Revisiting collapse, a year later

What kind of world do you want to live in?

A year ago I hit send on a piece about becoming collapse aware. At around 4,000 words, it is the longest piece I’ve ever written in this newsletter and, I worried at the time, perhaps the most unhinged.

The piece went on to reach an audience much larger than my own, and I know it brought many of you here. A year on, I wanted to revisit it, in part to reflect on the remarkable and terrible things that have happened in the year since, and also to share how my feelings on the matter have evolved.

What follows is less an essay — and certainly not one I spent as much time on as that original piece — and more of an addendum. So if you haven’t already, I recommend you go back and read (or listen) to the original piece, because what follows will lean heavily on the framing and ideas I explored there. There are also loads of links from different thinkers embedded below, and so I encourage you to engage with their work as you think this through, as well.

How I became 'collapse aware'

The first, most obvious point I have to make is a sobering one: I think the idea of collapse is far more prominent in the mainstream consciousness than it was a year ago. And I don’t mean in the corporate sanitized language of management consultants talking about the polycrisis or whatever. I mean the average person more readily accepts that many of the systems that underpin modern life aren’t really fit for purpose anymore. More people plainly see that extractive capitalism is, in fact, going to reach an upper limit. The idea that we might be saved by the electoral politics that have defined our lives seems, even to writers in prestige publications like the The Atlantic or New York Times¹, shakier than ever.

In my original essay, I tried to emphasize that the concept of collapse has a long list of thinkers who have brought to the fore. I tried to braid together some of the inputs that brought the idea of collapse to my attention slowly when I quit my journalism job during the first year of the pandemic, and then seemingly all at once last year.

Chief among those thinkers, of course, is Sarah Wilson. I was stunned (and thrilled for Sarah) when I learned Penguin, a so-called “Big Five” US publisher, had picked up her serialized book on collapse, which she wrote here on Substack. (It comes out in 2026, and I’m hoping Sarah and I will talk about it on here early next year.) It shows not only that Sarah made the topic real and resonant for so many people, including me, but also that it’s mainstream enough for publishers to see a commercial case for. This is no small thing. Sarah’s more recent Ted Talk was also recently featured on the Ted page and has deservedly racked up half a million views.

I’ve also hugely resonated with Douglas Rushkoff’s writing on the “insulation equation” and the other ideas in his newsletter. There’s also Anya Kamenetz’s newsletter The Golden Hour; she’s also writing a book about “caring for others on a rapidly changing planet.” I recommend you give all of the above a follow if you’re watching this topic evolve.

So that’s where I think we are. If I were hitting send on that piece today, I would have felt a lot less nervous about it. I’m not saying that’s a good thing because none of this is great. But it is the moment we find ourselves in. Here’s what I’ve been doing with it all.

Learning to sit with hard feelings

When my son turned two, I remember rattling off to my husband all the milestones we needed to accomplish by his next birthday: ditch the dummy/pacifier, potty train, transition from a crib to a bed. When he turned three this summer, I joked that by four, our only hope can be that he has gained some small measure of empathy and patience. It remains a work in progress.

When you are three, learning that other people’s priorities and material realities might get in the way of what you want in any given moment is nothing short of a moral outrage. If infancy is about making a child feel totally secure, attached, and loved, raising a three year old is about introducing them to the idea — in a gradual, kind, and developmentally-appropriate way — that sometimes, life won’t feel totally secure and attached and lovely. That sometimes, we feel discomfort and unhappiness but crucially, we can tolerate that feeling and get through it together.

But in this project of kindly (and I do emphasize that I am kind about it) helping my son get used to sitting with discomfort, inconvenience, and the hard feelings they cause, I realized something: I actually need a lot of help with this too.

Parenting is full of these sobering realizations. I’ve thought a lot this year about how growing up with the norms of what I called “There” in my original essay — the lack of friction, the convenience, the perpetual growth mindset, the emotional avoidance — have weakened my own ability to sit with discomfort.

It’s why I take it so personally when things don’t go my way (which continues to happen all the time! wtf!) and feel dismayed when I can’t bend the universe to my will. This is essentially the myth of perpetual progress playing out in my own silly little life. I’ve actually enjoyed reflecting on that this year, and giving myself the same pep talk I give my three year old multiple times a day: This time is hard and uncomfortable, but we can get through it.

I can only hope it’s good parenting; I’ll let you know in ten to 15 years. However I’ve started to see it as good preparation for whatever comes next in the times we live in.

What kind of world do you want to live in?

Something that was totally missing from my initial essay was any mention of AI. There are two parallel conversations to have about it, I think. There is the financial reality that, thanks to the interminable logic of There, it looks likely to be a bubble (there are loads of pieces about this at the moment, but this is the one that convinced me). And then there is the way AI is infiltrating all of our lives.

The latter is what I have something to say about, because even if the AI bubble pops and stops propping up the entire US economy, the technology itself will stick around. Which means the norms we are sleepwalking into right now are going to stay with us.

I’ve been stunned in the last year watching so many people — people I’m friends with! people I love! — uncritically adopt the use of AI and LLMs in their daily lives. Not just for boring or banal things, like proofreading, a glorified Google search, or asking it how to fix a pair of trousers if you don’t know how to sew, but for relationship advice, legal advice, therapy, and creative inspiration. People are using it less as a tool, and more as a companion.

One or two decades ago, we could all be forgiven for not foreseeing the ways that venture-backed companies who promised to “make the world more open and connected” would actually go on to hijack our attention, emotions, and feelings for their own means and profit. But these days, we should all know better.

For disclosure: I use an AI transcription service called Otter to transcribe interviews, and I use ChatGPT very cautiously, mostly as a starting point for research when Google isn’t cutting it. Repeatedly, I find it to be something that is worse than just inaccurate. As a former editor of mine Kira Bindrim put it in The Writethrough: “It gets things wrong, and it gets things wrong with confidence.”

But beyond the fact it’s confidently wrong way too often to be reliable, the idea that someone would trust it with their innermost thoughts, feelings, and dilemmas remains inconceivable to me. Is it inertia? Laziness? Have people forgotten the essence of what being human means? Have they not seen the narrative arc of this movie before? I really don’t know the answer here, but it has dominated my thoughts in the last year.

If I were tasked with interviewing a big AI guy, I would ask them one question: What kind of world do you want to live in?

Because we are getting closer to the world they want every day. And yet, no one seems to be asking them to clearly articulate how bleak it is. It’s a world where caregivers are even more buried and disrespected than they are now, where efficiency is all that matters, and you can become a passive consumer (or creator) of any kind of slop you want, with all the friction and meaning of life removed. It’s a world where human relationships become entirely optional, and so we assume most humans are awful as a result.

I don’t want to live in that world, and I don’t think you do, either. Which is why I feel so intent on drawing bold lines around what it means to be human is in these times. When we use AI in this unthinking, passive way, we are allowing these people to set the terms of the world we live in, and only because they have amassed enough capital using the ruthless, extractive logic of There to force that upon us. I can’t tell you how emphatically I reject this, and how I encourage you to do the same, loudly and proudly, in your daily life.

A lot of the work of living Here, or even of building a village (which, hey, have I mentioned I am writing a book about?) is just that. It’s an embodied form of activism in which you live out the norms you want the world to have — rather than passively accepting the ones that have the most capital backing them.

“We are going to have to live here with one another”

The primary frame through which I think about collapse and the transition from There to Here is not through electoral politics. I’m not saying I don’t vote or pay attention, but the zero sum logic of that system seems intent on edging out anyone who is not on board with the requisite radical agenda, and I find it too frustrating to engage deeply with.

I also find the world to be a more complicated place than I once did. Call me problematic, but I’m able to locate much more grace for people with problematic beliefs than I could five or ten years ago. Plus, I no longer think it’s possible to separate our political beliefs from the algorithmic platforms we form and broadcast them on. (kyla scanlon has a great piece on this.)

However, I do believe any political response to our moment has to be consistent with what Ezra Klein (controversially) said in the days after Charlie Kirk’s murder: “We are going to have to live here with one another.”

“There will be no fever that breaks, no permanent victory that routs or quiets those who disagree with us. I have watched many on both sides entertain the illusion that there would be, either through the power of social shame and cultural pressure or the force the state could bring to bear on those it seeks to silence. It won’t work. It can’t work. It would not be better if it did. That would not be a free country.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Sam Knight, writing in the New Yorker, made an apt point when he said “the main fault line currently running through British politics is not to do with left or right but with whether voters feel pro- or anti-system.”

A useful mental exercise I keep coming back to as I read the news is separating the algorithmic avatars of repugnant ideas (Trump, Kirk, Farage, fill in the blank) from the many people who are drawn to them. We have to get more curious about what might make someone anti-system. We have to cultivate compassion for what brought them there. Because ultimately, though you may hate their politics, they are likely being harmed by the same dynamics of There as you are. And like it or not, we are going to have to live here with one another.

In defense of mystery

Some people take issue with the word collapse to frame what we’re living through. It’s too final, too definitive, too certain. I am sympathetic to that take, because the one thing I’m certain of at this point is that nothing is certain.

In fact, I’ve found myself recently doubling down on mystery, which is perhaps a natural thing that humans do in uncertain times. I refuse to believe that as our systems crumble, everything is doomed, and our future is foretold. There is still a tremendous amount of mystery and wonder involved in being alive, and I refuse to cede one bit of it.

Reading what one might call “collapse fiction” has helped with this. I was floored by Rosa Rankin Gee’s novel Dreamland, which takes place in the coastal British town I used to live in. She paints a near-future picture of collapse that felt so hyper-realistic and specific it was chilling. I could imagine every ransacked street, every high water mark, every corrupt yet charismatic politician. But she also told an epic love story, one in which humans do all sorts of brave, mad, heartbreaking, and beautiful things because, well, they are humans. The whole book is a reminder that it doesn’t matter how bad things get, we can still do that stuff.

Douglas Rushkoff has been saying something similar in reminding us not to cede to “intentional collapse.” That is, don’t believe the billionaires who have decided all is lost and they better start building their own, privatized means to escape this planet — literally, as he documents in his book Survival of the Richest. “They’re the ones who have given up on prosperity,” he writes. “They are living the nightmare. They are the pessimistic downers, who lack faith in the regenerative capacity of people, cultures, the planet, and life itself.”

I think he’s right. The kind of world they want to live in is the nightmare. So the job is to resist adopting their mindset. How? To sit with the hard feelings and strengthen our ability to get through them together. To practice, in small quiet ways, what life might be like when we run out of rope on this particular version of it. To double down on being human, especially when it’s inconvenient, time consuming, and full of friction.

It’s how I feel when I save seeds in my allotment garden, or feel moved while writing my book, or invite someone round for dinner, or go out of my way to help someone even when I myself feel stretched. It’s what I see what I notice a man playing a beautiful piece on the piano in the public library for no reason, or hear my son invent an extraordinarily creative phrase for something he doesn’t know the name of yet, or when I take a walk in the woods without listening to anything but the trees turn from autumn to winter.

This is the kind of world I want to live in. And while I’m still here, I’m going to fucking live in it.

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A quick list of things around Substack

• Here is a link to my Live conversation with Anna Brones from earlier in the month. We talked about honoring and respecting our creativity in the dark half of the year. Thanks to the 100+ of you who joined us!

• If you’re looking for an “antidote to the consumer frenzy that has come to define the holiday season",” Anna’s kicking off her 9th annual advent calendar of making, doing, and being. More on that here.

• Maggie interviewed me for her Substack, Coffee With Maggie, where I spouted off a bunch of opinions about all sorts of stuff, which is one of my favorite things to do. I first articulated my feelings about AI in the essay above in that interview.

Thank you for reading. I keep all my writing free for all subscribers, but paying subscribers give me time and space to write on these topics, so please join them if you can. You can also support me by liking, commenting, or re-stacking this post on Substack, or the old-fashioned way: forwarding it to a friend.

1. I heard Ezra Klein blithely rank the chances of American democracy staying “relatively normal” after the Trump presidency as “50-50 or worse.” Sobering stuff.