When Is The Collapse Going to Start?
The definitive answer.
Every single day, someone pops the question.
When is the collapse going to start?
This question comes up all the time on Reddit, in private chats, on social media, in the comments section of articles about doom…
It sits on the tip of tongues. It lurks in the back of minds. Even those friends and relatives who don’t believe in that “doomer nonsense” still crave an answer, even if they don’t want to talk about it.
It’s an interesting question that generates a lot of different answers, depending on who’s talking. Some say 2030. Some say 2050.
And then there’s the related question:
What form will it take?
Maybe the financial collapse will start before the climate collapse, or vice versa. Maybe a heatwave like the one in The Ministry for The Future will kill millions of civilians. Maybe a flood will wash away an entire country, not just a third of a country like Pakistan. One person I know said they plan to start taking people in “when things start to get seriously bad, for real.” When someone asks me when the collapse is going to start, I think what they really mean is this:
When’s it going to affect me?
Because the collapse has already started.
It’s been going on for a few years now, depending on which experts you’re interviewing. Scientists quietly admit we’ve already crashed through the 1.5C safeguard, set at the Paris Accords last decade. Carbon emissions haven’t peaked. Companies like Microsoft and Google are blowing off their pledges, because they want to create robot secretaries and interns.
And sexbots.
Men in their 20s are spending thousands of dollars a month on AI girlfriends. Isn’t that a pretty good sign collapse has started?
We’re living through the hottest summers in human history. Wildfire smoke blankets North America every other summer. Cactuses are falling over dead from the heat. Urbanites are passing out on sidewalks and winding up in the ER with contact burns. They’re not safe walking down the street in their hometowns. One state responded by canceling mandatory water breaks.
Wouldn’t you say collapse has started?
There’s a certain kind of person I’ve met in my conversations about collapse. When you tell them collapse has already started, they correct you. They don’t mean the collapse in general. They mean “the real” collapse, in other words, the one that matters to them. They want to know about that one.
Nobody knows.
My family lived through an F3 tornado. We lived through a hurricane. We drove through a wildfire. We’ve put quite a few notches on our collapse bedpost. When I pick up my phone, I can scroll my own doom.
And yet, it doesn’t feel like collapse.
Not yet.
Millions of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans feel the same way. They still wake up and go to work. They still go out for dinner and drinks. They relax and watch Squid Game. If you start to get worked up and overshare, your condescending friend Ben can take you outside to touch grass.
For many of us, it’s easy to pretend collapse isn’t happening.
So, it’s more like:
When does collapse become impossible to ignore?
When does collapse get so bad they can’t look away anymore? When does it get so bad they can’t distract themselves with scandals, with gossip, with retail therapy? When does it get so bad, it feels bad all the time?
That depends.
Some of us already can’t look away.
It doesn’t matter if we stop doomscrolling. It doesn’t matter if we turn our phones off. It doesn’t matter if we go outside and touch grass. The awareness breathes through us all the time, even when we ignore it long enough to enjoy a meal or spend an evening with our families, or just screwing around.
We’re living in a fascist regime, and we know it. We’re living through the end of public health, and we know it. According to Gallup polls, 41 percent of Americans still believe we’re living in a pandemic (they’re right), and even more (53 percent) admit their lives haven’t returned to normal.
We have a convicted felon for president, who may or may not have staged his own assassination attempt for votes.
We have an alcoholic Fox News host in charge of our military, and he doesn’t know how to use a phone. We have an anti-vaxxer in charge of Health and Human Services, and he publicly reminisces over the days when “everybody got measles.” We have a TV doctor in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, and he once had to testify before Congress about hawking dangerous supplements.
The political collapse has started, that’s for sure.
And our celebrities, oof. From actors to fantasy authors, so many of them turned out to be liars, grifters, bigots, and predators. Those Marvel movies don’t feel so great when you realize our version of Tony Stark not only backed a fascist felon for president, but topped it off with a Nazi salute. Pop stars who used to weep over school shootings fly around in space now, taking selfies. As the world burns, they cheerfully announce they bought their masters.
The cultural collapse has started.
That’s for sure.
There’s at least one genocide going on right now, and most of the world still manages to look away. They say at least 400,000 innocent civilians are missing. Don’t you think they’re dead? They were murdered.
For anyone who believes collapse hasn’t started yet, or “the real collapse” hasyet to come, I’ve got a question for them.
What would be bad enough?
What has to happen for the collapse to officially begin? What event would qualify? Temperatures are soaring above the limits of human survivability across the world. Every year is now the hottest year in recorded history. How hot does it have to get before millions of us start dying? How many people have to crank up their AC before their city’s grid gives out?
When is collapse going to hit each of us, personally?
It depends.
It depends on where you live. It depends on how much money you make. It depends on how old you are. It depends on whether you have health insurance. It depends on whether you have a chronic illness. It depends on your gender. It depends on your race. It depends on your nationality. It depends on your religion.
I know one thing:
No celebrity or politician is ever going to declare the beginning of collapse. No network is going to announce it on the news. There’s never going to be a history book that says collapse started on a given date.
The Weather Channel probably isn’t going to say, “We have no idea what’s going on now because fascists gutted the programs we rely on to predict storms.” It’s just not going to be there one day, and strangely enough, by the time that happens, a lot of people aren’t going to care that much.
In climate science, there’s this thing called shifting baseline syndrome. Things just gradually get worse, and everyone gets used to it. Collapse happens, but it’s so slow that hardly anyone really notices.
Maybe for someone, collapse starts when their hot water heater breaks, and they can’t afford to fix it. Maybe it’s when the cheapest coffee they can find costs twenty bucks a bag, and they start to ration it. Maybe it’s when their parents can’t afford a retirement home, so they have to move in with their kids.
Even as climate disasters and water wars kill millions, plenty of yoga moms and golf dads will be sitting in the drive thru at Chick-Fil-A, without much concern for anyone else, bitching about egg prices, blaming immigrants and trans teachers for their problems, hiding in their air conditioned bubbles, and defending Elon Musk online to whoever hasn’t been locked up yet.
When you think about those Gallup polls, all those Americans who still feel as if life hasn’t gotten back to normal, maybe that’s not just a virus. Maybe that’s collapse. If you think life just feels different, if you’re just not looking forward to the future like you were, that’s collapse.
Honestly, the typical American could wake up covered in dust every morning and still think they’re going to be a billionaire someday.
So, when is the collapse going to start?
Beats me.
I‘ve always liked this definition of collapse: “a long economic malaise punctuated by a set of destabilizing conflicts . . . with economic upheaval mixing into warfare.” The destabilizing conflicts which are obviously here so far have come primarily from the interconnected realities of economic hardship and cultural and political alienation. The environmental collapse has been around as long but its effects have been harder to perceive, at least in the “developed” world.
To your point, this state of society has been around for a while even if it was not generally noticed or explicitly comprehended. The mass shootings of our era go back to 1999. The earlier of the two most recent cataclysmic financial breakdowns occurred in 2008. Donald Trump’s first election, after the rearguard Bernie Sanders campaign, was another watershed of social degeneration, in 2016.
I’ve believed since at least 2000 that people who issued rhetorical scare warnings about totalitarianism, a precursor to and an embodiment of collapse, in the U.S. had ignored the totalitarianism that had already been established, especially after 9/11, when the Constitution became the feckless husk everyone sees it is today. 9/11 itself, the first of the cataclysmic collapses on our 21st century event horizon, has never been adequately explained - another collapse, of media and democracy, along with the unrestrained continuous warfare unleashed afterwards that the world’s population has been subjected to mainly by the West since 2001.
I wrote in May 2015, because I saw and felt it then (I wasn’t alone), that any “general decency and amiability of yore has been supplanted by frothing discord, silent rage, and explosive volatility.”
In May 2018, Chris Hedges published “America: The Farewell Tour in which he “examined the social indicators of a nation in serious trouble.“ Several years later, he said, “life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2021, for the second year in a row. There have been over 300 mass shootings this year. Close to a million people have died from drug overdoses since 1999. There are an average of 132 suicides every day. Nearly 42 percent of the country is classified as obese, with one in 11 adults considered severely obese.
These diseases of despair are rooted in the disconnect between a society’s expectations of a better future and the reality of a system that does not provide a meaningful place for its citizens. Loss of a sustainable income and social stagnation causes more than financial distress.”
All this is to say: I agree. Evidence of collapse has been there for anyone with eyes to see, but perhaps (I don’t mean this to sound elitist) there is only a minority of Cassandras or sensitive types who have the gift first for seeing, then for facing, “unpleasant facts”, as Orwell put it, unimpeded by denial - until it is too late.
Great piece. Reminds of Gil Scott-Heron’s “the revolution will not be televised.” Even after hearing it for decades, only eventually did I take it to mean that the revolution takes place in the mind before one will see it reflected in the world around them. IMO collapse hinges on a similar admission, with the same vulnerability of surrender. Given its gradual pace, despite isolated moments of grandeur, it’s only after we admit to ourselves that it’s happening that we begin to notice the macro trend.