How I Became Collapse Aware
So much of this article resonates deeply with me.
It’s frequently said that societal collapse is not a singular event, but a process: [...] an “uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning.”
But I’ve broadly come to think of collapse as the antidote to the narrative of infinite progress.
One of the most powerful things you can do as a storyteller is articulate a feeling or truth that people sense deep down, but haven’t heard someone say out loud let.
“living through collapse isn’t a factual statement, but an emotional one. It feels like we are approaching the end of a specific social contract.”
As a result, these days I see my life as straddling two states, There and Here.
There is where I earn a living, and it’s where I have a mortgage, and order groceries for pickup. It’s where growth is uniformly seen as good, [...]
Here is where I’ve internally accepted that infinite progress and wealth are not inevitable. It’s where I expect that the material conditions of my child’s life (and likely my own) will be worse than I’ve known up until this point: more violent, less secure, less prosperous.
It is [having a baby] when I became more convinced of the sanity of trying to spend some of my time Here, and not be so heavily invested over There.
For the last decade or so, many people my age have internalized the idea that structural solutions are where the real change happens. Forget puny acts of care or service like offering to babysit your neighbors' kids, donating to charity, or participating in a meal train — the government should really be doing those things for you! Go vote, volunteer at the phone bank, lobby your lawmakers for universal childcare, and sign this petition online. Then get back to work.
So start thinking today about how you can attain some of those things [sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning] elsewhere, from non-monetary or transactional means. Start small. Do you get all your pleasure and leisure from consumption, traveling, and other carbon or resource-intensive activities? Maybe you join a choir and make music with your neighbors, paint your surroundings, or work in a garden instead.
[...] the best defense, the most meaningful work, the best preparation you can do at the level of an individual life is to boost your local resilience. To become a person of place. To connect with the people and land where you live. This is what we’re built to do.
[...] dismissing more than half the country as bigots, racists, and transphobes is too simplistic now. If nothing else, we have to admit that the identity-based politics of the last eight years failed spectacularly at diminishing Trump and his appeal. We need a new tactic.
While I believe my son’s life may be materially worse off than my own, I think about how it could possibly be better too — psychologically, spiritually, and collectively. I think about how many of the social problems we lament — the mental health crisis among young people, especially young men; the cruel isolation of new motherhood; the normalization of depression and anxiety; the growing number of homeless and destitute people in the richest cities in the world — would be ameliorated by the kind of collective consciousness change I describe above.
Indeed if you lean into collapse awareness, you might be surprised how those small steps I listed above start to expand and morph. How you suddenly have more energy to engage in the kinds of things you didn’t before — even the incrementalist politics of There. How you care about different things. How it feels much lighter than you expected.
Because sure, there may be a fair amount of doom Here, but it feels more honest to me. And in that honesty lies some hope that I haven’t felt over There for a very long time.