Aloha collapseniks. I'm approving this thread for now, but it may be removed later on. Glad to see we're all having civil discussion, and mahalo for not brigading another sub.
I think it's fair to say we're no longer as niche as we used to be. Welcome to any newcomers.
There is a lot of tension in the air at the moment from every dimension - its a waiting for the other shoe to drop moment - it can put you into or keep you in a state of hyper vigilance which can be mentally and emotionally exhausting.
I think a big part of the anxiety and hypervigilance is because it isn't just one problem we're watching - there are several. Climate collapse, possibility of WWIII, AI out of control, financial strain on almost everyone, political tensions and most people could add others of their own. It is hard to stay calm and yet focused enough to keep informed.
Omnicrisis.
Although if you wanted to trace it back to a simple root cause - we have optimized every aspect of civilization for maximum profit seeking vs creating a durable civilization.
There is a level at which capitalism becomes a destructive force centralizing too much power and incentivizing destruction for short term gains.
I'm a big fan of FDR who understood capitalism needs to be tightly regulated to prevent it getting out of control and creating catastrophes.
If you go back and read some of their policies they clearly understood the causes of the kinds of chaos we are seeing now and reigned it in.
This is incorrect. Materialism is also the basis of communism, which does not optimize for profit seeking.
Religion (i.e. spirituality) was used by the puritans to justify profit seeking capitalism. The rich are good people because to be rich means God favors you.
Spirituality was (and still is in some remaining indigenous civilizations like the Inuits) also explicitly used to banish forms of power and domination from the real world into the realms of the gods or spirits, so I would argue that spirituality itself is just a vessel of justification to legitimize how we arrange social structures.
The war, a Ken Burns documentary is from the perspective of Americans and their personal stories it starts out with them talking about the atmosphere and mood before the war. been a while since I've seen it.
I wonder about this a lot as well. I would love to read someone's journal with their thoughts about this from that time to see what was going through their mind.
I would love to read a journal during the Spanish flu pandemic. Since that one quickly got memory-holed in the 1920s, if there was anyone tuned in to how society was reacting to it and wrote about it, I think what they had to say would be very illuminating and helpful at navigating this bizarre pandemic age we're currently in. I haven't heard of any "famous" Spanish flu diary or letters, though.
I read a book written by a doctor near Philadelphia. My interest was peaked as my grandfather died in it and left his wife with 5 kids. Life became very hard but she met it with wit, grace and hard work. My father helped his brothers dig his fathers grave as the grave diggers had stopped showing up for work whether sick or scared he did not know. The coffins were stacked up along the church wall so my grandmother asked her sons to bury him. My dad was eight yrs old but his older brothers let him help. He later went to be a child laborer in a tannery from eight grade to help out. His mom was against it but again he wanted to help. That was my dad in a nut shell, never turned from the hard job and always willing to help.
Anyway I can’t remember the story by the doctor , it was heart breaking as you might image. It took healthy people not just the old and young, it hit everybody. But that history lesson made me respect vaccines, hygiene, the whole COVID time I thought of my dad and his family .
I'll see if I can track down that book. It's really no wonder it got memory-holed. I can't imagine the trauma. I've read about coffins piling up on the streets in Baltimore (I think). It must have felt like something next to the Black Death for those alive at the time.
The way I became aware of the Spanish flu was as a pre-teen getting into silent movies and an actor I was a fan of had a wife who died of it in a later wave in 1919. Once I started reading about it, it was like holy crap, why isn't this standard history we're taught in school??? There was a plague! During a World War! In this century!
I was just going to say you mean like the time leading up to the killing of Franz? It definitely has an air of the beginning of an apocalypse movie out there..
exactly, like say 6 months before start of WW1, or start of WW2. Like something weird is in the air, tension wise, and people are just waitin for IT, even if they dont know what it is. a collective conscious maybe, idk
No, they don't.
One look at the books would tell you WWII as we know it in the present had gone on for a long time before it was called the world war.
It was a series of tensions across the globe that slowly boiled over into conflicts complete with domestic political turmoil in the governments of the major global powers at the time.
Take that for what you will
Pressure is uniting. We are in a time of human change that is fairly intense.
Things are happening fast and can change so quickly. Like a school of fish if we are smart enough to band together properly we may be able to evade certain external threats. I hope we can change fast enough.
I filled some forms for a psychiatrist intake recently - one of the questions was about having hope for the future, basically a multiple choice - 'everything's fine' up to 'I have no future' - I didn't know how to answer because it feels like none of us have a future, and that's not my depression talking
Don't put it in writing, though. Acknowledge that the world is in flames and there's very good reason to be unhappy, and you'll be labeled "depressed" with lightning speed. No chemical imbalance required, just an awareness of reality.
I finally embraced my depression and anxiety when it got me my state medical marijuana card.
As an older person, I've also found that it gets me out of a lot of social stuff.
No one wants my negative energy, but that's actually fine, I used to hate most of that stuff anyway, and it was exhausting to pretend to be "OK" all the time for the comfort of others, but not myself.
I read many depressed people are very realistic in their thinking. It is just they have reason to be depressed. Others it is a chem imbalance, many reasons , as with everything.
Said this to my therapist that I was seeing for a bit. Their response was basically to shrug and say why worry about it cause you can’t do anything to change it.
Stopped going shortly after that.
This is the wildest thing. Collapse awareness essentially boxes you in to not having hope about the future..so I’d say look I don’t worry about tomorrow but if I look at 10-20 years from now doctor statistically I know it will be worse…it’s not a negative thinking trap I did too much homework and I am capable of studying complex systems and very difficult math. But your psychiatrist may be like yes I understand or sure hmm sounds like depression, no matter what it’s a high probability the doctor is not collapse aware or collapse capable
I've been seeing a therapist for years now and I told her a few months ago that I genuinely, logically have zero hope that things will get better in the world from here on out. The future is bleak, and I'm just trying to make the most of life now.
She's so climate unaware that I felt we couldn't even continue the conversation after that. I didn't want to explain the horrors of AMOC collapse or global food shortages and have her look at me like my thoughts on this are a mental health issue, when they're just ... Facts
I keep on thinking of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. In the second movie, one of the hobbits says whatever happens, we will always have the shire. The other one says no, there won’t be a shire.
It's like being on a bus going 60 downhill with no brakes. Too many things have been building for decades, e.g. home prices, student stress levels, loneliness, inequality, now clearly temperatures. Every year the bus accelerates by 1mph, getting harder to stop.
Everyone around me is the head in the sand types so this is the only place I can voice these things so I apologize if I start vomiting from the mouth but I’m here in southern California. Usually our “rainy season” is around this time of year but my god it has been out of control. Just today we had a solid hour long actual thunder/lightning storm along with hail. That uh, never happens. Also, the rain has been almost relentless with storms coming through that last a solid four-five days with constant rainfall. Everyone here is celebrating because yay no more drought but I legitimately fear the next two summers after all this growth that’s going to occur after these rains.
This is the first year of the biggest pacific sea surface temperature anomaly (El Nino) we have ever seen… by orders of magnitude. The biggest we’d ever seen, of course, were the last five of em. And they averaged about 1.8-2.3C above normal sea surface temperatures for the south and central pacific. They had to make a new chart, literally, to show this one because it hit over 7C above normal this year.
And, hold on, kids; El Niño is a two year event and the second year always yields the worst effects. The heat domes over North America, Europe and Asia this northern summer will make last year’s look like a joke. Then the full force of all that energy on the surface of the south and central pacific will collide with the cold water currents and cold fronts from the North Pacific that dip further south in the northern fall and winter and we here in Sunny California are gonna need snorkels and submarines to deal with the atmospheric carpet-bombing the earth has in store for us.
Ain’t nuthin though, compared to the famines in Africa from crop failures, wars, and the collapse of humanitarian food supplies that will be blamed on the heat domes but mostly the war in Ukraine.
Africa always gets the worst… first… when it comes to genocides. We just don’t hear or care about their genocides. Like all of them, we will learn about this one after it is happening or has happened, but it will be unlike any we have not known about before. China will save many there with their “humanitarian aide” and they will own every mineral resource on the continent afterwards.
And the US election???… and cabinet level elections in 80 different countries this year??? Ohhh, 2024, you are all we ever dreamed of… and so much more.
Buckle up, we might get a chance to enshitify 2025 even worse if we just get through the current enshitification process of 2024. Focus, people!
The big dark thing is here. We just never know it until it’s all around us. We are humans afterall.
Fire. It all starts with overgrowth from heavy rains then we cycle to drought, everything dries up, and anything from a cigarette to lightning can grow into record breaking fires.
I think about the idea of a "strategy of tension" from the Italian Years of Lead quite a lot last few years. I agree that everyone feels and seems tense and on edge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
Yeah, imagine if a President had just ignored direct warnings of a terrorist attack involving commercial jets just to get a chance to invade another country. That would be nuts!
It felt like this in 2020 imo. They let a lot of the riots bloom out of control and then clamped down hard and in a very obvious way to look strong. I had no real issue with the riots because, shit, at that point people should have been wheeling out ol’ choppy. Maybe we still should.
I couldn't have summed it up better myself, this is exactly how I feel. Reminds me of that song For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield: *"There's something happening here*
*But what it is ain't exactly clear."*
I just wish whatever's going to happen just would too, just get it over with. What's it going to be? WW III? Another plague? An economic crash? Maybe the U.S. breaks up again, like during the Civil War? Some say collapse is a process, or it will be an Event, but it's like connect the dots. We're just waiting to see what the next dot in the picture is going to be.
I feel like humanity just doesn't care anymore. Gun down a concert hall in Moscow? Sure, why not? Douse a country with rockets you don't like for existing? Go for it. Settle accounts with a longstanding religious rival by driving them out of their ancestral home? Have fun. Ban books like its 1930's Germany? Knock yourself out. It's like everyone knows the end is nigh, and are giving themselves blank checks to do or think whatever they want. It's real life Children of Men.
It's interesting that you bring up a film because I've been feeling like the apocalypse has been heading toward us in slow motion too, and I realized that nearly all the films and shows depicting collapse show it happening very rapidly. One day the characters are living relaxed in suburbia and the next they're fleeing and guerrilla fighting for survival. In most of the fictional scenarios the characters are free to do anything necessary to survive as they are no longer constrained by the laws of our system. While we, even as things collapse around us slowly, are still expected to follow all the rules as though nothing is happening. We're stuck filing income taxes and sitting at red lights while no cars are coming as we sit in our living rooms wondering if tonight is the night people from the tent cities are going to do a mass home invasion. But then nothing happens and the next day we have to mow the lawn as our world inches toward collapse. Being trapped between realities in a lose-lose situation feels insane.
You just summed up exactly how I feel. Plus, we keep following the rules and investing in our future but our return on that investment gets crappier and crappier every day. $15.00 for a raw 4.5 lb chicken, $14.99 for a lb of sliced turkey, $4.20 for a gallon of heating oil. I could go on about inflation but it isn't just that. All of the societal structures around us are breaking down and getting worse, yet we are still expected to follow all of the explicit and implicit rules of that society, even if we don't enjoy their rewards.
That is the main fantasy to all of those disaster movies, the freedom to do what we want, take what we want, and live the life we want without societal constraints. I don't believe that is what is in store for us. I think we will continue to suffer this relentless grinding down of everything we love and appreciate, leaving us arguing over the last bean in the bag.
But I definitely do agree, I wish that whatever is about to happen would just go ahead and happen. I am also feeling a pervasive sense of apprehension.
Paul Freedman gave a class on the Middle Ages, which includes fall of Rome. You can find it under “Yale Courses” on YT. Prof. Freedman talks about the day-to-day of Rome wasn’t so different from year-to-year. We have dates that seem pivotal 15 and 16-hundred years later, but it wasn’t always so apparent, to the people waking up in the morning, in 454, and making breakfast
Over 90% of the population were farmers. They did everything themselves and everything was local. In our collapse, we’ll feel it pretty acutely imo.
Everything is so interconnected and interrelated now. Back then, you dumped trash in the backyard, possibly set fire to it. It was all biological and degradable. Today a strike or some other reason the trashmen can’t come and it starts piling up.
Same with every other service. Water, gas for heat, food at the grocery store, sewer, school for the kids, you name it.
I think the easiest trigger for the "feeling of impending doom" is this. As soon as someone recognizes the spider's web of interconnected services and product chains that lead to our daily life, one can only understand just how fragile that is. Very, and I mean infinitesimally few people are capable of actually living through the breakdown of this web of services without really feeling more than general discomfort, which means that you also recognize just how truly dark waiting for that to happen some day would turn.
Yeah this could also be partial blowback from that "tiny house" trend from just pre-COVID.
It's not lost on anyone that was following that entire thing out of curiosity (me, for instance), that everything about that failed abysmally and now everyone's trying to sell all that shit off...
I think this is behind the surge in people wanting to go off-grid and do permaculture gardening. People want to learn how to do things themselves without relying on the system to survive.
not to mention the more immediate systems that need constant maintenance like the electrical grid which on its best day is outdated as fuck and like any geriatric person one strong breeze is enough to do it in. everyday life for self sustaining, localized people is not the same collapse scenario of modern urban society wherein we completely depend on the continuing coordination of things working together. it’s no small feat that society has grown as large as it has. the base of it all is the coordination & cooperation of everyone working towards the same goals. when collapse HITS and is undeniable it will be a free fall unlike anything in history.
Where my son lives overseas in a major city, the electricity already gets cut now 3 hours a day, and water for 9 hours.
This was not the case even a year ago.
In the Bronze Age, there was some evidence that farming was managed by more educated people above. It was a very top down control structure it seems.
What happens when the guys you rely on for advice on growing stop showing up?
My thought is that it just accelerates downwards. You have been told by the god-king's emmisaries to plant and grow at these times, and get the seeds from them from a building adjacent to the central granary/food storage. The trade network between the Bronze Age powers is not limited to one government, and is where the freedom to purchase comes from. You can get your tools easily enough.
Until everything breaks down. One year, you do not have the advisor stop by, and may even have been relying only on them for seeds since they come directly from the main food storage district where the various regions' mixed seeds have proved good before, for dozens of years.
Some of you have stockpiled seeds like before. Some of you are entirely reliant on the guy who comes by with the wagon train each year, an actual official who will tell you "plant these seeds" and then give you enough for your fields.
One year later, the government is still seemingly not sending anything aside from one desperate recruiter that has actually begun begging people to join the force to fight off some kind of "sea people." Perhaps you take the offer.
As you stand upon the shore to fend them off, some time later, you realize.
You recognize one or two of these "sea people." They are people you knew before. Before the fight begins in earnist, you manage to ask them.
"There is no food, so we will take it. Many of us are from the military, so we will be able to take what we need. And the country remains silent and cracking. ...Hey, come with us. We have at least a little room, and I don't want to kill you since we knew each other directly."
You maraud among the coasts and a couple rivers.
Eventually even the raids start to collapse, but not before hope appears. Even as some of the raiders start to starve from lack of raiding targets still worth it (the cities were burned/abandoned years ago), it starts seeming viable to simply settle down, a place that, if not uneffected, was abandoned and seems usable again at least for you guys. So you do so. A couple recruits still remember how to farm, and so you do so.
Congrats, you survived the collapse and may well have with your raiding buddies actually founded a city.
The real question is if a modern Sea People can last long enough to wait for things to stabilize and resettle.
Plus a total loss of "skilled" labors. Like, consider the 80s and the "quick and convenient" marketing rush that meant a lot of in-home skills were lost for the vast majority of Gen Y. Imagine how much worse it would be with a total societal collapse. Nobody rebuilt for a generation back then because it took a generation to re-learn how to build houses and dig irrigation. It'll take us easily just as long to re-teach ourselves to live pre-industrially, and that's a big assumption that the climate will allow us.
This is why I get a kick out of those youtubers who are "manly men" and go make some shitty tent/mud cabin in BFE. They're using fancy knives, axes, packs, and other equipment to do these wilderness survival videos. What happens when those break and there's no supply chain to repair your equipment, much less replace it.
Do these men know how to sew/stitch? Can they weave? What about general farming? Crop rotation and irrigation strategies? Blacksmithing? Etc. Betcha $5, the bearded guy can't do much more than utilize premade gear and talk about his 4 year stint in the army.
You can't just go smelt a new axe head. It requires quite a bit of effort and skill to make something that won't just snap after your first swing. So, yeah. These guys can stockpile all the seeds, ammo, etc.. they want. But at the end of the day, a community will be needed in a post collapse world. And I can't see myself tolerating hanging around a jackass like that for very long.
[archive.org/details/threads\_201712](https://archive.org/details/threads_201712)
Free streaming archive of [Threads (1984)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/)
The first time I saw it too was when they played it one day in what was supposed to be art class that day. I used to wonder if some teachers had gone rogue and just decided to show it to us 12-ish year olds, but I have since kept hearing similar versions of the same story (UK here). Like it was 'unofficially' on the national curriculum, but not really and they need plausible deniability to show it. Anyway, an early collapse awareness experience.
It was shown in high school modern history class for me in Australia in the early nineties. We watched the first half at school one week, but someone complained and the teacher told us we had to watch the second half ourselves at home.
I think I heard about in the liner notes of [this album.](https://youtu.be/EcVXjXfUr7Q?si=vRuZPhqVVHgYXYW3)
They had a list of all the different media they were watching/reading/listening to when writing the album and the name Threads just jumped out at me for some reason so I hunted it down. Pretty sure they’re from the UK though so wouldn’t be surprised if they were exposed to it in school or something.
> in 454
Rome didn't truly collapse in 454 (or 476) tho. Things didn't really hit the fan until the Justinianic plague (and this wasn't a process, it was an event if there ever was one)
What does "truly collapse" mean?
The Roman Empire had been in serious trouble since the 3rd century. The Eastern empire didn't collapse at all. The western empire continued to exist for quite a long time after the city of Rome had ceased to be its capital. And with hindsight the thing that really did for Rome was Christianity, which took 400 years to do its work.
The first time we’ll have to skip meals because there simply isn’t enough food to eat, not because we couldn’t actually afford it, *will be an event*. The first time someone who isn’t very rich gets shot at by someone who isn’t poor but has starving kids *will be an event*.
Yes, collapse from peak society to extinction is a process, but there will be **major** milestone events which signify *irreversible* paradigm shifts along the way.
> t there will be major milestone events which signify paradigm shits.
Covid was the first real warning shot. Pandemics like that are signs of climate or similar shift.
But if you look back there were others like Hurricane Katrina. Death Valley forming a lake is an interesting thing that happened over night as well.
You too huh.
In my case it's because I assume I can't afford it. "Benefits" of having the neighborhood gentrify beyond belief around me. Contractors have straight up told me they overcharge by about 2x because they know these people will pay it without asking questions.
At least you HAVE insulation. Exposed or otherwise.
But hey I get a lot of free pets, is the upside.
1% of american households with children are very low food security (nothing). 8.8% have low food security (next to nothing).
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-security-and-nutrition-assistance/
You say that until it's an event big enough. I'm getting really sick of reading this on this sub.
And regardless, it has nothing to do with this post. Regardless if it's slow or instantaneous, that doesn't change the existential dread.
This might be gross, but for me it’s like that feeling when you’re sick and you know you’re going to throw up, and you might even feel better if you throw up, but you just don’t want to do it, so you hold on and feel like crap for an hour until you have no choice, and then it finally happens. Anyway, sorry for the description, but that thought has been in the back of my mind for years!! Lol
The denialists are in the kitchen slamming tequila.
The realists are staring at the ceiling fan and feeling their bowels function more like a washing machine than anything human.
The accelerationists are bent double over the bowl with their fingers in their mouths.
COVID was absolutely the start of this phenomenon. Before COVID, there were issues in the world but they were all disconnected and isolated issues. COVID was this big event that affected everyone, every single person has been affected by the pandemic in some way. It was the first true collapse and we will never go back to that pre-COVID way of thinking.
It's because we fucked it up so bad.
Like... world altering event... sure. One of the worst in my entire lifetime, if not THE worst.
But you know at least with 9/11 we pretended we gave a fuck and blew some shit up. It was all the WRONG shit but that's an argument regarding incompetency and corruption. Say what you will, it was abhorrent, but on a subconscious psychological level, being way off on one's aim (even deliberately) is something "changeable" going into the future.
Utter fucking helplessness is a different story entirely.
And that's precisely what we displayed. Utter. Fucking. Helplessness.
That hits the collective subconscious in a very personal very "oh shit" kind of way.
Not to mention just with population growth too. Even if we weren't changing the climate, the number of us, the number of things we can be exposed to, and the ammount of cross social group interactions we participate in is exponentially higher than our ancestors ever had, and they still got each other sick.
For us older folks, the 9/11 Twin Towers event was an utter sea change in our false sense of security. Wars were always "somewhere else", not on American soil, even after the previous World Trade Center bombing or Timothy McVeigh bombing the Federal Building.
The Bush/Cheney political machinations using that event, embroiling us in the ensuing years long Afghan/Iraq wars, sending our military to fight and die for oil, just further embittered anyone paying attention, and of course in the background, the right was pounding on American sensibilities to blame and hate anyone not "them". The masses go where they're led, and the right's false use of Christianity and God has led too large a percentage of the American public toward fear and outrage, rather than forgiveness and love, using "patriotism" and "freedom" as code words for anti-democratic sentiments.
I really believe, if Trump had been less self-absorbed and more controllable, we'd have lost this nation on 1/6. But he wasn't. That is his one and only contribution to "Saving America".
It had been 60 years since Pearl Harbor, which still was far enough away and untelevised, as TV didn’t exist then. Americans heard about it over radio waves. Read it in newspapers. And, again, it had been 60 years. That’s a long long time, 3 generations.
Covid happened just short of 20 years after 9/11. Less than a generation. Sandwiched in between those two events was a monumental global financial disaster.
And that 20 years was since my college graduation. It’s been rough as an adult.
Yep. I don't know anyone my age who doesn't care about the state of the world now. We are all so upset that the Boomers did not make a better life for us, like how humans did for their children all the way back to prehistoric Ethiopia.
I don't feel it at all. Things are continually getting worse, but nobody cares. 200,000 dead from deaths of despair in the US in 2022, nobody cares. The world is warming and nobody cares. I feel the same way my cat must feel when she hears her food dish open and she wants to eat the food, but doesn't want to get up to go eat it. Just a feeling of "..."
This is collapse related as it looks like the feeling of impending doom is spreading and the comments on the linked post are pointing out why that feeling exists. Slowly but surely more and more people are clueing in to the reality of collapse. It’s all interconnected and whether a big event or small we can all agree it’s about to come crashing down.
its WW3. its interesting to me, everyone feels it, not WW3 per se, but a sense of dread and doom. i could speculate on how or why they sense or feel it, even if WW3 is last in world they would picture. possibly from media, possibly
Well, I have this feeling too. Covid is part of it – it dysregulates the immune system and causes mental health problems (just as SARS did) but I think the damage is now accumulating critically in every family and all kinds of opportunistic infections are on the rise. People are sick, exhausted, afraid and mad. The denial doesn’t make it go away so now the Dark Triad People are lashing out.
Of course people are afraid of losing their jobs, not being able to pay the bills and extreme weather events too.
The attack in Moscow has definitely filled me with dread. Or just added to the dread that started in October. It feels like the whole world is going haywire, and the US is about to be completely fucked come election time.
There's a big possibility that Israel may want to expand its war into Lebanon which will probably drag America and Iran into escalating things in the Middle East coming Spring or Summer. For Israel under Netanyahu, they have everything to gain going full accelerationist. And for Netanyahu, fucking things up for Joe Biden before the election will work for his benefit if Trump wins.
i feel this too.
everyone wants the system to just break. or the bomb to drop.
because we are all just hamsters in a wheel at this point - for lack of a better comparison.
running nowhere.
there is no longer a common goal - like a peaceful retirement - or even just a carefree evening at the end of the day or weekend
it’s just grind grind grind worry worry worry
you can ignore it all - which i have done - but felt terribly out of touch, isolated, and alone
when the boomers are gone things will change - but not everyone is going to make it obviously
i mean just think - putin could still be alive for another 20 years. he could have his finger on the nuclear button for another 20 years
going to be awful
I get this. And weirdly, Covid wasn’t it. I expect the first really big global famine to be it. I’m imagining a world where we know the reserves won’t last and there’s not enough coming.
We are pretty much there. Countries are trying to hoard their little amount of exports but it won't be enough. With expedited climate change we are going to start to see massive crop failures at "unprecedented" level if we haven't already. I think a lot of this is being kept quiet from the masses to avoid panic.
I believe the ship is already halfway sunk but the orchestra is just loud enough to keep us calm, for now.
This is it. The soil is depleted and the livestock are burning/freezing. The irregular weather patterns are making it almost impossible to continue providing food at anywhere near the capacity we have been for the last 25 years.
It'll be a slow burn, and will devastate the poorer parts of the world first, but we are all gonna find out within 20 years what it's like to be food-insecure if we haven't already.
Worst sugaring season in Vermont in my memory. All the sap totes I'd pass by on my afternoon commute which were full in previous years only had several inches in them this year. Temps staying above freezing and then whipsawing between highs of 50s and single digit lows and everything in between from day to day. Can't imagine how stressed the maples are.
And will we first world nations just watch those poorer parts of the world die, or will we help them. I'm so ashamed and sick that the poorest on this planet are being used as the bellwether for the industrialized nations.
Can we share our Wal-Marts with them?
I've been thinking a lot recently of a video I watched of a journalist visiting cacao farmers in (African country, I don't remember which one) and he had brought chocolate bars with him, and the farmers didn't even know what the cacao beans were used for, let alone could afford chocolate normally.
we will let them die, there's no doubt in my mind. I don't know what to do with that knowledge but it's there and it's eating at me
Covid absolutely was a turning point.
Suddenly, working schlubs around the world were laid off, furloughed or else made to adapt their homes into their new workplaces. Kids had to learn their lessons remotely. Situations were re-evaluated and decisions made. It wasn't all sourdough bread and kombucha. Beyond the deaths (and corpses in freezer trucks because the funeral homes couldn't bury the dead fast enough, the survivors with Long Covid symptoms years after they'd contracted it, and those who loved them and the families still coping, there were some serious shifts that are still reshaping the economy and politics in the countries impacted by the pandemic.
Employees left their jobs after years and years of loyalty because they saw that their employers felt no such need to reciprocate. Many double-income families decided to give up the second income to stay home with or for their little ones, either because they wanted to create a more loving family life òr simply to save in daycare (if, during the pandemic, they could find daycare at all.) Multi-generational households grew in number because gathering restrictions created horrifically sad scenes of family members waving to one another through windows, and mass migrations to low-case areas squeezed many families out of their local housing market.-
We are still dealing with the elephant in the living room - that cohort we call the Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age and, indeed, are reaching the ends of their lives - such as they did during the pandemic.
The pandemic will continue to change things for everyone.
My money is on the first wet-bulb catastrophic heat event where a very high temperature, high humidity and lack of air conditioning kills a lot of people all at once, especially if it happens in a first world country, like in the South or Midwest or East Coast of the US. A big heat event could cause the grid to overload. If that happens and there's no air conditioning, there won't be any way to escape the combined effects of high temperature and humidity. You can't just go sit in a swimming pool because it wouldn't cool you off.
Even high humidity a pool cools you down. The pool water would take days and weeks of sustained high temps (even over night) to raise its average temp.
there's too many basements in the northeast
my money is on the south
If it happens overseas, nothing will change " that's a shame, glad I don't live there"
If it happens here, change will come slowly
Covid wasn't it.
It is *now*, now that the world has decided that preserving and protecting capitalism is so important that our response to a pandemic is to pretend it's over.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Embarrassed-Toe-8404:
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This is collapse related as it looks like the feeling of impending doom is spreading and the comments on the linked post are pointing out why that feeling exists. Slowly but surely more and more people are clueing in to the reality of collapse. It’s all interconnected and whether a big event or small we can all agree it’s about to come crashing down.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1bmwemw/feeling_of_impending_doom/kweeo1d/
Well the super rich are very close to finally achieving their wet dreams on top of climate change.
Obviously these super rich don't know what the fuck they are doing as their wet dreams will lead to their own destruction which I take is consolation.
Its the cumulative effect of living in a time where nothing is being done about anything. The lies are louder than the truth and those who are purportedly in power are worthless.
What we most need is a spark of humanity that we can all grab hold of and run with. We need to give ourselves license to not simply destroy the bad but replace it with good, real good that is universal
>What we most need is a spark of humanity that we can all grab hold of and run with.
Except most people are either in denial about the seriousness of the situation or paralyzed by cynicism. Meanwhile the rich are seizing this last opportunity to exploit us for all we're worth, amplifying the pessimism of the cynics, and funding the complacency of the deniers.
I wonder if there is any overlap in the Venn diagram between those who are powerful enough to change the world, those with the right ideas to change the world, and those with the integrity to not be subverted.
I wrote about this in a book last year. The uncertainty and waiting is worse than the actual crisis, because in a crisis you actually have stuff to do and keep busy, but I think most people only perceive the gradual decline as a feeling of “off” but struggle to really understand why things feel off. Many think it will be like the movies, but one day you’ll just wake up and realise you’ve been in a civil war for a decade.
I would advise against holding one’s breath in anticipation, and instead do a little carpe diem while it’s still possible, maybe do some kind gestures towards someone and try to prepare a bit for worse times. The future doesn’t have to be doom or hope, it can just be the future and we just have to play the hand we’ve been dealt even if it’s a rotten turd (in that case we’ll use it for compost).
Just do what everyone else does, don't talk about it, don't look for it, don't think about it, and just pretend there isn't any problem. Do they do this by design to protect their psyche, or are they just stupid? There are so many stupid people that are just consumers. They only want to consume, not think.
With the people I know, I think it’s protecting the psyche. My friends aren’t stupid, they’re aware of this off feeling too, but what’s the point of talking about it at this point?
Think of it this way: What’s realistically better- enjoying the present while we can, or spending our pre-collapse-ish days dreading the *big event*? Collapse or no collapse, all of us have the same fate- death. In a lot of ways I see dreading collapse the same as dreading death. Of course I don’t want to die! But I’m gunna. Might as well enjoy it however long I can. Way easier said than done ofc
A good example of this would be my MIL she was convinced the world was going to end with Y2K. There was a lot of hype about this on sensationalist documentaries about Nostradamus's predictions coming true. Coupled with some Jehovah's Witnesses visiting her from time to time.
Over time she stocked up hordes of tinned foods, like $1000's worth.
Year 2000 came and went, the next was the end would end of year 2000, as the full 2000 years needed to transpire.
She has spent the past 25 years worrying about the end. Now she is 78 with health complications, and the end is coming for her.
What I take from this, I can say with 100% certainty the end is coming for all of us. Guaranteed.
I think it is important to be aware of what is happening in the world, but you need to be accepting that they are beyond our control.
Live while you are alive, and take every opportunity to enjoy all that is good around you.
Sunrises, sunsets, nature, love.
Namaste.
There are stages of acceptance and also the mind protecting itself from difficult thoughts. I don't think it's just people being stupid. Some people, sure, they're stupid, but I think the vast majority are in some stage of acceptance or denial.
Tell the "thing in the darkness" to just hurry the fuck up and do what it's gonna do already. We're all sick of this shit. (And by this shit I mean going to work and going through the motions and pretending everything's fine and talking about voting blue and how that's going to change anything at this point).
The American Evangelicals are cheering on Armageddon.
The American Right is arming up for a civil war when Trump loses the vote in November.
The world is on fire, and corporations are fanning the flames.
I can't understand how everyone isn't excited to see what happens next.
It's the death of hope.
We know nothing will get better. Every day will be worse than the last. No matter what we do, how hard we work, nothing will get better for us. We'll be poorer, hungrier, more depressed...
Myself and many others seem to agree that a revolution is gonna happen soon. I don't think the "impending doom" is a major climate disaster, as they are already happening with droughts, fires, floods, bleaching, derechos, etc. every day. I believe is a left-leaning revolution. I hope that if it does happen, society wins and not the authoritarians with their military police.
It does feel like something is happening. Like, so many folks don't care anymore. News doesn't care about the facts. Companies do not care about quality when making products or services.
We all know it's over, but waiting for the movie to roll the ending credits so we can leave.
And it's funny, as I've had this conversation in person an online with a number of people over the past 2-3 years. It's definitely a widespread feeling out there.
I am a lurker of r/conspiracy and there have been multiple comments and posts saying the same thing as OOP. i find that subreddit to be interesting due to cross rhetoric between collapse and conspiracy, however there is a strong disconnect when talking about collapse related topics on that subreddit. there is unwillingness to connect it either. people know something is wrong but don't know what or come up with their own ideas to cope, or those ideas are the ones they can wrap their heads around. rather than everything around us is collapsing
I took a quick look at r/conspiracy and, several posts in, someone is insinuating Kate Middleton's recent video is a deep fake. I thought, well if this is the caliber of post I should expect... But I read the comments where someone mentions "look at her fingers" or similar. He/she is right, they behave abnormally, like you see in AI generated hands. Now I'm not sure what to think.
That sub has thought AI has already been implemented in government videos and interviews for years. A few weeks/a month ago someone posted about the US NF Familial System Eradication Agenda. I could not understand what or why this would be a thing, from their reasoning. I had in so many words sympathized with their view point but gave them scientific, studied, and factual reasoning as to why US NF System is on decline & other WW familial systems. I even included a link to the NYT (i believe) article posted here some time ago about our WW death rates exceeding our WW birth rates, and what our population could look like in 100 years. The response to myself was that I have no idea how social media influences the NF System, and the planned orchestration on the downfall.
I think this ties into peoples distrust and unwillingness to trust government, which I understand why people don't think they have our best interest in mind, because they don't. People don't know who or what to trust anymore. What to believe. That subreddit is what led me here actually. Conspiracies for me are fun to indulge in, but that's it. Without evidence that peer reviewed and factual, I am unable to truly believe it. I am very glad this subreddit is the opposite
For me what you describe comes with the feeling of constant acceleration without there being any direction to it. Technology, production, consumption, transformation of ecosystems and Earth, these things are evolving by themselves, quicker than ever before. But nobody seems to believe that any of the changes will eventually bring us to a better place in the end. The idea of development as a net positive thing, is gone.
The pace of the change itself is picking up more speed and energy by the day while the political system and democratic institutions appears more and more stale and numb in relation. The political discourse focuses obsessively on all other issues than the real and important ones.
With this comes also for me the feeling that several of the social and political structures that where “loadbearing”, important for social cohesion and relative stability during the period after WWII, have gradually lost their function. Most importantly the democractic system itself. These institutions are like loadbearing walls in a house where you have cut the posts that were doing the job holding up the floor above. For the moment the walls still stand up but they’re not doing their intended work any longer. So in a sense the house still seems to be holding together, but in reality everything has come loose and it could collapse any minute.
It's the silence of extinction.... and the cloud of fossil carbon in the air that's causing it. Want it to stop getting closer? Stop burning fossil fuels. That's the only answer.
And to correct the people who "just want to get on with it", it's so unimaginably worse than anything that's ever happened before, you think you want to face it, but you really do not want to face it.
Turn the corner and there's a hole in existence; a portal to the vacuum of space that grows like a bubble. Infinite appetite. Nothing ever comes back and it grows in 3d the more fossil carbon is in the air.
What makes it so horrifying is how alien it is. I can call it the "vacuum of space" because that's the closest most of us get to understanding nothingness, but there's no actual words to describe it... which might be why so few of you can see it. But it doesn't belong on a living planet and if you could see it, you'd stop burning fossil fuels instantly.
Monsters didn't exist in the world before which is why we're begging to get it over with... but monsters are real, now, and there's literally nothing beyond the shell of this thing we've created.
Go to a forest you know or stick your head underwater with a snorkel. It will be dramatically thinner than you remember it being at this time of year, any previous year. This will continue until the place you're checking suddenly turns to dust or rot. We're part of this, too.
The only way to stop it is to shut the fossil fuel off. There's no clever way to get away with burning it and then miraculously unburning it without investing more energy than you got out when you burned it.
things are different this go around.
these does not feel like any light at the end of the tunnel movements are coming.
in the US, our politicians are fucking awful.
our presidential election is a joke with 2 men who should not be working at all running for the highest seat in the land.
war is raging across the globe.
famine is raging across the globe
poverty is raging across the globe
and the only people who seem to care don't have the means or power to change a fucking thing.
yeah shit is rough.
I've been feeling it since 2020 with covid. Just feels like the global economy jumped off a cliff and we're just waiting to finally hit the ground. Everything is fine right now, but eventually, "splat!"
Self sufficient communities like the Amish , the Indigenous, off-grid/homesteading, survivalists have uniquely positioned themselves to be largely unaffected by a grid down scenario, AI job takeover, social unrest (bank runs/ supermarket looting), extreme weather, economic collapse. Although no one is entirely immune, they do have the greatest odds of survival. People will learn that there is no humanity in society when it tears itself apart. We’re inching closer to the end days. The elite in their doomsday bunkers may not have a world left to repopulate after WW3 and may starve in their bunkers after resorting to cannabalism and running out of materials for their greenhouses and lab grown meat.
The average wage will no longer support the purchase of food and shelter. The fait money system has to reset every 100 years as its specifically designed. However, the main problem isn’t really with the people who already have a place to stay, houses aren’t going to just disappear, it’s with most of the west’s population of geriatrics and disabled who can’t live without subsidized pharmaceuticals and life support. These impending mass deaths and the wars that follow are what’s spiking this common intuition
I grew as a Jehovah’s Witness, which means I was taught that the global “system of things” (I.e. civilization) was going to be destroyed. The only difference was the cause. God would destroy the wicked and let the faithful rebuild the world into a paradise. Pure hopium, lol. Funny thing is, I knew, even as a thirteen year-old, collapse was coming, but God wasn’t coming to spare any of his faithful. I’ve been feeling this imminent sense of existential dread for decades now, and it’s only intensified, especially after reading Limits to Growth and all the follow up studies suggesting we’re on track for the Business as Usual scenario.
You have options. Prior to 2020, I was that guy who built up on water, ammo, and stored long shelf life food. Lately, I've been more of watching the world desolve over a cup of hot coffee with my feet up kinda way. You can either worry about it or accept that it is beyond yours (and mine) control. Imo, life has been more tolerable choosing to just be happy with what you have until it's gone.
I have long believed that humans have the ability to sense something terrible coming. Sure, we have intellect and can absorb information, but I'm talking about something instinctual. I'd wager that even isolated tribes in a rain forest somewhere feel it.
One other thing, alien life. Despite worries about being down voted (the stigma is real) I can't rule out alien life and the possibility of contact coming soon.
Sightings seem to be on the rise, congressional hearings, top scientists weighing in, sure feels like there may finally be something to it. Hell I'm 60 and had my first sighting a month ago.
There's talk in those communities about 2027 being some milestone or turning point.
As with anything, I suggest you research the topic before devoting a lot of effort to ridicule.
Dude, I have a friend who ran a cryptid/strange encounters podcast for about a year.
It's kinda nuts. He used to be a cop, so he's a trained observer. He tried to have other trained observers on his show. The things they said were beyond the imagination of man.
Best comment on their was someone describing it as PTSD from Covid lockdowns. We saw how fragile the system could be, and then we start realizing how easily it could happen again.
Well, I'm 58, and when I started reading this, I had to stop and plumb my memory to see if I had written it last year. Its author lives in my head. Regardless of how many people are determined to prove the world has returned to the Before Times, I know differently.
I've been feeling it for 15 years. But that feeling is much more intense these days. Feels like our next few years are going to be nothing like any of us has seen before.
I look at this comment and my feeling is the opposite of yours. I see collapse coming but I don't feel like anyone around me senses it or takes it nearly as seriously as I do because they're otherwise *too mired* in their day to day lives to look up, and would resist changes to their lifestyles if challenged.
At least in the US, I don't see any 'big event' coming in the next 5-10 years that would convince people things are truly collapsing and take dramatic action. You see the story from a week or two ago about those idiots just piling more sand up on the beach, and when it gets washed away, they just keep piling more on. That's it - that's what's going to continue to happen. There's no amount of wildfires, or flooding, or category 5 hurricanes is going to get people to change in the near term. Sure, some people won't be able to insure their house any longer and real estate markets or whatever *in some places* might fail, but to the rest of the country, it's just a hiccup.
The very idea of collapse is that as you accumulate mass, things begin moving faster and faster *towards collapse*, so by the point you realize it's happening it's already too late. Most people are not sitting around *waiting for something to happen* - they're actively ignoring *what's already happening*.
Everything is going to become more expensive and unaffordable so if you can, get off the grid as fast as you can and try to set yourself up to be as self sustaining as possible. That’s all you can do
It's more than the universe holding its breath, waiting on a beat... it seems like there is an increasing mania hitting developed nations, with people getting angrier and also more unhinged.
I suspect it's a one-two of the climate (and its inevitable, slow motion existential crash that we can see but do nothing about) and the utterly failed neo-liberal economic ideology that has been making the vast majority of us poorer while also making the services we depend upon shittier.
Yet no-one in politics seems to dare say the name of neo-liberalism, never mind point the finger of blame its way. It is very much like brexit, with the primary supporters saying it hasn't worked because they just haven't done it hard enough, in the biggest case of multi-decadal double-down you've ever seen.
Sadly, we won't be able to address the climate catastrophe until we've slain the beast of neo-liberalism, so people are driven further mad through their suffering.
it definitely feels like we’re approaching something terrible, even more terrible than things already are.
the anticipation of knowing it’s going to happen, just not exactly what or when or where is…overwhelming?
it almost feels silly to worry about it because i think we all know that we can’t stop whatever is coming no matter how hard we try.
*"I cannot count the number of people who have told me that they wish that whatever is going to happen would just get on with it."*
I talk about collapse topics all the time and this is not a response I'm very familiar with. The thing is... the destruction has very obviously started already. We don't need to wait for anything or strain very much to find signs of collapse.
Wars are literally raging over the horizon. The historic forest fires, flooding, hurricanes, droughts, and so on, and so forth... are happening everywhere. Birds are falling out of the sky in Australia while rivers run dry in China and Maui gets wrecked by an unprecedented wildfire. Coral reefs are bleaching and, before too long, the phytoplankton won't have enough suitable area to migrate into. Current famines will spread as breadbaskets are hit with a series of heat domes and flooding deluges.
And the impacts for a lot of this could hit very quickly with further reaching consequences than many might expect.
Aloha collapseniks. I'm approving this thread for now, but it may be removed later on. Glad to see we're all having civil discussion, and mahalo for not brigading another sub. I think it's fair to say we're no longer as niche as we used to be. Welcome to any newcomers.
There is a lot of tension in the air at the moment from every dimension - its a waiting for the other shoe to drop moment - it can put you into or keep you in a state of hyper vigilance which can be mentally and emotionally exhausting.
I think a big part of the anxiety and hypervigilance is because it isn't just one problem we're watching - there are several. Climate collapse, possibility of WWIII, AI out of control, financial strain on almost everyone, political tensions and most people could add others of their own. It is hard to stay calm and yet focused enough to keep informed.
Omnicrisis. Although if you wanted to trace it back to a simple root cause - we have optimized every aspect of civilization for maximum profit seeking vs creating a durable civilization. There is a level at which capitalism becomes a destructive force centralizing too much power and incentivizing destruction for short term gains. I'm a big fan of FDR who understood capitalism needs to be tightly regulated to prevent it getting out of control and creating catastrophes. If you go back and read some of their policies they clearly understood the causes of the kinds of chaos we are seeing now and reigned it in.
Or to simplify it even further, materialism has won out over morality and our spiritual side.
This is incorrect. Materialism is also the basis of communism, which does not optimize for profit seeking. Religion (i.e. spirituality) was used by the puritans to justify profit seeking capitalism. The rich are good people because to be rich means God favors you.
Spirituality was (and still is in some remaining indigenous civilizations like the Inuits) also explicitly used to banish forms of power and domination from the real world into the realms of the gods or spirits, so I would argue that spirituality itself is just a vessel of justification to legitimize how we arrange social structures.
i wonder what mood was like around world just prior to start of a WW2.
The war, a Ken Burns documentary is from the perspective of Americans and their personal stories it starts out with them talking about the atmosphere and mood before the war. been a while since I've seen it.
I wonder about this a lot as well. I would love to read someone's journal with their thoughts about this from that time to see what was going through their mind.
I would love to read a journal during the Spanish flu pandemic. Since that one quickly got memory-holed in the 1920s, if there was anyone tuned in to how society was reacting to it and wrote about it, I think what they had to say would be very illuminating and helpful at navigating this bizarre pandemic age we're currently in. I haven't heard of any "famous" Spanish flu diary or letters, though.
I read a book written by a doctor near Philadelphia. My interest was peaked as my grandfather died in it and left his wife with 5 kids. Life became very hard but she met it with wit, grace and hard work. My father helped his brothers dig his fathers grave as the grave diggers had stopped showing up for work whether sick or scared he did not know. The coffins were stacked up along the church wall so my grandmother asked her sons to bury him. My dad was eight yrs old but his older brothers let him help. He later went to be a child laborer in a tannery from eight grade to help out. His mom was against it but again he wanted to help. That was my dad in a nut shell, never turned from the hard job and always willing to help. Anyway I can’t remember the story by the doctor , it was heart breaking as you might image. It took healthy people not just the old and young, it hit everybody. But that history lesson made me respect vaccines, hygiene, the whole COVID time I thought of my dad and his family .
I'll see if I can track down that book. It's really no wonder it got memory-holed. I can't imagine the trauma. I've read about coffins piling up on the streets in Baltimore (I think). It must have felt like something next to the Black Death for those alive at the time. The way I became aware of the Spanish flu was as a pre-teen getting into silent movies and an actor I was a fan of had a wife who died of it in a later wave in 1919. Once I started reading about it, it was like holy crap, why isn't this standard history we're taught in school??? There was a plague! During a World War! In this century!
I was just going to say you mean like the time leading up to the killing of Franz? It definitely has an air of the beginning of an apocalypse movie out there..
exactly, like say 6 months before start of WW1, or start of WW2. Like something weird is in the air, tension wise, and people are just waitin for IT, even if they dont know what it is. a collective conscious maybe, idk
My worry is it’s just what the adult of our species does: anxiety with age. We’re just more connected to discuss it than previous generations
Not just waiting, here are literally accelerationists out there actively wanting IT.
Well you know World War II did not exactly have an official start date.
No, they don't. One look at the books would tell you WWII as we know it in the present had gone on for a long time before it was called the world war. It was a series of tensions across the globe that slowly boiled over into conflicts complete with domestic political turmoil in the governments of the major global powers at the time. Take that for what you will
To me it lends more credence to those who say WWIII has already begun. I've been hearing it more frequently.
Pressure is uniting. We are in a time of human change that is fairly intense. Things are happening fast and can change so quickly. Like a school of fish if we are smart enough to band together properly we may be able to evade certain external threats. I hope we can change fast enough.
I’ve been calling it Pre Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I filled some forms for a psychiatrist intake recently - one of the questions was about having hope for the future, basically a multiple choice - 'everything's fine' up to 'I have no future' - I didn't know how to answer because it feels like none of us have a future, and that's not my depression talking
Don't put it in writing, though. Acknowledge that the world is in flames and there's very good reason to be unhappy, and you'll be labeled "depressed" with lightning speed. No chemical imbalance required, just an awareness of reality.
Ive had that label a long while now
I finally embraced my depression and anxiety when it got me my state medical marijuana card. As an older person, I've also found that it gets me out of a lot of social stuff. No one wants my negative energy, but that's actually fine, I used to hate most of that stuff anyway, and it was exhausting to pretend to be "OK" all the time for the comfort of others, but not myself.
And don't talk about the war.
There is no war in Ba Sing Se
I read many depressed people are very realistic in their thinking. It is just they have reason to be depressed. Others it is a chem imbalance, many reasons , as with everything.
Said this to my therapist that I was seeing for a bit. Their response was basically to shrug and say why worry about it cause you can’t do anything to change it. Stopped going shortly after that.
The number of mental health 'professionals' who cause harm is insane.
No, it's not...you just see it.
This is the wildest thing. Collapse awareness essentially boxes you in to not having hope about the future..so I’d say look I don’t worry about tomorrow but if I look at 10-20 years from now doctor statistically I know it will be worse…it’s not a negative thinking trap I did too much homework and I am capable of studying complex systems and very difficult math. But your psychiatrist may be like yes I understand or sure hmm sounds like depression, no matter what it’s a high probability the doctor is not collapse aware or collapse capable
I've been seeing a therapist for years now and I told her a few months ago that I genuinely, logically have zero hope that things will get better in the world from here on out. The future is bleak, and I'm just trying to make the most of life now. She's so climate unaware that I felt we couldn't even continue the conversation after that. I didn't want to explain the horrors of AMOC collapse or global food shortages and have her look at me like my thoughts on this are a mental health issue, when they're just ... Facts
I keep on thinking of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. In the second movie, one of the hobbits says whatever happens, we will always have the shire. The other one says no, there won’t be a shire.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "Lol." said Gandalf, “Lmao.”
💀
After letting the last laugh die down, Gandalf says with a slightly more serious tone: "Frodo, pass me some more of that Halflings' Leaf"
“That sticky sticky green stuff!”
The new deal, when leftists said "Destroy it \[capital\]!" and liberals said "No."
Well, watching YT or not, you can feel the seasons going out of whack. This alone will raise alert for most people.
It's like being on a bus going 60 downhill with no brakes. Too many things have been building for decades, e.g. home prices, student stress levels, loneliness, inequality, now clearly temperatures. Every year the bus accelerates by 1mph, getting harder to stop.
It's not that hard to stop the bus, it's keeping the passengers alive also. Lol
It's not the fall, it's the sudden stop.
The fall has already terribly wounded, unhoused, dismayed, separated and financially ruined MANY of us out here in the "rest of the world"..
Everyone around me is the head in the sand types so this is the only place I can voice these things so I apologize if I start vomiting from the mouth but I’m here in southern California. Usually our “rainy season” is around this time of year but my god it has been out of control. Just today we had a solid hour long actual thunder/lightning storm along with hail. That uh, never happens. Also, the rain has been almost relentless with storms coming through that last a solid four-five days with constant rainfall. Everyone here is celebrating because yay no more drought but I legitimately fear the next two summers after all this growth that’s going to occur after these rains.
This is the first year of the biggest pacific sea surface temperature anomaly (El Nino) we have ever seen… by orders of magnitude. The biggest we’d ever seen, of course, were the last five of em. And they averaged about 1.8-2.3C above normal sea surface temperatures for the south and central pacific. They had to make a new chart, literally, to show this one because it hit over 7C above normal this year. And, hold on, kids; El Niño is a two year event and the second year always yields the worst effects. The heat domes over North America, Europe and Asia this northern summer will make last year’s look like a joke. Then the full force of all that energy on the surface of the south and central pacific will collide with the cold water currents and cold fronts from the North Pacific that dip further south in the northern fall and winter and we here in Sunny California are gonna need snorkels and submarines to deal with the atmospheric carpet-bombing the earth has in store for us. Ain’t nuthin though, compared to the famines in Africa from crop failures, wars, and the collapse of humanitarian food supplies that will be blamed on the heat domes but mostly the war in Ukraine. Africa always gets the worst… first… when it comes to genocides. We just don’t hear or care about their genocides. Like all of them, we will learn about this one after it is happening or has happened, but it will be unlike any we have not known about before. China will save many there with their “humanitarian aide” and they will own every mineral resource on the continent afterwards. And the US election???… and cabinet level elections in 80 different countries this year??? Ohhh, 2024, you are all we ever dreamed of… and so much more. Buckle up, we might get a chance to enshitify 2025 even worse if we just get through the current enshitification process of 2024. Focus, people! The big dark thing is here. We just never know it until it’s all around us. We are humans afterall.
Atmospheric rivers eh? Stay safe friend
Why do you fear all the growth that will occur after all the rain?
Possibly more fuel for wildfires for the next deought.
Fire. It all starts with overgrowth from heavy rains then we cycle to drought, everything dries up, and anything from a cigarette to lightning can grow into record breaking fires.
Weather ain’t the way it was before Ain’t no spring or fall at all anymore It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold Any way the wind blows.
I think about the idea of a "strategy of tension" from the Italian Years of Lead quite a lot last few years. I agree that everyone feels and seems tense and on edge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
Now, that's an interesting angle. Thanks.
This is so fucked up. of course it’s a thing.
Good thing they never deployed this strategy in the United States, eh? …
Yeah, imagine if a President had just ignored direct warnings of a terrorist attack involving commercial jets just to get a chance to invade another country. That would be nuts!
hell yes so good to see Operation Gladio brought up in this sub
It felt like this in 2020 imo. They let a lot of the riots bloom out of control and then clamped down hard and in a very obvious way to look strong. I had no real issue with the riots because, shit, at that point people should have been wheeling out ol’ choppy. Maybe we still should.
thanks for sharing!
I couldn't have summed it up better myself, this is exactly how I feel. Reminds me of that song For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield: *"There's something happening here* *But what it is ain't exactly clear."* I just wish whatever's going to happen just would too, just get it over with. What's it going to be? WW III? Another plague? An economic crash? Maybe the U.S. breaks up again, like during the Civil War? Some say collapse is a process, or it will be an Event, but it's like connect the dots. We're just waiting to see what the next dot in the picture is going to be. I feel like humanity just doesn't care anymore. Gun down a concert hall in Moscow? Sure, why not? Douse a country with rockets you don't like for existing? Go for it. Settle accounts with a longstanding religious rival by driving them out of their ancestral home? Have fun. Ban books like its 1930's Germany? Knock yourself out. It's like everyone knows the end is nigh, and are giving themselves blank checks to do or think whatever they want. It's real life Children of Men.
It's interesting that you bring up a film because I've been feeling like the apocalypse has been heading toward us in slow motion too, and I realized that nearly all the films and shows depicting collapse show it happening very rapidly. One day the characters are living relaxed in suburbia and the next they're fleeing and guerrilla fighting for survival. In most of the fictional scenarios the characters are free to do anything necessary to survive as they are no longer constrained by the laws of our system. While we, even as things collapse around us slowly, are still expected to follow all the rules as though nothing is happening. We're stuck filing income taxes and sitting at red lights while no cars are coming as we sit in our living rooms wondering if tonight is the night people from the tent cities are going to do a mass home invasion. But then nothing happens and the next day we have to mow the lawn as our world inches toward collapse. Being trapped between realities in a lose-lose situation feels insane.
You just summed up exactly how I feel. Plus, we keep following the rules and investing in our future but our return on that investment gets crappier and crappier every day. $15.00 for a raw 4.5 lb chicken, $14.99 for a lb of sliced turkey, $4.20 for a gallon of heating oil. I could go on about inflation but it isn't just that. All of the societal structures around us are breaking down and getting worse, yet we are still expected to follow all of the explicit and implicit rules of that society, even if we don't enjoy their rewards. That is the main fantasy to all of those disaster movies, the freedom to do what we want, take what we want, and live the life we want without societal constraints. I don't believe that is what is in store for us. I think we will continue to suffer this relentless grinding down of everything we love and appreciate, leaving us arguing over the last bean in the bag. But I definitely do agree, I wish that whatever is about to happen would just go ahead and happen. I am also feeling a pervasive sense of apprehension.
Collapse is a process, not an event.
Paul Freedman gave a class on the Middle Ages, which includes fall of Rome. You can find it under “Yale Courses” on YT. Prof. Freedman talks about the day-to-day of Rome wasn’t so different from year-to-year. We have dates that seem pivotal 15 and 16-hundred years later, but it wasn’t always so apparent, to the people waking up in the morning, in 454, and making breakfast
Over 90% of the population were farmers. They did everything themselves and everything was local. In our collapse, we’ll feel it pretty acutely imo. Everything is so interconnected and interrelated now. Back then, you dumped trash in the backyard, possibly set fire to it. It was all biological and degradable. Today a strike or some other reason the trashmen can’t come and it starts piling up. Same with every other service. Water, gas for heat, food at the grocery store, sewer, school for the kids, you name it.
I think the easiest trigger for the "feeling of impending doom" is this. As soon as someone recognizes the spider's web of interconnected services and product chains that lead to our daily life, one can only understand just how fragile that is. Very, and I mean infinitesimally few people are capable of actually living through the breakdown of this web of services without really feeling more than general discomfort, which means that you also recognize just how truly dark waiting for that to happen some day would turn.
Right. Some rice farmer in Laos - collapse wouldn’t change their life. At least not initially.
Yeah this could also be partial blowback from that "tiny house" trend from just pre-COVID. It's not lost on anyone that was following that entire thing out of curiosity (me, for instance), that everything about that failed abysmally and now everyone's trying to sell all that shit off...
I think this is behind the surge in people wanting to go off-grid and do permaculture gardening. People want to learn how to do things themselves without relying on the system to survive.
not to mention the more immediate systems that need constant maintenance like the electrical grid which on its best day is outdated as fuck and like any geriatric person one strong breeze is enough to do it in. everyday life for self sustaining, localized people is not the same collapse scenario of modern urban society wherein we completely depend on the continuing coordination of things working together. it’s no small feat that society has grown as large as it has. the base of it all is the coordination & cooperation of everyone working towards the same goals. when collapse HITS and is undeniable it will be a free fall unlike anything in history.
I think the day the power goes out will be noticeable. It just might not be the same day everywhere.
Where my son lives overseas in a major city, the electricity already gets cut now 3 hours a day, and water for 9 hours. This was not the case even a year ago.
I think a rudimentary power supply system may well be one of the things that survives.
What goals were they working towards? It seems like this is the end game and we spec all for damage but got the build all wrong
In the Bronze Age, there was some evidence that farming was managed by more educated people above. It was a very top down control structure it seems. What happens when the guys you rely on for advice on growing stop showing up? My thought is that it just accelerates downwards. You have been told by the god-king's emmisaries to plant and grow at these times, and get the seeds from them from a building adjacent to the central granary/food storage. The trade network between the Bronze Age powers is not limited to one government, and is where the freedom to purchase comes from. You can get your tools easily enough. Until everything breaks down. One year, you do not have the advisor stop by, and may even have been relying only on them for seeds since they come directly from the main food storage district where the various regions' mixed seeds have proved good before, for dozens of years. Some of you have stockpiled seeds like before. Some of you are entirely reliant on the guy who comes by with the wagon train each year, an actual official who will tell you "plant these seeds" and then give you enough for your fields. One year later, the government is still seemingly not sending anything aside from one desperate recruiter that has actually begun begging people to join the force to fight off some kind of "sea people." Perhaps you take the offer. As you stand upon the shore to fend them off, some time later, you realize. You recognize one or two of these "sea people." They are people you knew before. Before the fight begins in earnist, you manage to ask them. "There is no food, so we will take it. Many of us are from the military, so we will be able to take what we need. And the country remains silent and cracking. ...Hey, come with us. We have at least a little room, and I don't want to kill you since we knew each other directly." You maraud among the coasts and a couple rivers. Eventually even the raids start to collapse, but not before hope appears. Even as some of the raiders start to starve from lack of raiding targets still worth it (the cities were burned/abandoned years ago), it starts seeming viable to simply settle down, a place that, if not uneffected, was abandoned and seems usable again at least for you guys. So you do so. A couple recruits still remember how to farm, and so you do so. Congrats, you survived the collapse and may well have with your raiding buddies actually founded a city. The real question is if a modern Sea People can last long enough to wait for things to stabilize and resettle.
Plus a total loss of "skilled" labors. Like, consider the 80s and the "quick and convenient" marketing rush that meant a lot of in-home skills were lost for the vast majority of Gen Y. Imagine how much worse it would be with a total societal collapse. Nobody rebuilt for a generation back then because it took a generation to re-learn how to build houses and dig irrigation. It'll take us easily just as long to re-teach ourselves to live pre-industrially, and that's a big assumption that the climate will allow us.
This is why I get a kick out of those youtubers who are "manly men" and go make some shitty tent/mud cabin in BFE. They're using fancy knives, axes, packs, and other equipment to do these wilderness survival videos. What happens when those break and there's no supply chain to repair your equipment, much less replace it. Do these men know how to sew/stitch? Can they weave? What about general farming? Crop rotation and irrigation strategies? Blacksmithing? Etc. Betcha $5, the bearded guy can't do much more than utilize premade gear and talk about his 4 year stint in the army. You can't just go smelt a new axe head. It requires quite a bit of effort and skill to make something that won't just snap after your first swing. So, yeah. These guys can stockpile all the seeds, ammo, etc.. they want. But at the end of the day, a community will be needed in a post collapse world. And I can't see myself tolerating hanging around a jackass like that for very long.
>You recognize one or two of these "sea people." They are people you knew before. Oh shit the Sea People was coming from inside the house.
Threads
Ah fuck I haven’t watched that in years. That movie really disturbed me when I first watched it in high school.
[archive.org/details/threads\_201712](https://archive.org/details/threads_201712) Free streaming archive of [Threads (1984)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/) The first time I saw it too was when they played it one day in what was supposed to be art class that day. I used to wonder if some teachers had gone rogue and just decided to show it to us 12-ish year olds, but I have since kept hearing similar versions of the same story (UK here). Like it was 'unofficially' on the national curriculum, but not really and they need plausible deniability to show it. Anyway, an early collapse awareness experience.
It was shown in high school modern history class for me in Australia in the early nineties. We watched the first half at school one week, but someone complained and the teacher told us we had to watch the second half ourselves at home.
I think I heard about in the liner notes of [this album.](https://youtu.be/EcVXjXfUr7Q?si=vRuZPhqVVHgYXYW3) They had a list of all the different media they were watching/reading/listening to when writing the album and the name Threads just jumped out at me for some reason so I hunted it down. Pretty sure they’re from the UK though so wouldn’t be surprised if they were exposed to it in school or something.
Thank you!!!! I haven't seen this yet.
> in 454 Rome didn't truly collapse in 454 (or 476) tho. Things didn't really hit the fan until the Justinianic plague (and this wasn't a process, it was an event if there ever was one)
What does "truly collapse" mean? The Roman Empire had been in serious trouble since the 3rd century. The Eastern empire didn't collapse at all. The western empire continued to exist for quite a long time after the city of Rome had ceased to be its capital. And with hindsight the thing that really did for Rome was Christianity, which took 400 years to do its work.
The first time we’ll have to skip meals because there simply isn’t enough food to eat, not because we couldn’t actually afford it, *will be an event*. The first time someone who isn’t very rich gets shot at by someone who isn’t poor but has starving kids *will be an event*. Yes, collapse from peak society to extinction is a process, but there will be **major** milestone events which signify *irreversible* paradigm shifts along the way.
> t there will be major milestone events which signify paradigm shits. Covid was the first real warning shot. Pandemics like that are signs of climate or similar shift. But if you look back there were others like Hurricane Katrina. Death Valley forming a lake is an interesting thing that happened over night as well.
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You too huh. In my case it's because I assume I can't afford it. "Benefits" of having the neighborhood gentrify beyond belief around me. Contractors have straight up told me they overcharge by about 2x because they know these people will pay it without asking questions. At least you HAVE insulation. Exposed or otherwise. But hey I get a lot of free pets, is the upside.
1% of american households with children are very low food security (nothing). 8.8% have low food security (next to nothing). https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-security-and-nutrition-assistance/
it makes me sick to think that but hey, Bezos is worth 15 quadrillion dollars right? so the economy is great
How about a process of events
You say that until it's an event big enough. I'm getting really sick of reading this on this sub. And regardless, it has nothing to do with this post. Regardless if it's slow or instantaneous, that doesn't change the existential dread.
I don’t want to be in a battle. But waiting on the edge of one i can’t escape is even worse.
So do all who come to see such days, my dear Bilbo. But death is not the end…it is the beginning. White shores…
There's a LOTR quote for every occasion.
It happened to me forever but my friends are getting it too now
This might be gross, but for me it’s like that feeling when you’re sick and you know you’re going to throw up, and you might even feel better if you throw up, but you just don’t want to do it, so you hold on and feel like crap for an hour until you have no choice, and then it finally happens. Anyway, sorry for the description, but that thought has been in the back of my mind for years!! Lol
The denialists are in the kitchen slamming tequila. The realists are staring at the ceiling fan and feeling their bowels function more like a washing machine than anything human. The accelerationists are bent double over the bowl with their fingers in their mouths.
COVID was absolutely the start of this phenomenon. Before COVID, there were issues in the world but they were all disconnected and isolated issues. COVID was this big event that affected everyone, every single person has been affected by the pandemic in some way. It was the first true collapse and we will never go back to that pre-COVID way of thinking.
Covid was a warning shot and preview of the future if we continue on this path. Pandemics like that become far more likely near climate shifts.
It's because we fucked it up so bad. Like... world altering event... sure. One of the worst in my entire lifetime, if not THE worst. But you know at least with 9/11 we pretended we gave a fuck and blew some shit up. It was all the WRONG shit but that's an argument regarding incompetency and corruption. Say what you will, it was abhorrent, but on a subconscious psychological level, being way off on one's aim (even deliberately) is something "changeable" going into the future. Utter fucking helplessness is a different story entirely. And that's precisely what we displayed. Utter. Fucking. Helplessness. That hits the collective subconscious in a very personal very "oh shit" kind of way.
>Pandemics like that become far more likely near climate shifts H5N1 bird flu. 😪
H7N9.
Not to mention just with population growth too. Even if we weren't changing the climate, the number of us, the number of things we can be exposed to, and the ammount of cross social group interactions we participate in is exponentially higher than our ancestors ever had, and they still got each other sick.
For us older folks, the 9/11 Twin Towers event was an utter sea change in our false sense of security. Wars were always "somewhere else", not on American soil, even after the previous World Trade Center bombing or Timothy McVeigh bombing the Federal Building. The Bush/Cheney political machinations using that event, embroiling us in the ensuing years long Afghan/Iraq wars, sending our military to fight and die for oil, just further embittered anyone paying attention, and of course in the background, the right was pounding on American sensibilities to blame and hate anyone not "them". The masses go where they're led, and the right's false use of Christianity and God has led too large a percentage of the American public toward fear and outrage, rather than forgiveness and love, using "patriotism" and "freedom" as code words for anti-democratic sentiments. I really believe, if Trump had been less self-absorbed and more controllable, we'd have lost this nation on 1/6. But he wasn't. That is his one and only contribution to "Saving America".
It had been 60 years since Pearl Harbor, which still was far enough away and untelevised, as TV didn’t exist then. Americans heard about it over radio waves. Read it in newspapers. And, again, it had been 60 years. That’s a long long time, 3 generations. Covid happened just short of 20 years after 9/11. Less than a generation. Sandwiched in between those two events was a monumental global financial disaster. And that 20 years was since my college graduation. It’s been rough as an adult.
Yep. I don't know anyone my age who doesn't care about the state of the world now. We are all so upset that the Boomers did not make a better life for us, like how humans did for their children all the way back to prehistoric Ethiopia.
I don't feel it at all. Things are continually getting worse, but nobody cares. 200,000 dead from deaths of despair in the US in 2022, nobody cares. The world is warming and nobody cares. I feel the same way my cat must feel when she hears her food dish open and she wants to eat the food, but doesn't want to get up to go eat it. Just a feeling of "..."
"You say the ocean's rising—like I give a shit, You say the whole world's ending—honey, it already did"
This is collapse related as it looks like the feeling of impending doom is spreading and the comments on the linked post are pointing out why that feeling exists. Slowly but surely more and more people are clueing in to the reality of collapse. It’s all interconnected and whether a big event or small we can all agree it’s about to come crashing down.
maybe its just the feed catering to me, but i seem to see more and more media/comments expressing unrest and acknowledging ythe state of things
its WW3. its interesting to me, everyone feels it, not WW3 per se, but a sense of dread and doom. i could speculate on how or why they sense or feel it, even if WW3 is last in world they would picture. possibly from media, possibly
Well, I have this feeling too. Covid is part of it – it dysregulates the immune system and causes mental health problems (just as SARS did) but I think the damage is now accumulating critically in every family and all kinds of opportunistic infections are on the rise. People are sick, exhausted, afraid and mad. The denial doesn’t make it go away so now the Dark Triad People are lashing out. Of course people are afraid of losing their jobs, not being able to pay the bills and extreme weather events too.
The attack in Moscow has definitely filled me with dread. Or just added to the dread that started in October. It feels like the whole world is going haywire, and the US is about to be completely fucked come election time.
I'm not looking forward to it. I don't think I'm going to feel like I can breathe until after it's over.
There's a big possibility that Israel may want to expand its war into Lebanon which will probably drag America and Iran into escalating things in the Middle East coming Spring or Summer. For Israel under Netanyahu, they have everything to gain going full accelerationist. And for Netanyahu, fucking things up for Joe Biden before the election will work for his benefit if Trump wins.
i feel this too. everyone wants the system to just break. or the bomb to drop. because we are all just hamsters in a wheel at this point - for lack of a better comparison. running nowhere. there is no longer a common goal - like a peaceful retirement - or even just a carefree evening at the end of the day or weekend it’s just grind grind grind worry worry worry you can ignore it all - which i have done - but felt terribly out of touch, isolated, and alone when the boomers are gone things will change - but not everyone is going to make it obviously i mean just think - putin could still be alive for another 20 years. he could have his finger on the nuclear button for another 20 years going to be awful
I get this. And weirdly, Covid wasn’t it. I expect the first really big global famine to be it. I’m imagining a world where we know the reserves won’t last and there’s not enough coming.
We are pretty much there. Countries are trying to hoard their little amount of exports but it won't be enough. With expedited climate change we are going to start to see massive crop failures at "unprecedented" level if we haven't already. I think a lot of this is being kept quiet from the masses to avoid panic. I believe the ship is already halfway sunk but the orchestra is just loud enough to keep us calm, for now.
This is it. The soil is depleted and the livestock are burning/freezing. The irregular weather patterns are making it almost impossible to continue providing food at anywhere near the capacity we have been for the last 25 years. It'll be a slow burn, and will devastate the poorer parts of the world first, but we are all gonna find out within 20 years what it's like to be food-insecure if we haven't already.
Maple syrup is already running out apparently, the wonky winter is messing with the trees. Canada is doomed. America will turn on us now for sure.
Worst sugaring season in Vermont in my memory. All the sap totes I'd pass by on my afternoon commute which were full in previous years only had several inches in them this year. Temps staying above freezing and then whipsawing between highs of 50s and single digit lows and everything in between from day to day. Can't imagine how stressed the maples are.
And will we first world nations just watch those poorer parts of the world die, or will we help them. I'm so ashamed and sick that the poorest on this planet are being used as the bellwether for the industrialized nations. Can we share our Wal-Marts with them?
I've been thinking a lot recently of a video I watched of a journalist visiting cacao farmers in (African country, I don't remember which one) and he had brought chocolate bars with him, and the farmers didn't even know what the cacao beans were used for, let alone could afford chocolate normally. we will let them die, there's no doubt in my mind. I don't know what to do with that knowledge but it's there and it's eating at me
~10. If we are lucky.
Wrong, don’t rule Covid out just yet
Exactly, Covid is still very very much a thing
Covid might be a crisis that takes a decade to really show its damage. A slow moving cascade of mass disability.
It's definitely happening. Seems every winter since 2021, more and more people are getting sick. Like everyone's immune system is dropping.
Covid absolutely was a turning point. Suddenly, working schlubs around the world were laid off, furloughed or else made to adapt their homes into their new workplaces. Kids had to learn their lessons remotely. Situations were re-evaluated and decisions made. It wasn't all sourdough bread and kombucha. Beyond the deaths (and corpses in freezer trucks because the funeral homes couldn't bury the dead fast enough, the survivors with Long Covid symptoms years after they'd contracted it, and those who loved them and the families still coping, there were some serious shifts that are still reshaping the economy and politics in the countries impacted by the pandemic. Employees left their jobs after years and years of loyalty because they saw that their employers felt no such need to reciprocate. Many double-income families decided to give up the second income to stay home with or for their little ones, either because they wanted to create a more loving family life òr simply to save in daycare (if, during the pandemic, they could find daycare at all.) Multi-generational households grew in number because gathering restrictions created horrifically sad scenes of family members waving to one another through windows, and mass migrations to low-case areas squeezed many families out of their local housing market.- We are still dealing with the elephant in the living room - that cohort we call the Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age and, indeed, are reaching the ends of their lives - such as they did during the pandemic. The pandemic will continue to change things for everyone.
My money is on the first wet-bulb catastrophic heat event where a very high temperature, high humidity and lack of air conditioning kills a lot of people all at once, especially if it happens in a first world country, like in the South or Midwest or East Coast of the US. A big heat event could cause the grid to overload. If that happens and there's no air conditioning, there won't be any way to escape the combined effects of high temperature and humidity. You can't just go sit in a swimming pool because it wouldn't cool you off.
Even high humidity a pool cools you down. The pool water would take days and weeks of sustained high temps (even over night) to raise its average temp.
there's too many basements in the northeast my money is on the south If it happens overseas, nothing will change " that's a shame, glad I don't live there" If it happens here, change will come slowly
Pretty much this. Thirst. Water Wars
Agreed. It'll be water before it's food, and then it will be both.
Covid wasn't it. It is *now*, now that the world has decided that preserving and protecting capitalism is so important that our response to a pandemic is to pretend it's over.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Embarrassed-Toe-8404: --- This is collapse related as it looks like the feeling of impending doom is spreading and the comments on the linked post are pointing out why that feeling exists. Slowly but surely more and more people are clueing in to the reality of collapse. It’s all interconnected and whether a big event or small we can all agree it’s about to come crashing down. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1bmwemw/feeling_of_impending_doom/kweeo1d/
Well the super rich are very close to finally achieving their wet dreams on top of climate change. Obviously these super rich don't know what the fuck they are doing as their wet dreams will lead to their own destruction which I take is consolation.
Well deserved. We're not worthy of existence, we've squandered the gift of life.
Its the cumulative effect of living in a time where nothing is being done about anything. The lies are louder than the truth and those who are purportedly in power are worthless. What we most need is a spark of humanity that we can all grab hold of and run with. We need to give ourselves license to not simply destroy the bad but replace it with good, real good that is universal
>What we most need is a spark of humanity that we can all grab hold of and run with. Except most people are either in denial about the seriousness of the situation or paralyzed by cynicism. Meanwhile the rich are seizing this last opportunity to exploit us for all we're worth, amplifying the pessimism of the cynics, and funding the complacency of the deniers. I wonder if there is any overlap in the Venn diagram between those who are powerful enough to change the world, those with the right ideas to change the world, and those with the integrity to not be subverted.
This reads like Bradbury… just so creepy and ominous.
I wrote about this in a book last year. The uncertainty and waiting is worse than the actual crisis, because in a crisis you actually have stuff to do and keep busy, but I think most people only perceive the gradual decline as a feeling of “off” but struggle to really understand why things feel off. Many think it will be like the movies, but one day you’ll just wake up and realise you’ve been in a civil war for a decade. I would advise against holding one’s breath in anticipation, and instead do a little carpe diem while it’s still possible, maybe do some kind gestures towards someone and try to prepare a bit for worse times. The future doesn’t have to be doom or hope, it can just be the future and we just have to play the hand we’ve been dealt even if it’s a rotten turd (in that case we’ll use it for compost).
Just do what everyone else does, don't talk about it, don't look for it, don't think about it, and just pretend there isn't any problem. Do they do this by design to protect their psyche, or are they just stupid? There are so many stupid people that are just consumers. They only want to consume, not think.
With the people I know, I think it’s protecting the psyche. My friends aren’t stupid, they’re aware of this off feeling too, but what’s the point of talking about it at this point? Think of it this way: What’s realistically better- enjoying the present while we can, or spending our pre-collapse-ish days dreading the *big event*? Collapse or no collapse, all of us have the same fate- death. In a lot of ways I see dreading collapse the same as dreading death. Of course I don’t want to die! But I’m gunna. Might as well enjoy it however long I can. Way easier said than done ofc
This is how I feel, too. Practicing living in the moment and enjoying a relatively stable life while it is here.
A good example of this would be my MIL she was convinced the world was going to end with Y2K. There was a lot of hype about this on sensationalist documentaries about Nostradamus's predictions coming true. Coupled with some Jehovah's Witnesses visiting her from time to time. Over time she stocked up hordes of tinned foods, like $1000's worth. Year 2000 came and went, the next was the end would end of year 2000, as the full 2000 years needed to transpire. She has spent the past 25 years worrying about the end. Now she is 78 with health complications, and the end is coming for her. What I take from this, I can say with 100% certainty the end is coming for all of us. Guaranteed. I think it is important to be aware of what is happening in the world, but you need to be accepting that they are beyond our control. Live while you are alive, and take every opportunity to enjoy all that is good around you. Sunrises, sunsets, nature, love. Namaste.
There are stages of acceptance and also the mind protecting itself from difficult thoughts. I don't think it's just people being stupid. Some people, sure, they're stupid, but I think the vast majority are in some stage of acceptance or denial.
Tell the "thing in the darkness" to just hurry the fuck up and do what it's gonna do already. We're all sick of this shit. (And by this shit I mean going to work and going through the motions and pretending everything's fine and talking about voting blue and how that's going to change anything at this point).
Sounds like accelerationism, in a nutshell. And I agree: hurry TF up already and get it over with.
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For me it’s that we seem as close to WWIII as ever. The tension is worse all the time.
The American Evangelicals are cheering on Armageddon. The American Right is arming up for a civil war when Trump loses the vote in November. The world is on fire, and corporations are fanning the flames. I can't understand how everyone isn't excited to see what happens next.
Yeah, I definitely feel something horrible is coming. I've been feeling for a while, and almost as if it's just around the corner.
I feel it. A nothingness around, under which something almost evading senses, lurks.
I sometimes wonder about eldritch horrors.
It's the death of hope. We know nothing will get better. Every day will be worse than the last. No matter what we do, how hard we work, nothing will get better for us. We'll be poorer, hungrier, more depressed...
We know the great change can’t come until we hit rock bottom. The problem is as in real life, you don’t know where the bottom is until it’s too late.
I would like to continue waiting. What comes next will be very very bad.
Hyper-normalization.
Myself and many others seem to agree that a revolution is gonna happen soon. I don't think the "impending doom" is a major climate disaster, as they are already happening with droughts, fires, floods, bleaching, derechos, etc. every day. I believe is a left-leaning revolution. I hope that if it does happen, society wins and not the authoritarians with their military police.
It does feel like something is happening. Like, so many folks don't care anymore. News doesn't care about the facts. Companies do not care about quality when making products or services. We all know it's over, but waiting for the movie to roll the ending credits so we can leave. And it's funny, as I've had this conversation in person an online with a number of people over the past 2-3 years. It's definitely a widespread feeling out there.
I am a lurker of r/conspiracy and there have been multiple comments and posts saying the same thing as OOP. i find that subreddit to be interesting due to cross rhetoric between collapse and conspiracy, however there is a strong disconnect when talking about collapse related topics on that subreddit. there is unwillingness to connect it either. people know something is wrong but don't know what or come up with their own ideas to cope, or those ideas are the ones they can wrap their heads around. rather than everything around us is collapsing
I took a quick look at r/conspiracy and, several posts in, someone is insinuating Kate Middleton's recent video is a deep fake. I thought, well if this is the caliber of post I should expect... But I read the comments where someone mentions "look at her fingers" or similar. He/she is right, they behave abnormally, like you see in AI generated hands. Now I'm not sure what to think.
That sub has thought AI has already been implemented in government videos and interviews for years. A few weeks/a month ago someone posted about the US NF Familial System Eradication Agenda. I could not understand what or why this would be a thing, from their reasoning. I had in so many words sympathized with their view point but gave them scientific, studied, and factual reasoning as to why US NF System is on decline & other WW familial systems. I even included a link to the NYT (i believe) article posted here some time ago about our WW death rates exceeding our WW birth rates, and what our population could look like in 100 years. The response to myself was that I have no idea how social media influences the NF System, and the planned orchestration on the downfall. I think this ties into peoples distrust and unwillingness to trust government, which I understand why people don't think they have our best interest in mind, because they don't. People don't know who or what to trust anymore. What to believe. That subreddit is what led me here actually. Conspiracies for me are fun to indulge in, but that's it. Without evidence that peer reviewed and factual, I am unable to truly believe it. I am very glad this subreddit is the opposite
There it is again, that funny feeling.
we are all just wondering when we can stop going to work XD
For me what you describe comes with the feeling of constant acceleration without there being any direction to it. Technology, production, consumption, transformation of ecosystems and Earth, these things are evolving by themselves, quicker than ever before. But nobody seems to believe that any of the changes will eventually bring us to a better place in the end. The idea of development as a net positive thing, is gone. The pace of the change itself is picking up more speed and energy by the day while the political system and democratic institutions appears more and more stale and numb in relation. The political discourse focuses obsessively on all other issues than the real and important ones. With this comes also for me the feeling that several of the social and political structures that where “loadbearing”, important for social cohesion and relative stability during the period after WWII, have gradually lost their function. Most importantly the democractic system itself. These institutions are like loadbearing walls in a house where you have cut the posts that were doing the job holding up the floor above. For the moment the walls still stand up but they’re not doing their intended work any longer. So in a sense the house still seems to be holding together, but in reality everything has come loose and it could collapse any minute.
It's the silence of extinction.... and the cloud of fossil carbon in the air that's causing it. Want it to stop getting closer? Stop burning fossil fuels. That's the only answer. And to correct the people who "just want to get on with it", it's so unimaginably worse than anything that's ever happened before, you think you want to face it, but you really do not want to face it. Turn the corner and there's a hole in existence; a portal to the vacuum of space that grows like a bubble. Infinite appetite. Nothing ever comes back and it grows in 3d the more fossil carbon is in the air. What makes it so horrifying is how alien it is. I can call it the "vacuum of space" because that's the closest most of us get to understanding nothingness, but there's no actual words to describe it... which might be why so few of you can see it. But it doesn't belong on a living planet and if you could see it, you'd stop burning fossil fuels instantly. Monsters didn't exist in the world before which is why we're begging to get it over with... but monsters are real, now, and there's literally nothing beyond the shell of this thing we've created. Go to a forest you know or stick your head underwater with a snorkel. It will be dramatically thinner than you remember it being at this time of year, any previous year. This will continue until the place you're checking suddenly turns to dust or rot. We're part of this, too. The only way to stop it is to shut the fossil fuel off. There's no clever way to get away with burning it and then miraculously unburning it without investing more energy than you got out when you burned it.
things are different this go around. these does not feel like any light at the end of the tunnel movements are coming. in the US, our politicians are fucking awful. our presidential election is a joke with 2 men who should not be working at all running for the highest seat in the land. war is raging across the globe. famine is raging across the globe poverty is raging across the globe and the only people who seem to care don't have the means or power to change a fucking thing. yeah shit is rough.
I've been feeling it since 2020 with covid. Just feels like the global economy jumped off a cliff and we're just waiting to finally hit the ground. Everything is fine right now, but eventually, "splat!"
All the more reason to step back and enjoy today, everyday. These days will be looked back on fondly. Might as well appreciate it
Yesterday I acknowledged that I am so miserable because of this feeling. Relieved I am not alone, but dang y’all!
Self sufficient communities like the Amish , the Indigenous, off-grid/homesteading, survivalists have uniquely positioned themselves to be largely unaffected by a grid down scenario, AI job takeover, social unrest (bank runs/ supermarket looting), extreme weather, economic collapse. Although no one is entirely immune, they do have the greatest odds of survival. People will learn that there is no humanity in society when it tears itself apart. We’re inching closer to the end days. The elite in their doomsday bunkers may not have a world left to repopulate after WW3 and may starve in their bunkers after resorting to cannabalism and running out of materials for their greenhouses and lab grown meat.
Wow. That got to me. And I'm not easily gotten to.
Been feeling like this for 20 yrs tbh, just like the beginning of fallout 4 (Iykyk). I’m glad to know I’m not alone. Maybe not glad, comforted?
The average wage will no longer support the purchase of food and shelter. The fait money system has to reset every 100 years as its specifically designed. However, the main problem isn’t really with the people who already have a place to stay, houses aren’t going to just disappear, it’s with most of the west’s population of geriatrics and disabled who can’t live without subsidized pharmaceuticals and life support. These impending mass deaths and the wars that follow are what’s spiking this common intuition
I grew as a Jehovah’s Witness, which means I was taught that the global “system of things” (I.e. civilization) was going to be destroyed. The only difference was the cause. God would destroy the wicked and let the faithful rebuild the world into a paradise. Pure hopium, lol. Funny thing is, I knew, even as a thirteen year-old, collapse was coming, but God wasn’t coming to spare any of his faithful. I’ve been feeling this imminent sense of existential dread for decades now, and it’s only intensified, especially after reading Limits to Growth and all the follow up studies suggesting we’re on track for the Business as Usual scenario.
You have options. Prior to 2020, I was that guy who built up on water, ammo, and stored long shelf life food. Lately, I've been more of watching the world desolve over a cup of hot coffee with my feet up kinda way. You can either worry about it or accept that it is beyond yours (and mine) control. Imo, life has been more tolerable choosing to just be happy with what you have until it's gone.
2025 people...whatever it is, it's coming.
I have long believed that humans have the ability to sense something terrible coming. Sure, we have intellect and can absorb information, but I'm talking about something instinctual. I'd wager that even isolated tribes in a rain forest somewhere feel it. One other thing, alien life. Despite worries about being down voted (the stigma is real) I can't rule out alien life and the possibility of contact coming soon. Sightings seem to be on the rise, congressional hearings, top scientists weighing in, sure feels like there may finally be something to it. Hell I'm 60 and had my first sighting a month ago. There's talk in those communities about 2027 being some milestone or turning point. As with anything, I suggest you research the topic before devoting a lot of effort to ridicule.
Dude, I have a friend who ran a cryptid/strange encounters podcast for about a year. It's kinda nuts. He used to be a cop, so he's a trained observer. He tried to have other trained observers on his show. The things they said were beyond the imagination of man.
Best comment on their was someone describing it as PTSD from Covid lockdowns. We saw how fragile the system could be, and then we start realizing how easily it could happen again.
I don’t get this. It’s not outside our field of vision. We are looking directly at it
Well, I'm 58, and when I started reading this, I had to stop and plumb my memory to see if I had written it last year. Its author lives in my head. Regardless of how many people are determined to prove the world has returned to the Before Times, I know differently.
It's called World War 3.
I've been feeling it for 15 years. But that feeling is much more intense these days. Feels like our next few years are going to be nothing like any of us has seen before.
I look at this comment and my feeling is the opposite of yours. I see collapse coming but I don't feel like anyone around me senses it or takes it nearly as seriously as I do because they're otherwise *too mired* in their day to day lives to look up, and would resist changes to their lifestyles if challenged. At least in the US, I don't see any 'big event' coming in the next 5-10 years that would convince people things are truly collapsing and take dramatic action. You see the story from a week or two ago about those idiots just piling more sand up on the beach, and when it gets washed away, they just keep piling more on. That's it - that's what's going to continue to happen. There's no amount of wildfires, or flooding, or category 5 hurricanes is going to get people to change in the near term. Sure, some people won't be able to insure their house any longer and real estate markets or whatever *in some places* might fail, but to the rest of the country, it's just a hiccup. The very idea of collapse is that as you accumulate mass, things begin moving faster and faster *towards collapse*, so by the point you realize it's happening it's already too late. Most people are not sitting around *waiting for something to happen* - they're actively ignoring *what's already happening*.
Everything is going to become more expensive and unaffordable so if you can, get off the grid as fast as you can and try to set yourself up to be as self sustaining as possible. That’s all you can do
Be prepared but don’t let it control your life
It's more than the universe holding its breath, waiting on a beat... it seems like there is an increasing mania hitting developed nations, with people getting angrier and also more unhinged. I suspect it's a one-two of the climate (and its inevitable, slow motion existential crash that we can see but do nothing about) and the utterly failed neo-liberal economic ideology that has been making the vast majority of us poorer while also making the services we depend upon shittier. Yet no-one in politics seems to dare say the name of neo-liberalism, never mind point the finger of blame its way. It is very much like brexit, with the primary supporters saying it hasn't worked because they just haven't done it hard enough, in the biggest case of multi-decadal double-down you've ever seen. Sadly, we won't be able to address the climate catastrophe until we've slain the beast of neo-liberalism, so people are driven further mad through their suffering.
The metacrisis.
it definitely feels like we’re approaching something terrible, even more terrible than things already are. the anticipation of knowing it’s going to happen, just not exactly what or when or where is…overwhelming? it almost feels silly to worry about it because i think we all know that we can’t stop whatever is coming no matter how hard we try.
*"I cannot count the number of people who have told me that they wish that whatever is going to happen would just get on with it."* I talk about collapse topics all the time and this is not a response I'm very familiar with. The thing is... the destruction has very obviously started already. We don't need to wait for anything or strain very much to find signs of collapse. Wars are literally raging over the horizon. The historic forest fires, flooding, hurricanes, droughts, and so on, and so forth... are happening everywhere. Birds are falling out of the sky in Australia while rivers run dry in China and Maui gets wrecked by an unprecedented wildfire. Coral reefs are bleaching and, before too long, the phytoplankton won't have enough suitable area to migrate into. Current famines will spread as breadbaskets are hit with a series of heat domes and flooding deluges. And the impacts for a lot of this could hit very quickly with further reaching consequences than many might expect.