With worrying global trends like climate change, pollution, increasingly divided or radical governments, economic woes, misinformation and disinformation everywhere, dangerous health crises and so on, what do you think - how much time do we have before “it all comes crashing down”? What will end life or our way of life as we know it first?
Or do you think we’ll make it? If so, how?
The “collapse” is a cope. A non denominational version of the rapture. It being “all over” is something people dream of because oblivion also means an end to pain.
Society won’t “collapse”.
Life will just get shittier and shittier in such a slow, gradual manner that most people won’t even realise it is happening. More work for less pay, less rights and freedoms, more repression, more wars, etc.
Societal collapse can happen; it happened to us in the Bronze age, several times in fact. War and famine causing enough chaos to destabilise and destroy cities or empires that took centuries to recover, if they recovered at all.
I don’t know what the Sea People event of the modern era would be. I do know that bombing a handful of factories around the world will set us back a couple of decades when it comes to computers and integrated devices. A second COVID hitting us right now while the world is still recovering would probably do a number on the world as well. Plus, nuclear war would ruin civilisation as we know it pretty quickly.
Unless Putin or Trump start launching nukes, I don’t expect any sudden collapses within one lifetime, but societal collapse is something that can happen eventually.
I think people tend to underestimate human resilience. To use the bronze age collapses as an example, sure, it brought down existing polities, the names drawn on maps changed.
But most of the cities were still there. People still lived in them. Does changing the rulers while keeping a similar paradigm ultimately matter that much? I’m reminded of accounts of the experiences of some Afghanis during the American intervention there. First they paid their taxes to the Taliban, then the govt we set up, then the Taliban again. shrug.
While supply chains could be disrupted, any time that happens it opens the door for another profitable enterprise to rise in its place. People suffer, some die, but life goes on. If the knowledge of how to build those supply chains is still around, it will be done, and swiftly.
I think this is the more accurate take. I think the world at large is more likely headed toward a world in chains or world war 3 disaster scenario more so than anything.