Everything’s Collapsing and You’re Arguing Online

How crisis fatigue and distraction are keeping us blind to planetary breakdown.

(Image created by author via DALL-E.)

If you’re reading this, odds are you already know something’s off. Maybe it’s the price of eggs. Or the fact that summer now starts in April. Or that your kids keep asking if the world will still be around when they’re grown. You’re not imagining it. The air smells like collapse because that’s exactly where we are — mid-free fall, no parachute.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about one thing going wrong. It’s not just climate change. It’s not just pollution, or the mass extinction of insects, or microplastics showing up in breast milk. It’s all of it. Simultaneously. It’s a polycrisis — the unbearable convergence of everything, everywhere, breaking all at once.

So how is anyone supposed to know what actually matters anymore? You scroll through the news and see a four-year-old immigrant representing herself in court. Your heart breaks. Then you see a report about coral bleaching, and PFAS raining from the sky, and the FDA abandoning milk safety inspections, and some billionaire throwing a fit on social media while buying another island fortress. It’s a tornado of tragedy and spectacle. And you’re stuck trying to sort the extinction-level events from the PR disasters.