Forget the Future — The Fall of Society Has Already Begun

Slow, relentless collapse is shaping your life more than you realize.

(Image credit: Salon)

Collapse isn’t loud. It’s not a Hollywood explosion, not a sudden black hole swallowing the United States overnight. There’s no singular moment when the world collectively gasps and realizes everything has come undone. Instead, collapse is a slow, grinding process — insidious, creeping, and patient.

A lot of people are waiting for a definitive moment of “global chaos” — a clear, singular event that heralds the beginning of the end. But here’s the thing: it’s already happening. People expecting the end of civilization to arrive like a meteor impact are missing the truth. Global collapse is more like a terminal illness — it weakens, depletes, and eventually kills, but rarely all at once.

Take climate change. It’s not a binary switch between “everything is fine” and “everything is doomed.” It’s a progression of escalating disasters, each worse than the last, but none quite enough to make the world scream in unison. Right now, Alaska’s rivers are turning orange as toxic minerals leach from thawing permafrost. Mortgage lending is slowly but inexorably collapsing in disaster-prone regions. And let’s not forget the growing appetite for war over land, water, and resources, with figures…