How I became 'collapse aware'

And started to imagine what comes next

Photo by Cédric Dhaenens on Unsplash

[This is a longer essay than usual. If you’d like to listen to an audio version, click the player above the photo.]

I was not surprised when Trump won last week. Appalled, yes. Depressed, absolutely. But not surprised. It seemed entirely in keeping with our direction of travel. 

In reading the various takes and responses online, it occurred to me that some Harris voters were still holding onto the idea of partisan politics as a beacon of hope. They still believed that if the right person wins, we might return to a time when things were good and normal, when things were stable again. The arc could still bend towards justice, if you squint hard enough. 

I’m nervous to admit this here, but long before I cast my vote for Harris, I had largely given up on that version of reality. This essay is an exploration of how I got there. And perhaps more interestingly, why that notion is not as depressing as it might first sound. 

What I’m writing about here is the hazy idea of collapse. It’s come into my intellectual consciousness (and algorithm) slowly over the last few years, and more intensely recently. But before that was a feeling that came much earlier, and it’s one that may sound very familiar to you.

It’s a nagging sense that has hung over modern life since 2020, or 2016, or 2008, or 2001 — pick your start date — that things are not working anymore. And that waiting for them to get better after the next Most Important Election of Our Lives, or another war to end, or a new economic recovery cycle doesn’t seem to be having the desired effects. 

Millennials have experienced all of our adulthood under this specter. Most people I know feel it to some extent, we even joke about it, but it’s admittedly hard to confront what comes next. Making space for the idea that the progress we were raised on is not guaranteed requires a lot of time and space. It requires grieving, uncertainty, and sitting with difficult feelings. These are things, in western culture at least, we studiously avoid.

Which is why the idea of collapse — which you may have seen referred to by the more palatable terms metacrisis or perma-crisis — has interested me. To be collapse aware is to live with the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end. And then to ask the next obvious question head on: If the incrementalist approach of our existing political and economic structures is not up to the task of improving things — climate, society, inequality, injustice — what comes next?

It’s frequently said that societal collapse is not a singular event, but a process. Jem Bendell’s seminal (and controversial) paper on the topic, Deep Adaptation, defines it as an “uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning.” 

Bendell is far from the only thinker in this space, but it’s worth noting that some climate scientists did not agree with the thesis of his paper — they found it too doom heavy. And I remain skeptical of any one forecast, prognosis, or imminent prediction that claims to know exactly how things will unfold. Or maybe my brain just can’t accept how bad those predictions sound.

But I’ve broadly come to think of collapse as the antidote to the narrative of infinite progress. The one we’re all steeped in, which tells us that with the right technology, innovation, and political party in power, we can save the way we’re living now. We won’t have to face what’s coming for us in a climate sense, and we don’t have to change anything fundamental about the way we live, what we strive for, and what we value. We can have it all.

Long before I knew the outcome of the election, the likelihood of staying on that trajectory seemed very slim to me.

Normal modes

Collapse isn’t about any one system, country, or political leader — it’s about a shift in all our “normal modes” of living, being, and surviving. But I think you can argue that the American project is the fullest and most visible embodiment of the values that have driven us to this moment. 

Trump has always laid those values out in their most grotesque form, for all to see: growth is good, extractive greed is your birthright, feelings only weaken you, individual striving is more important than collective care. 

When I originally conceived of this essay months ago, I wasn’t planning on writing about Trump or the election at all. But as I sifted through his decisive victory, I realized it had collapse written all over it. Why did so many people choose this man again? Remember, he gained support in 90% of counties. In blue states, in New York City(!), as well as from Black and Hispanic voters, first-time voters, and many other groups. Check out this stunning map at the top of this New York Times analysis.

I think the growing support of Trump is down to something very simple: Many normal people intuitively sense that the current system is irrevocably broken. The extractive models of capitalism that have brought prosperity to just enough people over the last century to keep things stable are no longer delivering adequate returns for most. You could argue this is evident in voters’ rejection of incumbent governments all over the world this year, not just in the US.

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. And Trump offered just that with his four word slogan: “Trump will fix it.” And he’ll do it with all our patriarchal values still intact. No reckoning necessary, just brute force.

Of course, Trump won’t fix any of it. No political party can fix the fatal flaw of this setup, because it’s a problem with the foundational assumption that our society and economy is built on. As the biologist and writer

Spencer R. Scott

put it in his excellent newsletter, “at the bottom of nearly every modern problem is this cultural monomyth of neoliberalism, and the inequality of power it creates and the environmental and social degradation it causes.”

The environment — the literal earth we stand on — has a diametrically opposed set of values to our political system. One is exponential, and the other is cyclical. We could have changed our values in the face of all the evidence of the last quarter century, but we didn’t. In fact, we doubled down. Though it may take time, the house always wins. 

The writer Jack Self summed it up much better than I can: “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. Modernity is a project founded on patriarchal domination, on linear time, infinite extraction and unstoppable accumulation. In its five centuries, it has evolved into such an unnatural paradigm that it now only survives through extreme and perpetual violence; perpetrated indifferently against both humans and non-humans alike.”

There versus Here 

The idea that there won’t be progress and growth forever is weird if your entire life has been predicated on it. Even though I have become collapse aware, I am not living in a collapse mindset all the time, nor do I cling to it as some kind of dogma or prophecy. There’s a certain amount of compartmentalization that has to happen to just get through the week.

Simultaneously, it takes a hefty amount of grief and emotional preparedness to even wade into this terrain in the first place — to allow yourself to think about it part-time.

Sarah Wilson

is writing and talking extensively about this in her book serialization project on her Substack, as well as in her podcast series on collapse. I credit her with expanding my awareness and thinking on this topic, in addition to the other writers linked to in this piece. 

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, and we’re told that social problems have to be ameliorated while still upholding shareholder value. It’s the place where convenience is king, friction is bad, and our imperative as citizens, parents, and employees is to work very hard so we can prepare our offspring to go to good schools and do exactly the same thing. It’s a place where most of us are very burned out, in a manner that mirrors the exhaustion of the earth. 

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. Where life is less concerned with status, and more with sustenance. It’s a place where the entire economy is not based on getting consumers exactly what they want, where cheap flights and next-day delivery are not available. Where extreme weather events and adverse conditions are less newsworthy, and more commonplace. Where we adjust our lives accordingly, and rely on one another by necessity, rather than forging ahead pretending that everything is fine.

It’s not a coincidence that the title of this newsletter — What Do We Do Now That We’re Here? — hints at this Here versus There dichotomy. Though I started this newsletter in 2016, I renamed it in 2021, not long after I’d quit my journalism job covering the travel industry. 

Seeing the world change so quickly in such a short amount of time in 2020 jolted something awake in me. Collapse, though I may not have called it that at the time, felt breathtakingly close. It no longer made sense to me to pursue the same version of success I had up to that point. Even though I was covering the travel industry critically and aggressively, the entire premise of friction-free, carbon-intensive travel started to feel like a relic. No matter where I worked or who published my work, I wasn’t sure I would ever be allowed to fully articulate what I believed the problem was. Traditional journalism remains, for the most part, firmly rooted in There.

Four years on, I haven’t given up on There entirely — no one can. And as we stare down a second Trump era, the work of incrementalism done by people in government, politics, activism, law, science, and healthcare is incredibly important. It’s one of the only defenses we have left against an administration that is undoubtedly going to cause a lot of suffering for a lot of people. 

I’m not telling you none of that matters, to drop out and stop paying attention, to forget about voting and doomer prep instead. Nor am I saying that a Harris win would have been no different from Trump. The landscape has gotten even harder, there’s no doubt. But ultimately, I think the long road ahead would’ve been the same, no matter who won last week.

What I am suggesting is that, as we face down the next four years — and everything after that — we keep a foot in both camps. As Scott wrote, “If you can wade through everything else as a symptom of this singular cause, it illuminates a path forward: getting very serious about doing everything in our power to keep value you generate away from their bottomless pit.”

Coming out of deep winter

In and amidst all the Covid, collapse, and change, I had a baby in 2022. And that, if you can believe it, is when things really started to make sense for me. It’s 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. 

Because as I’ve written over the last year, having a baby was the first time that my capacity for caregiving entered my life. It had been hidden for 33 years over There, where taking care of others is not something that is valued at all. 

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.

But what happens when systemic change doesn’t seem to come? When we’re burned out by another traumatic election cycle, and all we want to do is retreat into our homes and judge our Trump-supporting neighbors? Baby boomers have come to realize that their adult children’s lives likely won’t be as economically prosperous as their own. But many millennials already know that, and are raising little kids in the midst of that knowledge — what then?

In her widely-shared piece entitled “Why I Changed My Mind About Volunteering,” Rachel M. Cohen notes that the result of this over-emphasis on structural change is that people feel disempowered, like nothing matters. This goes some way to explain why so many people in their twenties and thirties are “numbing out.” As one of Cohen’s sources put it, “There’s a lot of apocalyptic thinking and not a lot of action there. It’s like a deep tiredness, a feeling like people are in deep winter.”

Becoming collapse aware took me out of that deep winter, assigning new meaning and value to the things in my life that I could control and take care of. Look, we simply don't know if collapse will happen in such a way that we notice “oh, this is it,” or if it will just be a gradual process of enshittification that seems to already be well underway. Indeed, it’s possible it might not happen at all. But I’ve come to realize that none of that matters. 

I think back to an interview I did in 2021 with the Aboriginal scholar and author Tyson Yunkaporta (his book, Sand Talk, is an inviting primer on this topic). He told me that if you zoom out, way beyond the timescales we’re accustomed to planning our lives on, you might start to think of yourself as a participant in a culture of transition. You can engage with what he called the “thousand year clean-up,” where the “new normal is about a millennium from now.” 

That, more than anything else, feels energizing to me right now. As I’ve written before: Most of the things we need to do to heal the planet and our society are the same things that would heal ourselves. Figuring out how I’m going to live Here makes my life better right now, today. At the same time, it prepares me for a future that feels very uncertain and scary. 

Becoming a person of place

The good news is that the work of doing this is not some kind of grim disaster preparedness. It can actually be very joyful. Indeed in writing about connection, care and how to build a village over the last year, I realized I’ve been writing about collapse already.

So what does that look like? It’s worth pointing out that in Bendell’s definition I shared above, he does not say collapse is the end to sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning — just that it’s an end to our “normal modes” of acquiring all those things. 

So start thinking today about how you can attain some of those things 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. 

Do you work so hard in your status-bestowing job that you don’t have any time or energy to offer anyone else in your life? Try to reallocate some of your energy away from how you earn your income. Are you so perpetually busy and overstimulated that the thought of sitting in silence with no entertainment or productive pursuit fills you with dread? Find practices to counter that — it’s a skill that’ll come in handy. 

Does much of your diet come fully prepared to you, right to your door? Could you start taking small steps (very tiny ones) to shift some of that to more locally resilient or less convenient sources. If disaster struck tomorrow, would you have your neighbors’ phone numbers, or better yet, could you knock on their doors and call them by name? 

Can you host a Christmas or holiday open house for your neighbors this year? Or take initiative and start a group chat with the parents from your childcare, so you can offer to help each other out and trade clothes and gear. Can you stop spending your precious energy on the deluded anxiety of making sure your kids get into the best university possible? Instead, help them figure out how to be bored, creative, and resourceful.

If this all seems small and insignificant in the face of what I’m writing about here, I get it. We have been trained to think this stuff doesn’t add up to much. But consider that over the last five to ten years, almost every smart and well-credentialed climate thinker I read says the same thing: 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. 

I acknowledge that it’s very hard to find compassion for people who you feel voted in direct opposition of your personhood or beliefs. But dismissing more than half the country as bigots, racists, and transphobes is too simplistic now. (Again: see this map). 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.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that we’re not in unprecedented territory here. A lot of people are already living under collapse. Throughout history to today, people outside the countries we call “developed” have seen their homes and land destroyed, and have experienced no shortage of violence under this paradigm. Those people still manage to have rich lives as they fight for survival and meaning. They still have children, celebrate festivals, write stories, and fall in love. We have a lot to learn from them. 

What I’ve found since 2020 is that there is some relief in acknowledging the Here. 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. 

(With thanks to Indrani, Philippa, and Dan for feedback and edits.)

---

Thanks for making it to the end of this long piece. I keep all my writing free and available for all subscribers to read, but paying subscribers give me the time and space (aka childcare) to write longer, more ambitious pieces like this one. If you enjoyed this piece, consider upgrading to being a paid supporter today. It all adds up. If you already pay for a subscription — thank you. ❤️