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Edge of Collapse

Becoming collapse aware in the age of the permanent polycrisis.

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Your Life Was Designed in a Boardroom

10 min readMay 19, 2025

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We’re eight billion people jammed into a planetary pressure cooker. That’s not hyperbole — that’s population math and entropy meeting head-on. And in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s not going great.

The thing is, this complexity didn’t sneak up on us. It grew like an overfed beast. Think of a startup: 10 people, maybe a dog, one whiteboard, and some ramen-fueled dreams. Decision-making is crisp, chaos is manageable. But then it grows — departments spawn like mold, policies metastasize, meetings become the corporate weather system. To “control” it, you layer on hierarchies, rules, and KPIs until it’s all bureaucracy and very little actual steering.

Now take that logic and scale it to nations. Then to continents. Then to the planet. That’s where we’re at — trying to manage humanity’s chaos with outdated mental software and leadership models designed when leeches were still considered medicine.

The more people you pack into a town, a city, a world, the more you need sophisticated systems to maintain the illusion that someone is at the wheel. But the truth? We ceded the wheel a long time ago — if we ever had it in the first place. We traded agency for security, complexity for comforting fairy tales.

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Edge of Collapse
Edge of Collapse

Published in Edge of Collapse

Becoming collapse aware in the age of the permanent polycrisis.

Angus Peterson
Angus Peterson

Written by Angus Peterson

Becoming collapse aware in the age of the permanent polycrisis. Follow to get all the new stories: https://anguspeterson.medium.com/subscribe

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