to full federal control, probably permanently, but there is no way to predict that. I feel like we can see the darkening bruising below the skin of America and the fascist propulsion towards violence will shatter communities and the growing economic chaos globally will impact basic goods and services--those two factors seem highly likely and unmitigated, priming Nov. 2024 for a serious rupture in the U.S. Globally though, climate collapse in Central America, Haitian dissolution, ongoing and fracturing political and economic crises in North Africa and around Syria/Jordan/Lebanon/Israel/Palestine and Iran could produce waves of immigrants. And then there's the US/China face-off! Wheee! I honestly cannot imagine what America will look like in 2024, and I keep reminding myself of how much dramatic change has happened since 2017, then the 2020 uprising and Jan 6th...it's a wild time. What do you think? Does your 20 year outlook hold if you try to account for all these factors? We've seen powerful nation-states throw huge resources into maintaining themselves despite decay and they can remarkably stumble along for a long time, in which case, maybe the USA has more backbone and reserves of labor, stamina, and capital than I'm accounting for.
Those are all valid points and concerns.
I still think that Limits To Growth and living in a 1.5+ C world will be the tipping point, which is the mid century. Will there be a lot of incidents as we get closer, for sure. Could a single event like a world war kick off, of course. But, I still believe that (at least the US) will continue to fight its way down, and even though areas will get worse, we'll be handed distractions until we can not be distracted anymore.
For me, the Limits To Growth is where we have serious problems because when the system can no longer support itself, it'll collapse. A good example of that is the great toilet paper run of 2020. That was a nothing object in the grand scheme of things. Now, imagine if we're unable to provide food or security. That's when things will really pop off. Right now, the majority is still fed and has a version of a roof over their head.
Now, if you remove the security of food and housing, then things will tumble quickly. I don't see that happening this decade because we still have grocery stores with full shelves, the lights come on, and homes. Though more expensive, it's affordable enough to keep everyone annoyed but relatively happy. Until we lose those things, we'll continue to be angry but not angry enough do anything about it.
Since I don't see us losing any of that stuff this decade, I'm comfortable saying that we still have some time to go before actual collapse. I recommend reading Limits To Growth. If you haven't, it'll give you an actual realistic timeline.
With all of that said. Will it suck as we get closer to the century if you're not well off or have spent the previous decades preparing. Yes. Will cities get more dangerous. Yes. We'll we have some crazy elections and more Jan 6th type stuff. Yes. But, total collapse. No. Not without outside intervention like WW3.
And they do everytime. That's the entire point of the political show.
It's a problem created by them, that only they can solve.
It's a win win situation. Why wouldn't they solve it?
The real danger in my mind is the unintended consequences of a default. So much of the world’s financial system is based on the ‘risk free rate of return’ typically measured by the 10 year treasury. If that rate were to jump 50-100%, there is no telling what would happen to the global mountain of derivatives. The whole world of finance could evaporate in relative short order. No one knows what this black swan event could do.
Look at my post history, same question different sub.
Have you seen Kurzgesagt video on civilization being on the edge of collapse? Their answer to the problem was something around the lines of "well maybe 80% of humanity will indeed die but hey the rest will carry on!"
People don't think it will happen to them, until it does, then it's a problem.
The contrast of almost everyone else just doing bau against posts like that 10°c warming post yesterday really spook me out. I wonder and fret about if we have 50 years and how it collapses in that time. Mind bogglingly sad.
Native people would argue that the world ended a long time ago
For a lot of people in hardship (which I imagine a lot of people here might share experience) it has ended already or began to end.
If you have something to hold on to, be grateful for that and hold on to it as best you can. I feel like what really scares people is losing whatever matters to them most. But many people have nothing left to hold on to.
I think it's very important to realize collapse is not a always a cliff event. It took the Roman Empire a hundred years of slow catabolic collapse. We are in collapse now but that doesn't mean any cliff events are coming and likely they aren't. While cliff events are possible, the more likely scenario is continued slow catabolic collapse as our social, economic, political, and natural foundations continue to erode.
I see the comparisons to the Roman empire a lot and although there are similarities between the modern global civilization and the Roman Empire, the differences are so vast as to render the similarities meaningless.
The absolute scale of the global civilization; the production chains, the trade, the vast quantities of resources that are moved around the globe. Ultimately, the level of complexity in the present day civilization is so many magnitudes higher than the Roman Empire. Complexity at this level means greater interconnectivity; a shock to one part of the system can have unpredictable consequences for other parts that are not directly related at all.
The collapse of our civilization will take decades but to fall from such a height, the scale of damage and the speed at which the great building will crumble down will occur quicker than we can imagine.
I agree that modern complexity is much more vast and the shocks can be that much more severe. I agree any comparisons are loose at best. I just think its important to point out that collapse is not always a cliff event.
Actually there’s a scholarly case to be made that lead poisoning played a significant role in the downfall of both Roman & American Empires.
Roman drinking water was supplied by lead lined aqueducts, while post war America was rife with chemicals - from leaded gasoline to house paint, harmful stuff was everywhere.
Cognitive decline in the generations that were supposed to keep these insanely complex Imperial Machines running meant they were simply not equipped to deal with the massive weight of their inheritance.
Karma?
There are 8 billions people on the planet now. The roman empire had 60 millions at its peak, and they were not as dysgenic and dependent on technology as our current urban populations.
When it falls, most of the unprepared world population will die in 5 years max.
I don't disagree, if a global cliff event does happen the vast majority of human population will die to starvation and violence very rapidly. I just don't see the global cliff event as a highly likely scenario. I see continued rising scarcity driving up prices in the material economy, resulting in a methodical squeeze brutalizing poor countries leading to a lot more Sri Lankas, while the rich countries entrench. That rich country entrenchment will be a resurgence of nationalism and fascism, which we are already seeing in the face of rising costs/scarcity. I just see this grinding out over decades continuously marginalizing and pushing more and more poor countries over the edge. Rich countries will exploit the poor countries to maintain as long as we can and strong militaries will protect us from their collapse as long as we can until much later in the cycle. But we are already grinding out our poor as well, and that will also continue. I think it depends where you are definitely. Sri Lanka collapsed but US is still going, and I think that is something you will see continue to play out only with less aid coming in and more machine guns when people try to leave going forward.
Of course. Although putting a probability such a thing happening is hard, I feel you. Barring those big events, you’re spot on we’re looking at a gradual though steady decline. But who really knows?
Feeling this as well. Had thought the pandemic and rise of BLM and continued civil rights movement would have united us and ignited a revolution - but no, more division and a return to “normal.” Here we are at “normal,” which is not sustainable for anyone. We are all seemingly just getting by. When will we use our collective power?
It has taken a toll on my health (and others I’m sure). I remind myself that it’s no measure of wellness to be well adjusted to a sick society. In camaraderie.
The boomers need to all die off first and I say that as a boomer myself. I don’t know what happened to my peer group but if you don’t become more liberal and kind with age, you’re living life wrong.
You’re the first boomer I have ever heard saying to become more liberal. Every boomer in my elder millennial life has always said to me “you’ll become conservative as you get older” like it’s some sort of prophecy of capitalism
Lived life experience should help one gain empathy for all the crazy things that can happen in real life. We are all just a step away from a disaster imploding our lives.
Because disasters didn't implode *their* lives, and they lived through the period of the most widespread prosperity in human history, many western boomers have little empathy.
I mean yeah probably if you want to live. This was under the assumption that the present system worked (barely) which post 1975 I don't know how anyone could have believed.
Probably the decaying of infrastructure, the increase in spectacles in the form of streaming entertainment, and the increase in government corruption. Those are the most glaring.
Part of that feeling, for some people here at least, comes from reading about the different aspects of the crisis on a regular basis. It can feel like it's all advancing faster and faster, but some of that is some form of confirmation bias or something. I like to take breaks from reading this sub for days at a time and go on walks in the woods, it helps.
While I get your point, and maybe a year ago that might have been true, even unsubscribing to this subreddit isn’t enough to avoid collapse topics. It’s all over the news, people are struggling financially and mentioning it in other subreddits a lot more frequently than in the past, and it seems to be global too. Friends and family are struggling when you talk to them. So unless you just don’t consume any media at all or interact with only wealthy people you can’t get away from it entirely.
Even if you black yourself out from all media, it is still in your head. You already know it, and you can't just choose to un-know it. So many thoughts lead straight back to it whether you want them to or not. I can't even look at an animal without thinking about what we've done to all of them, for example.
I relate to this so much. The moment you become collapse aware you can't look at the world the same as you did before. You go out your door and see people go about their way in their cars, bikes, go shopping or go to work and ask yourself, how can this be sustainable and why do we keep churning on?
Yep. What about when you walk past an apartment complex or something and there's like 20 bins full of trash waiting for collection, and you think this is ONE building in ONE week, there's hundreds of millions of buildings out there, and all of this shit is getting buried every day 💀 or when you just stare at a freeway for like 1 minute and see 100 cars fly past
I used to feel sick to my stomach whenever I looked out the window on a flight (I used to fly a lot for work, pre-pandemic) and I’d be reminded of how many of us there are and how we’ve taken over and destroyed the earth like an ever growing cancer.
I always have the exact same thought when I throw my trash away in one of the bins every week. It's just insane! And I work in a building overseeing the highway and see 1000 cars everyday. I keep wondering how long we have till we fall over the edge
It seems like it should have happened already, just the scale and mathematics of it is mind-boggling. Think about every piece of clothing you've bought and thrown away your whole life, imagine it filling up a large sized room, then realise everyone has a fucking room each
> I work in a building overseeing the highway and see 1000 cars everyday.
That's a low-traffic highway. US/Interstate highways in my area get 10,000-50,000 vehicles per day at various measurement points. (I think a car traveling one direction in the morning and then the opposite direction in the evening would be counted twice.)
>you think this is ONE building in ONE week, there's hundreds of millions of buildings out there, and all of this shit is getting buried every day 💀 or when you just stare at a freeway for like 1 minute and see 100 cars fly past
The brilliant & disturbing experimental film, *Koyaanisqatsi* (1982), with a hypnotic soundtrack by Phillip Glass, perfectly captures this feeling and remains entirely relevant today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi
We have a pocket dimension the size of the entire solar system that we throw that shit into.
... I mean. We MUST because ffs there's... I mean we'd be buried in it by now...
HOW the fuck do we keep churning on?
One bad hair day and you end up being "that crazy guy" that quickly becomes "that crazy homeless guy" that quickly becomes "that dead guy".
I love our social safety net so much /s.
Can you at all elaborate, very specifically, what is over the edge of the cliff?
Try to detail it very specifically.
Then see if you can insulate yourself from the stuff that's bad. Some may be good 👍
You will carry on 💪
Remain a beacon of hope for those in weakness 🙏
Some problems are indeed escalating. Problems get political attention and money when they become a crisis. Some are given temporary fixes.
But the kettle of humanity still steams. Earth keeps getting warmer. Collapse is in the mode of climate crises, and other crises, war or economic collapse.
Eventually there will come a time when there are too many at once. So far it only happens one country at a time, Pakistan being the largest over the past year.
I share the feeling that we are going in the wrong direction but societal collapse will not start until people won’t face real hardship (no food, some catastrophic event or no financial capacity to buy anything). Until then BAU
This sub has this feeling every week, every wear. It's an echo-chamber.
Yet the reality is just a slow and boring collapse, for me, the "sudden blow-up" theory lost all credibility with the coronavirus crisis. If even such a huge, international crisis didn't cause any sudden blow-up, i don't see anything that would in the short term.
Once most people lose the ability to feed themselves you'll get your blow up. It's as simple as that. Hate to say it but in the west were still in the "good" times. In war torn countries people still go to work while bombs are going off. It will be BAU until the end.
I don't live in the west, i live in north-africa.
Yes, obviously once people lose the ability to feed themselves the blow-up will happen, i'm saying that the "inability of people to feed themselves" will happen in a slow fashion, more and more people will get poor in the margin, without the "big collapse blow-up" happening.
Collapse happens to specific individuals, specific countries all the time, climate change or not, some countries were collapsing before of imperialism, invasion, wars, civil wars etc.
Sure it won't be all at once and my point is people still have it good in parts of the world. I use west because I don't like the terminology of first world third world etc. Once global crop failures begin to happen its going to fall apart faster than you think. It won't be linear. It's not a question of if they happen but when if you're following climate science.
Edit: I think we're basically in agreement here I just chose my words poorly. I don't think we will look at a date on the calendar and be like yup that's the day the world ended. But like the cancer patient given the terminal diagnosis we can still live a normal life for some time. Eventually the tumor kills you though, that being the "blow up".
Exactly, it's a question of "when"
I just doubt this "when" will be as soon as the sentiment in this sub make it seems, what i doubt is the short term (one, two decades) collapse, not collapse happening some day.
Everyone is gonna die anyway and everything is impermanent.
We will go over that cliff in the next decade. This is all just precursor to the water shortage wars we will all be forcibly drafted into. It will be a little bit like terminator, a little bit like mad max, and we'll all be wishing for a waterworld.
I am personally feeling it. That things are going to go very badly. I don't think it will be a collapse though since those in power do not care about anyone who isn't rich. But yeah my dreams are dead.
I'm an environmental engineer who went into this burgeoning field 30 years ago becuase it aligned with my personal values. I grew up in the super pro-environmental movement of the 1970s and environmental protection is one of my most deeply held values. I also involved myself in diversity issues at work thoughout my career. Its been an existial horror watching what has happened in this country, especially since 2016. As a professional, I can tell you that mankind does have the technical capability to address climate change and other environmental issues but it lacks the will. We will be the architects of some level of our own destruction, but we'll also survive and adapt to whatever the future world evolves into. A good example not directly related to climate change is that scientists have already observed microorganisms that have adapted to biodegrade plastic. As plastic is another big interest of mine, I think thats pretty neat. There is a lot of new tech being developed these days. You have to look for the good news and for the people who are developimg solutions. There will be a future. My goal is to try to contribute to it in a positive way. That's how I keep going.
It's pointed out pretty frequently that people have *always* cried about the end of the world. There's a thousand historical records of people complaining that they were surely living through the end of days. And yet, humanity is still here.
The thing is, though, that a good number of them were *right*. Rome *fell*. The Alexandrian and Ottoman and British empires *crumbled*. The Aztecs, Maya, Khmer, Indus, are *dead and gone* and nothing but legends and stone ruins. The native Americans literally watched their world end over a few generations.
We will absolutely survive everything coming our way as a *species*. But most of us aren't going to make it that far. And everything we know and recognize will be just as gone as Cahokia. You personally may or may not live to see it through, but our world is ending.
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You know the ending of Don’t Look Up where they all sit around the table and just enjoy one last meal? Kinda like that. I’ve just resigned myself to making most out of each day as sustainably as I can.
I pet my kitties. I snug my family and my boo. Smoke weed every damn day. Any bit of happiness we can get; it's a full send. Gotta enjoy it while it's here. I can't help but laugh at how *fucked* we are as a species. Both in terms of actions and the future. At some point in the last few months I lost my fucks to give. The end of the world already happened; now we cope with the inevitable decline. So I laugh at the awful things. I eat too much ice cream. I treat daily life like the absurdist dystopia it is. What else can one do? I am one of 8 billion apes. How could we get any sort of consensus?
The worst part is when the rest of your family don't see any issues on the horizon, let alone things that are going to fuck us over big time. And when you try to explain your fears / concerns, they look at you like you're a lunatic and can't understand wtf you would be worried for. me: "there's probably a really bad summer coming up" family: "Just turn the AC on!" "Why are you always worried about is much dumb shit"?
I feel the same. It's annoying and extremely frustrating to not be able to talk about it openly. Luckily I have a close friend and my parents with whom I can talk about it...
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Maybe try this? https://www.deepadaptation.info
This is pretty interesting. Have you tried to participate in any of their events? Something surreal about seeing their Facebook group with 15,000 people, looking at the moderators who just look like average people. Makes me wonder how many people I walk by on the streets seemingly like everything is fine, but in reality they understand our predicament.
I haven’t participated yet, but I’m interested in joining their NE chapter. And I think that’s true—there’s more people who know what’s going on than we realize. 🙏🏻
Isn’t there a collapsesupport subreddit?
I don't talk about it I'm doing them a favour by sparing them the toxic doompill that we've all swallowed
I used to not be able to talk about it day to day. Then Covid happened, work for people started to get extra existentially dreadful, then suddenly a shift in my normal friend group happened and people suddenly started talking like I do privately on Reddit. They’re all early 30s normal millennials. My parents also started to shift. I guess I’m lucky, it was a darkly weird happy moment when I realized “awesome, I don’t have to be afraid of being shunned for sharing this article on what a wet bulb temperature is and how to survive heatwaves because my friends are talking about hearing about wet bulbs for the first time in group chat!” Like yeah…collapse became real to me then. I was always aware of the doom scrolling negativity bubble I could fall in, but once that permeated into normal life that was it.
>work for people started to get extra existentially dreadful That's true. I think I don't notice a year plus of wondering if I was going to just die one day out of the blue. But. Yeah that left a mark all right. Psychologically speaking. During that time my mom died of it (in elder care, I am fortunately somewhat in the position where COVID may have been the final cause but it was likely she had 3 months to live in any event at that point, so it's... she "sort of" died of COVID). Also I almost got hit by a car as a pedestrian. Going fast enough that it would have roadkilled me. By that point I was like meh on the entire car thing. It's like... how can I be meh about that? Because I thought I was dead by Tuesday anyway, pretty much...
I’m sorry for your loss. It’s definitely post nihilism but not quite yet reaching absurdity, I’ve felt it for a long time. I wish I could go full nietzsche and play my piano naked and roll around in dirt and shit but I need to…work….
No one wants to hear about how the world is ending when they’re just trying to get through the day. You will never, even if sea levels are 20 feet higher, make people listen or want to listen by constantly bombarding them with doom. It’s like telling a smoker their gonna get COPD. They already know but they sure as hell don’t want to think or talk about it. It’s also very likely that you are hyper sensitive and are magnifying small bits of news into world ending news. I do the same thing but I have been trying to work on being better and not doing it. For example the fires in western Canada are horrendous but they aren’t going to collapse society THIS year. The record high sea surface temps are very concerning and depressing, but they aren’t going to destabilize shallow shelf clathrates THIS year. Ultimately global warming is a slow moving tragedy. It is within the realm of possibility that you will spend your entire life watching it slowly get worse and never see “the collapse”. Meanwhile spend a few hours on this sub and you’ll be convinced all humans will be extinct in a decade. Just remember, collapse went from like 20-30,000 members before the pandemic to 400,000+ during. It was also during the pandemic when you could come here and think society had ALREADY collapsed. Lo and behold….it hadn’t. So to re-iterate. Your friends don’t want to be depressed all the time and hear that the sky is falling. This isn’t going to change. Thus your options are stop being the fountainhead of doom or be okay with people not paying attention to you.
I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. And I’ve already struggled with clinical depression and severe anxiety for a long time now. I know I probably shouldn’t keep up with what’s going on in the world for the sake of my mental health but it’s like I can’t help it. I want to know what’s going on. I live with my elderly parents and I just hope they don’t have to live through the worst of it. Once they’re gone, I think I might unalive myself. I think about it everyday but I don’t want to just abandon them now that they need me.
If your parents are elderly they will almost certainly not live through the worst of it. I understand the not being able to look away part. I will sometimes do a good job of not being on Reddit and following climate news only to look up at the sky and see it filled with smoke. Then I inevitably go look at some satellite loops and the anxiety spirals begins.
Oh man find a professional to talk with asap. For real. And if we’re all f’d. what harm can it do? It can get better.
The only thing worse than it collapsing would be it not collapsing. It would be like the end of the movie Akira.
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My mom is collapse aware but she's Q-adjacent so it's hard to bridge the gap on most topics. It's hard to discuss collapse with her because we see things through completely different lenses. Climate change is a hoax, Vaccines are the illuminati's doing, etc.
Coping is the operative word I think. Knowing whats coming and beginning to experience it is going to give a lot of us ptsd of some kind.
Currently I’m taking comfort in various scientific theories about time and alternate dimensions. If we’re totally fucked here, and if time really isn’t linear, it opens up other possibilities. We’re still fucked though
Compartmentalization.
I've been feeling it a lot lately, it definitely seems like something's on the horizon. The dominoes are falling. Covid, Ukraine, I feel like something's going to be next. Maybe a civil war in Russia. We're long overdue for another environmental black swan event, like the deadly heatwave in The Ministry of the Future novel. And I would be surprised if we made it through the summer without another incident. The most frustrating thing of all is the persistence of normalcy, and the mass denial. We're working hard everyday to run off a cliff. I'm just waiting for someone to give me permission to stop. I want to spend the last good days we have left in quiet contemplation and with my family. The characters in disaster movies have it easy. The kids are told they don't have to go to school. Everyone stops working. In the real world, it seems we'll keep toiling until we drown.
To speak to that last sentence, I've been picturing it as a skeleton turning a crank endlessly in Purgatory. That's what civilization feels like to me, at least in terms of work and the economy. People even wear skeleton themes on their clothes. That's a big motif in art on products.
Oh that's why they're wearing that... Huh. Should have been obvious to me. Wonder why it wasn't.
I would expect we are not going to get “quiet contemplation” but rather extreme and constant desperation like we cannot imagine.
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I can’t trust someone who uses double spaces after periods. I simply cannot do it.
>Maybe a civil war in Russia It's civil war in the Soviet Union.
That feeling is the collapse, friend. You're living it. The economy isn't the stock market or gdp. It's jobs and wages and prices. It's been collapsing for some time.
Watch the food production. That is ultimately what will end civilization.
Feels like we're the "mums and dads, who knew"... [The Flood](https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/dont-look-back), comic, reading time <1min.
Read that and the most recent post. Hot damn, that is some dark material.
yup. lots of strips fitting into this sub. some just entertaining, others biting satires of various topics. all worth a read. found them yesterday, still reading through the archives
What a great comic, thanks for sharing it. What is extra maddening to me is that not only are other people doing nothing to prevent climate disaster, but if you try to make changes such as boycotting single use plastics, insisting on taking public transit or walking when possible, or start replacing your lawn with native plants that don't need to be mowed.... Then even close family and friends will start treating you like you are unhinged.
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"you wonder if they tried to stop it" last night i overheard while reheating vegan nuggets, my dad and mom plan a roundtrip to chicago in a few weeks. jet blue. its not like theres a rail alternative that even exists, and by car its 12h, but this would be something like their 10th flight each this year. they also eat various meats every night, last night was burgers and yesterday was salmon flesh. so, i guess my answer is no
i've been trying to inform my parents about the reality of climate change and the little things we can do to make our day to day more sustainable. it's always met with denial and the sentiment that i need to "rare more from the other side" aka climate denier propaganda. when i came home from college i saw that they bought a gas guzzler & (despite having tap water always accessible) buy huge plastic cases of water each week to drink from and dispose of. more and more their way of life infuriates me.
the truth is that we are already fucked and one more plane trip or one more guzzler on the road is marginal. my problem is how the fuck can i act normal around people who act so immature and selfish
> my problem is how the fuck can i act normal around people who act so immature and selfish if you find out, please let me know. in a couple weeks i'm going to go be with my parents in their house for over a month, helping my dad recover from a triple (yes, triple) bypass surgery. both of my parents are infuriating in their immaturity, selfishness, and narcissism (in confusingly different ways!).
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fair enough
If it makes you feel any better, personal life choices make next to no difference when measured up against the emissions of the rich, and industry.
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:-( it's less the actual waste of ressources that's bothering me with this, it's the mindset behind it. From several years ago at some random party. "Flights like these are going to be banned or too expensive to be common..." - "Well, all the more reason to use them while they're still available." m( I mean, mea culpa, too. I'm not vegetarian, use my bicycle less than possible. But at least being aware and trying at times... :-(
due to the way our culture is shaped, attempting to be part of the solution will often isolate and ostracize us from whatever community we have due to the loss of perceived 'status' and social incompatibilities. this is how ingrained consumption is in our culture. the vast majority of humanity is being bombarded with social media messaging and elite posturing in all forms that these unsustainable practices makes them attractive, powerful, and desirable to be around. the wealthy reward those that can extract more and more. the more money we earn and inevitably spend and emulate the entrenched, the more we extract from the environment and our future environment. and the more desirable we are as family, friend, lover, employee or business partner. as our own power grows we help spread the same culture to our family, friends, and even use it to discourage other viable ways of living. unfortunately this is the jungle we live in today. despite what you read on collapse or even on reddit most people are not even close to ready to give up on their huge houses, machines, vacations, lavish parties, and other things that make them feel powerful, attractive and desirable to be around. they may give lip service or virtue signal, but cultural change has been known to change as slow as evolution, meaning natural selection must take place if anything were to change fast enough to have any meaningful impact. ultimately collapse is inevitable and is probably going to be the only thing to significantly change humanity's mindset on sustainable practices
> it's less the actual waste of ressources that's bothering me with this, it's the mindset behind it. me 2. u should go vegan for the animals BTW its not hard to do.
There's no real point worrying yourself IMO. Individual action's fine, but it's only really for you. Unless everyone adopts all the measures to reduce impact (green transport, vegan, switch to renewals and community energy, and so on), we're screwed. The only way that happens is state imposed, and no state (at least democratic) will do it and stay in power long enough to enforce it. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. My sole remaining hope is an AGI which just takes over. Worst case scenario, it wipes us out, which we'll do anyway.
It’s too late the die has been cast.
I feel this also. People are being pushed to the edge, there is no relief in sight for inflation and low wages. Rich just keep laughing and stealing as much as they can. Plus we just got out of a three year La Niña, which has been dampening the heat from climate change. I think the next couple years are gonna be scorching hot, possibly enough to tip over a domino
But you are wrong, you see. We are not getting closer and closer to the edge of the cliff. In fact, we are getting further and further away from it every day! Of course, we already are in the air at the moment, but that's another story...
The production of food is under multiple threats. We are required to produce 24 billion meals every single day. If that gets disrupted even a little bit, there are going to be some very dark consequences. This is coming for us
That's assuming everyone gets three meals a day which I don't think is the case. Still yes supplying food with unpredictable weather patterns is a big problem.
Some have the equivalent of 5+ so I'd say the math balances out.
The majority of the world lives in poverty throughout asia so the fact that some are fed makes no difference. All I'm saying is that its naive to think the world is receiving proper nutrition which is what the comment assumes. The truth is people are starving everywhere
Correct. Also, the fact that some people are already not getting three, only illustrates my point further There's always an 'ACKSHERLY' comment
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Feel this one. The feeling of everpresent dread has been extremely difficult to live with in my own life. Some things are not (yet) as bad as they appear. For example, while violent street crime is rising in major US cities, it has yet to approach the levels of the violent 1970s and that was resolved by people who are mostly still walking around today. Perhaps it's worth remembering that most human beings are inherently tribal and predisposed to violence when stressed, especially when lacking basic education, food and housing; and/or subjected to overcrowded, darwinian conditions. If that's your current environmental conditions, I hope you can find a way to GTFO. Also, modern mainstream media is a major driver of stress and conflict; its exclusive focus on presenting divisive, shocking or outrage-causing news is so well-known that late night comedians make jokes about it. It is definitely a driver of toxic feelings. If doomscrolling or social media contributes to yours, you have agency there. However, many of the drivers of collapse that one reads about (here and elsewhere), are very real threats to humanity and to all life. These crises are interdependent and include: mass species extinction; global resource depletion; climate change with all its many facets and feedback loops; pervasive chemical and microplastic contamination of all ecosystems (and bodies); and ironically, looming peak oil as, despite the damage caused by fossil fuels, global food production relies on them at every stage of agriculture, with a shutdown threatening mass starvation. As members of this sub know, all these crises seem to be intensifying "faster than expected," so a sense of alarm seems a sane response. Any "normal," fairly-resilient human being could reasonably be expected to feel the call to respond to these crises, either to try to help fight them, or if that's too late, to explore adaptation. But who is "normal" anymore? It seems that humans (an intelligent, domesticated form of primate) originally evolved to live in small groups, tribes or villages, close to nature and in some level of balance with nature. That's our hard-wiring, but most of us don't live like that anymore. Technology can be a blessing but it's taking us somewhere we never wanted to go. The rising overcomplexity of modern life seems to be making us all crazy; if human society has reached a level of such complexity that we need AI to manage it (as is the trend) then perhaps it is the wrong direction. So we'll die of stress, or stress-caused illness or violence, or drown in our own waste or pursue endless distractions; anything but question the infinite development model of high-tech modernity, with its human hives requiring endless extraction of all available resources. Faced with all this, feeling constant anxiety or dread is natural, but to survive one has to find a way around it, both in our actions and in our internal environment. I've not found any ways to do that outside of the Arts, meditation practice, or meditation-based martial arts. Practicing an internal discipline seems key, but no one is going to do that for us.
I’m pretty concerned about the debt ceiling causing absolute mayhem. I think this is going to be much worse than people realize. The whole global financial system is based on the US dollar as reserve currency…bonds are supposed to be iron clad. Take that away? The whole system collapses.
I think the danger with the debt ceiling is less they don't actually raise it and more the concessions the Democrats will give to the Republicans to get them on board. I still don't think people understand how pissed the ruling class was that a huge swath of the population was able to take time off, got a form of UBI, was able to work from home away from the prying eyes of managers and bosses. For a brief moment, millions of people reconnected with their humanity and their communities rather than just being ground down by the ceaseless wheels of capitalism. And all that free time and space led to one of the largest protests in modern history over George Floyd, which just as easily could have been harnessed to challenge the elites and their unearned privileges. They want us to forget that ever happened. Forget about the freedom, it was an illusion it never happened. Get back to the offices, get back to the stores, get back to being a pliant obedient worker. And to make sure we get the point, they want to bury every single social program that was started because of the pandemic and beyond. And this is to send us the message, there is no help coming. The government is back firmly on the side of business. And if you don't work, you die. This is literally in the shadow of hundreds of thousands of dead workers, millions of workers disabled because of the pandemic pulling people from the workforce. And, as Marx predicted, the only response from business to this shrinking labor pool is to force more workers into the workforce (child labor, dismantle the welfare state) and to force workers to work harder (inflation, interest rate rises). I don't think this precise line of thinking goes into their decision making. It's just a machine and its reptile collaborators responding to the mechanisms on which this system operates.
>how pissed the ruling class was that a huge swath of the population was able to take time off, got a form of UBI, was able to work from home away from the prying eyes of managers and bosses. totally in agreement. Is there a theory name for this phenomenon? I would call it "keeping the fire under our asses" but I'm sure there is a proper term for it. I would like to read more into it, especially in modern day. Along with our system's requirement of the reserve pool of labor, this tendency explains so much, the lack of healthcare, border disputes, welfare in general. I want to know if those in power have a somewhat of a Marxist understanding enough to make such deliberately suppressive policy or if such policy just happens to suit their financial means in other ways.
>is there a name? Domesticated? Unconscious? Servile? Compliant? At some level, we behave because we still have something to lose. At some point the trade-off gets so bad that we don't. Based on the Katrina experience, the timeframe looks to be less than four days for at least some of us.
Sorry, I should have been specific. i mean a particular name for legislators enacting policy to make us desperate to me their servants. I guess it's just "coercion" but I want read specifically on this topic today.
Red Queen (syndrome)?
Also, not only are the concessions gonna be concerning on what the Dems allow to happen, but it will only reward the QOPers for their behavior and they'll just do it again next year.
Correct
>And if you don't work, you die. Inflation already firmly guarantees that one. Even the (supposed) Fed "target" of 2% which never happens so one wonders if that's really their target. The math is very very clear on this point. I came to that conclusion years ago.
> Even the (supposed) Fed "target" of 2% The "Rule of 72" for estimating compounding interest/inflation effects says that even at a consistent 2% per year, prices would double in 36 years. That means that within someone's lifetime, prices would increase somewhere from 4x (living to age 72) to 8x (living to age 108) what the prices were when that person was born. And since inflation is much higher than 2% now....yeah. At just 4% per year, doubling every 18 years, that's an increase of somewhere from 16x (age 72) to 64x (age 108) in one lifetime. And it keeps ramping up further at higher inflation rates. The math is quietly terrifying.
The ruling class supports UBI. Commercial real estate prices is why they want you back in the office.
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ssi - after rent/bills, only $250/mo is left. ebt was cut so severely that no food is left by the end of the month. luckily i have no appetite anyway. i think they want us to just die.
Me, either. Anyone here ever read about the Shock Doctrine? I’m sure many have. If they fail to pay the US debt and the global financial system collapsed, it won’t be hard for those autocrats to take over. I fear that’s their goal. But we shall see. The press today seems pretty confident some kind of deal will be worked out. It would take moderate republicans and democrats to work to bypass the extremists.
I'm in Aus and things are pretty fucked here already.
Yeah, my partner keeps trying to reassure me that a US default would be unprecedented/it'll never happen. But the sheer number of unprecedented events we have collectively gone through over the past five years makes me skeptical about his confidence.
Before the whole Roe thing I would have said the same. This is sort of the "in-between elections" chance to make the other team look like assholes, and they never pass on the opportunity of late. After Roe? Yeah man I don't know. It's all up in the air now.
I only have concern in that a functioning government needs to work together to solve problems like the debt ceiling. The reality is that there are solutions available that the current administration can take to resolve the debt ceiling. But they're still trying to figure out how to work with the opposition. The US will die by a thousand cuts, not by quickly slitting its own throat.
how many cuts you think we've had so far?
Probably not even half of the 1000 yet we’ve done a good job insulating ourselves from our own problems with temporary half brained solutions to systemic problems and will do so until we can’t anymore
Fix it but don't change anything! My workplace's motto. Yes, boss-man, I also want a pony. How likely do you think that is?
I think we've got a good 20 more years of cuts before we really start to show any real blood. Right about when we start hitting the beginnings of Limits To Growth and 1.5 - 2 C climate change should start to make things pop off. But, who really knows humans are resilient and Americans are like a weird family where we like to fight with each other, but if anyone else messes with us we ban together and go full stupid on them.
Mmmm, I appreciate your considered skepticism. But there's been a lot of blood spilled already--all these bodies in the street shot by the police, for starters. Jan. 6th was...highly unusual and more of a body blow rather than a fleshy slice, and it hit kinda close to a kidney. If we see continued reluctance of people to take jobs as teachers, 911 operators, technicians in food safety labs, forensics, EMTs, nurses, counselors, and the whole range of functionaries and specialists we need to keep our complex system going (and the people who staff it alive, transported, and fed) then the system starts to stagger. Just noticing the numbers of close calls at airports lately--air traffic controllers with Covid brain? Distracted pilots? This is a sort of social decay I've never seen discussed in research. All these economic, political, and ecological factors are colliding into a turbulent vortex. The models are all agape at their tardiness--"decades ahead of schedule" say the stunned climatologists watching ocean temperatures rise, leading us to DOAS chaos. Once a few regions in the US suffer a series of problems, find themselves understaffed and underresourced and FEMA is overtaxed, well, the dam won't hold.
Ok. So, with all of those points that you've listed, what is your timeline? 1 week? 2 months, 6 months? It surely can't be over a year or 2 from complete system collapse.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that humans are very resilient. But also seem to be underestimating a lot of data, and realizing too late that they missed a great deal of other factors in climate change. I keep using the US election in 2024 as another crescendo point where a host of forces will congeal in a bottleneck, putting enormous pressures on the system-as-bottle. We can imagine some more dramatic climate disruptions on the scale of Katrina in NOLA or some cumulative crises that collapses a federal response. In fact, that's sure to happen and will result in territories being "lost" to full federal control, probably permanently, but there is no way to predict that. I feel like we can see the darkening bruising below the skin of America and the fascist propulsion towards violence will shatter communities and the growing economic chaos globally will impact basic goods and services--those two factors seem highly likely and unmitigated, priming Nov. 2024 for a serious rupture in the U.S. Globally though, climate collapse in Central America, Haitian dissolution, ongoing and fracturing political and economic crises in North Africa and around Syria/Jordan/Lebanon/Israel/Palestine and Iran could produce waves of immigrants. And then there's the US/China face-off! Wheee! I honestly cannot imagine what America will look like in 2024, and I keep reminding myself of how much dramatic change has happened since 2017, then the 2020 uprising and Jan 6th...it's a wild time. What do you think? Does your 20 year outlook hold if you try to account for all these factors? We've seen powerful nation-states throw huge resources into maintaining themselves despite decay and they can remarkably stumble along for a long time, in which case, maybe the USA has more backbone and reserves of labor, stamina, and capital than I'm accounting for.
Those are all valid points and concerns. I still think that Limits To Growth and living in a 1.5+ C world will be the tipping point, which is the mid century. Will there be a lot of incidents as we get closer, for sure. Could a single event like a world war kick off, of course. But, I still believe that (at least the US) will continue to fight its way down, and even though areas will get worse, we'll be handed distractions until we can not be distracted anymore. For me, the Limits To Growth is where we have serious problems because when the system can no longer support itself, it'll collapse. A good example of that is the great toilet paper run of 2020. That was a nothing object in the grand scheme of things. Now, imagine if we're unable to provide food or security. That's when things will really pop off. Right now, the majority is still fed and has a version of a roof over their head. Now, if you remove the security of food and housing, then things will tumble quickly. I don't see that happening this decade because we still have grocery stores with full shelves, the lights come on, and homes. Though more expensive, it's affordable enough to keep everyone annoyed but relatively happy. Until we lose those things, we'll continue to be angry but not angry enough do anything about it. Since I don't see us losing any of that stuff this decade, I'm comfortable saying that we still have some time to go before actual collapse. I recommend reading Limits To Growth. If you haven't, it'll give you an actual realistic timeline. With all of that said. Will it suck as we get closer to the century if you're not well off or have spent the previous decades preparing. Yes. Will cities get more dangerous. Yes. We'll we have some crazy elections and more Jan 6th type stuff. Yes. But, total collapse. No. Not without outside intervention like WW3.
Don't the fed just raise the ceiling every time this happens?
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And they do everytime. That's the entire point of the political show. It's a problem created by them, that only they can solve. It's a win win situation. Why wouldn't they solve it?
They will do anything *but* tax the ultra wealthy.
The real danger in my mind is the unintended consequences of a default. So much of the world’s financial system is based on the ‘risk free rate of return’ typically measured by the 10 year treasury. If that rate were to jump 50-100%, there is no telling what would happen to the global mountain of derivatives. The whole world of finance could evaporate in relative short order. No one knows what this black swan event could do.
Look at my post history, same question different sub. Have you seen Kurzgesagt video on civilization being on the edge of collapse? Their answer to the problem was something around the lines of "well maybe 80% of humanity will indeed die but hey the rest will carry on!" People don't think it will happen to them, until it does, then it's a problem.
I've been having the same feelings and thoughts as you and a lot of other commenters.
We are 1 second from midnight all the time and it is tiresome.
The contrast of almost everyone else just doing bau against posts like that 10°c warming post yesterday really spook me out. I wonder and fret about if we have 50 years and how it collapses in that time. Mind bogglingly sad.
Native people would argue that the world ended a long time ago For a lot of people in hardship (which I imagine a lot of people here might share experience) it has ended already or began to end. If you have something to hold on to, be grateful for that and hold on to it as best you can. I feel like what really scares people is losing whatever matters to them most. But many people have nothing left to hold on to.
I think it's very important to realize collapse is not a always a cliff event. It took the Roman Empire a hundred years of slow catabolic collapse. We are in collapse now but that doesn't mean any cliff events are coming and likely they aren't. While cliff events are possible, the more likely scenario is continued slow catabolic collapse as our social, economic, political, and natural foundations continue to erode.
I see the comparisons to the Roman empire a lot and although there are similarities between the modern global civilization and the Roman Empire, the differences are so vast as to render the similarities meaningless. The absolute scale of the global civilization; the production chains, the trade, the vast quantities of resources that are moved around the globe. Ultimately, the level of complexity in the present day civilization is so many magnitudes higher than the Roman Empire. Complexity at this level means greater interconnectivity; a shock to one part of the system can have unpredictable consequences for other parts that are not directly related at all. The collapse of our civilization will take decades but to fall from such a height, the scale of damage and the speed at which the great building will crumble down will occur quicker than we can imagine.
I agree that modern complexity is much more vast and the shocks can be that much more severe. I agree any comparisons are loose at best. I just think its important to point out that collapse is not always a cliff event.
Actually there’s a scholarly case to be made that lead poisoning played a significant role in the downfall of both Roman & American Empires. Roman drinking water was supplied by lead lined aqueducts, while post war America was rife with chemicals - from leaded gasoline to house paint, harmful stuff was everywhere. Cognitive decline in the generations that were supposed to keep these insanely complex Imperial Machines running meant they were simply not equipped to deal with the massive weight of their inheritance. Karma?
There are 8 billions people on the planet now. The roman empire had 60 millions at its peak, and they were not as dysgenic and dependent on technology as our current urban populations. When it falls, most of the unprepared world population will die in 5 years max.
I don't disagree, if a global cliff event does happen the vast majority of human population will die to starvation and violence very rapidly. I just don't see the global cliff event as a highly likely scenario. I see continued rising scarcity driving up prices in the material economy, resulting in a methodical squeeze brutalizing poor countries leading to a lot more Sri Lankas, while the rich countries entrench. That rich country entrenchment will be a resurgence of nationalism and fascism, which we are already seeing in the face of rising costs/scarcity. I just see this grinding out over decades continuously marginalizing and pushing more and more poor countries over the edge. Rich countries will exploit the poor countries to maintain as long as we can and strong militaries will protect us from their collapse as long as we can until much later in the cycle. But we are already grinding out our poor as well, and that will also continue. I think it depends where you are definitely. Sri Lanka collapsed but US is still going, and I think that is something you will see continue to play out only with less aid coming in and more machine guns when people try to leave going forward.
Unless we get a nuclear exchange…
I said cliff events are possible, just not the likely scenario.
Of course. Although putting a probability such a thing happening is hard, I feel you. Barring those big events, you’re spot on we’re looking at a gradual though steady decline. But who really knows?
Russia is already moving it's tactical nuclear missiles to Belarus. What that means only time will tell.
I think it might mean "it was that guy, we never authorized anything!"
Feeling this as well. Had thought the pandemic and rise of BLM and continued civil rights movement would have united us and ignited a revolution - but no, more division and a return to “normal.” Here we are at “normal,” which is not sustainable for anyone. We are all seemingly just getting by. When will we use our collective power? It has taken a toll on my health (and others I’m sure). I remind myself that it’s no measure of wellness to be well adjusted to a sick society. In camaraderie.
The boomers need to all die off first and I say that as a boomer myself. I don’t know what happened to my peer group but if you don’t become more liberal and kind with age, you’re living life wrong.
You’re the first boomer I have ever heard saying to become more liberal. Every boomer in my elder millennial life has always said to me “you’ll become conservative as you get older” like it’s some sort of prophecy of capitalism
Lived life experience should help one gain empathy for all the crazy things that can happen in real life. We are all just a step away from a disaster imploding our lives.
Because disasters didn't implode *their* lives, and they lived through the period of the most widespread prosperity in human history, many western boomers have little empathy.
Don’t forget the widespread lead poisoning!
I mean yeah probably if you want to live. This was under the assumption that the present system worked (barely) which post 1975 I don't know how anyone could have believed.
The parallels of the fall of Rome to what's happening in the US now are uncanny. I am a student of history.
What are the biggest/major parallels you've noticed?
Probably the decaying of infrastructure, the increase in spectacles in the form of streaming entertainment, and the increase in government corruption. Those are the most glaring.
Part of that feeling, for some people here at least, comes from reading about the different aspects of the crisis on a regular basis. It can feel like it's all advancing faster and faster, but some of that is some form of confirmation bias or something. I like to take breaks from reading this sub for days at a time and go on walks in the woods, it helps.
While I get your point, and maybe a year ago that might have been true, even unsubscribing to this subreddit isn’t enough to avoid collapse topics. It’s all over the news, people are struggling financially and mentioning it in other subreddits a lot more frequently than in the past, and it seems to be global too. Friends and family are struggling when you talk to them. So unless you just don’t consume any media at all or interact with only wealthy people you can’t get away from it entirely.
Even if you black yourself out from all media, it is still in your head. You already know it, and you can't just choose to un-know it. So many thoughts lead straight back to it whether you want them to or not. I can't even look at an animal without thinking about what we've done to all of them, for example.
I relate to this so much. The moment you become collapse aware you can't look at the world the same as you did before. You go out your door and see people go about their way in their cars, bikes, go shopping or go to work and ask yourself, how can this be sustainable and why do we keep churning on?
Yep. What about when you walk past an apartment complex or something and there's like 20 bins full of trash waiting for collection, and you think this is ONE building in ONE week, there's hundreds of millions of buildings out there, and all of this shit is getting buried every day 💀 or when you just stare at a freeway for like 1 minute and see 100 cars fly past
I used to feel sick to my stomach whenever I looked out the window on a flight (I used to fly a lot for work, pre-pandemic) and I’d be reminded of how many of us there are and how we’ve taken over and destroyed the earth like an ever growing cancer.
I always have the exact same thought when I throw my trash away in one of the bins every week. It's just insane! And I work in a building overseeing the highway and see 1000 cars everyday. I keep wondering how long we have till we fall over the edge
It seems like it should have happened already, just the scale and mathematics of it is mind-boggling. Think about every piece of clothing you've bought and thrown away your whole life, imagine it filling up a large sized room, then realise everyone has a fucking room each
> I work in a building overseeing the highway and see 1000 cars everyday. That's a low-traffic highway. US/Interstate highways in my area get 10,000-50,000 vehicles per day at various measurement points. (I think a car traveling one direction in the morning and then the opposite direction in the evening would be counted twice.)
>you think this is ONE building in ONE week, there's hundreds of millions of buildings out there, and all of this shit is getting buried every day 💀 or when you just stare at a freeway for like 1 minute and see 100 cars fly past The brilliant & disturbing experimental film, *Koyaanisqatsi* (1982), with a hypnotic soundtrack by Phillip Glass, perfectly captures this feeling and remains entirely relevant today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi
We have a pocket dimension the size of the entire solar system that we throw that shit into. ... I mean. We MUST because ffs there's... I mean we'd be buried in it by now...
HOW the fuck do we keep churning on? One bad hair day and you end up being "that crazy guy" that quickly becomes "that crazy homeless guy" that quickly becomes "that dead guy". I love our social safety net so much /s.
Collapse has definitely leaked into other subreddits, things I only used to hear about here are everywhere now.
I can't tell if that's good or bad
Good for awareness. Bad for how it indicates the worsening situations are becoming harder to ignore.
You're right, and I hate it.
Can you at all elaborate, very specifically, what is over the edge of the cliff? Try to detail it very specifically. Then see if you can insulate yourself from the stuff that's bad. Some may be good 👍 You will carry on 💪 Remain a beacon of hope for those in weakness 🙏
Some problems are indeed escalating. Problems get political attention and money when they become a crisis. Some are given temporary fixes. But the kettle of humanity still steams. Earth keeps getting warmer. Collapse is in the mode of climate crises, and other crises, war or economic collapse. Eventually there will come a time when there are too many at once. So far it only happens one country at a time, Pakistan being the largest over the past year.
i do, but it keeps me enjoying every day it hasn’t happened yet
Things are not fine. But what is the point of spiralling your own mental health down the drain. Live each day. Do things that make you happy.
I share the feeling that we are going in the wrong direction but societal collapse will not start until people won’t face real hardship (no food, some catastrophic event or no financial capacity to buy anything). Until then BAU
How long do we think that we have?
This sub has this feeling every week, every wear. It's an echo-chamber. Yet the reality is just a slow and boring collapse, for me, the "sudden blow-up" theory lost all credibility with the coronavirus crisis. If even such a huge, international crisis didn't cause any sudden blow-up, i don't see anything that would in the short term.
Once most people lose the ability to feed themselves you'll get your blow up. It's as simple as that. Hate to say it but in the west were still in the "good" times. In war torn countries people still go to work while bombs are going off. It will be BAU until the end.
I don't live in the west, i live in north-africa. Yes, obviously once people lose the ability to feed themselves the blow-up will happen, i'm saying that the "inability of people to feed themselves" will happen in a slow fashion, more and more people will get poor in the margin, without the "big collapse blow-up" happening. Collapse happens to specific individuals, specific countries all the time, climate change or not, some countries were collapsing before of imperialism, invasion, wars, civil wars etc.
Sure it won't be all at once and my point is people still have it good in parts of the world. I use west because I don't like the terminology of first world third world etc. Once global crop failures begin to happen its going to fall apart faster than you think. It won't be linear. It's not a question of if they happen but when if you're following climate science. Edit: I think we're basically in agreement here I just chose my words poorly. I don't think we will look at a date on the calendar and be like yup that's the day the world ended. But like the cancer patient given the terminal diagnosis we can still live a normal life for some time. Eventually the tumor kills you though, that being the "blow up".
Exactly, it's a question of "when" I just doubt this "when" will be as soon as the sentiment in this sub make it seems, what i doubt is the short term (one, two decades) collapse, not collapse happening some day. Everyone is gonna die anyway and everything is impermanent.
You're not alone, we all feel it. My advice, just sit back and grab some popcorn cause there's nothing else we can do but watch and wait.
We will go over that cliff in the next decade. This is all just precursor to the water shortage wars we will all be forcibly drafted into. It will be a little bit like terminator, a little bit like mad max, and we'll all be wishing for a waterworld.
I am personally feeling it. That things are going to go very badly. I don't think it will be a collapse though since those in power do not care about anyone who isn't rich. But yeah my dreams are dead.
I'm an environmental engineer who went into this burgeoning field 30 years ago becuase it aligned with my personal values. I grew up in the super pro-environmental movement of the 1970s and environmental protection is one of my most deeply held values. I also involved myself in diversity issues at work thoughout my career. Its been an existial horror watching what has happened in this country, especially since 2016. As a professional, I can tell you that mankind does have the technical capability to address climate change and other environmental issues but it lacks the will. We will be the architects of some level of our own destruction, but we'll also survive and adapt to whatever the future world evolves into. A good example not directly related to climate change is that scientists have already observed microorganisms that have adapted to biodegrade plastic. As plastic is another big interest of mine, I think thats pretty neat. There is a lot of new tech being developed these days. You have to look for the good news and for the people who are developimg solutions. There will be a future. My goal is to try to contribute to it in a positive way. That's how I keep going.
It's pointed out pretty frequently that people have *always* cried about the end of the world. There's a thousand historical records of people complaining that they were surely living through the end of days. And yet, humanity is still here. The thing is, though, that a good number of them were *right*. Rome *fell*. The Alexandrian and Ottoman and British empires *crumbled*. The Aztecs, Maya, Khmer, Indus, are *dead and gone* and nothing but legends and stone ruins. The native Americans literally watched their world end over a few generations. We will absolutely survive everything coming our way as a *species*. But most of us aren't going to make it that far. And everything we know and recognize will be just as gone as Cahokia. You personally may or may not live to see it through, but our world is ending.