The Missing Stage of Grief
Recently, Alan Urban published a piece (The Apocalypse Is Not What I Expected) about how he tried to start a family Facebook group around collapse and got… zero response.
And Jessica Wildfire of OKDoomer just posted that she lost 50 subscribers yesterday.
I think I know why.
Collapse acceptance is — like every other form of grief — a process, and it often follows similar steps.
- Denial: Climate change is a hoax. The climate has always changed. Everything is fine!
- Anger: Exxon did this! It’s the fault of the mega-rich! Jeff Bezos is a climate criminal!!
- Bargaining: If we just adopt Ecars and solar power it will all be fine! I promise to recycle!
- Depression: We are SOOOO fucked and there is nothing I can do about it. We’re already dead.
- Acceptance: It will be what it is. I can’t change that, and that’s OK. Life is still full of beauty. (Or something like that. I’m still working on it, TBH.)
I think there’s a missing stage of grief.
Somewhere after denial, because after the past few years, it’s getting harder and harder to deny that something is happening. Something bad.
Everyplace is on fire. Everyplace is flooded.
But the more evidence that climate change is happening right now piles up, the less people seem to listen.
The news isn’t even covering it.
Hurricane Otis, which nearly wiped Acapulco off the map? It was days before there was a peep in the major news outlets.
The ongoing wildfire disaster in Australia right now? Bet you didn’t even know that was happening.
Temperature records being crushed everywhere on the planet? Not newsworthy.
I think the news is reacting like Alan’s family, and like OKDoomer’s subscribers.
I think they got just close enough to seeing the truth — close enough to the edge of the abyss — to realize that they couldn’t face it. And so they’ve backed completely away.
I think much of society is doing that, putting it out of their minds, as if sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “LALALALALALA” will make it go away.
But I think most people know that the warnings are true. Have been true. All along.
And now it’s too late. They know that, at least at some level.
It’s too late to deny it’s happening, but too soon to process it. So they freeze.
If we stay very still, it will pass us by, and we’ll be safe.
We can’t fight it. We can’t fly from it.
So we freeze.
For lack of a better word, I call this stage Paralysis.
I truly believe that that is a stage of grief, where understanding of the reality of collapse has dawned, but no response is available because it is too terrifying to think about.
I keep thinking of the line from Don’t Look Up: “We really had it all, didn’t we?”
I think most people cannot imagine or face losing that — everything we have. The cars, the science, the entertainment, the electric appliances. So they don’t.
It’s too terrifying and alien to contemplate. So they don’t.
They freeze in place, terrified of the depth of the abyss.
And then they back away in silence, unable to deny, but unable to look over the edge either.
