Forget Collapse: Things May Be Like This Until You Die
Climate change, wealth inequality, and the end of things.
There has been a lot of talk of collapse recently. A study out of Harvard asserts that civilization might collapse if we do not make substantial changes. The Doomsday Clock has been moved to 100 seconds till midnight. It would surprise few to wake up one day and receive an alert on our phones telling us that a missile was launching, another plague had started, or that food reserves could no longer support our current population.
From ecological degradation to political dysfunction, it really does seem like everything is falling apart, and this has affected many of our emotional states. The amount of people who are depressed or suicidal is staggering. On a personal level, I recently published an article where I talked about my existential dread in dealing with collapse.
Yet while talk of collapse is sexy, I propose another possibility —unless something drastic is done very soon, things will go on like this indefinitely, and that scenario should scare us all the most.
People have a romanticized version of collapse. It usually is depicted as a totalizing thing where a bad state of affairs will lead to a domino effect that causes everything to fall apart everywhere all at once. We have…
