We are indeed going to face massive, catastrophic changes to society broadly.
But they will take place over such timespans that most people are just going to get used to things being shitty and the death-tolls from storms, flooding, starvation, forced-migration… it will just be more dull noise in the background for decades and decades.
The “nothing ever happens” shitheads are in the middle of things happening, but our attention-spans have been so thoroughly eroded that people don’t think anything is real unless it literally shakes them out of their bed.
I had a conversation with an older dude this May. It was +30°C in Germany and Germany doesn’t really do air conditioning. The older dude, while sweating bullets, was telling me that we don’t need to do air conditioning because we rarely have high temperatures.
It was +30°C in May. It was +30°C in May for the last 10 years. I think that dude will die of heatsroke, and till his very end he will believe that nothing ever happens and things are exactly the same as they were when he was a child.
People also have this idea that collapse is this overnight thing, like a zombie apocalypse. But while that does sometimes happen historically, a gradual degradation is much more common and realistic. What that actually looks like on the ground is just a general decline in the standard of living all around. In an advanced capitalist economy, we rarely have actual shortages, where the supply of goods simply runs out. Rather, whenever the supply of anything gets tight, the price soars until demand drops.
As things degrade, everything’s just going to become ever more expensive. People used to eating beef will have to switch to chicken. Then they’ll switch to tofu. Eventually just rice and beans. And as prices rise, the world’s poorest, a few million at a time, will find that they can’t even afford rice and beans, and no one will be able to afford to give them food aid either.
Housing will gradually become ever-more expensive. We have a finite capacity to construct housing. And as natural disasters destroy more and more homes and infrastructure, we have to spend more and more of that finite capacity just rebuilding what we’ve lost, rather than constructing new homes. This drives the cost up ever-higher. People switch from owning their home, to renting an apartment, to living with roommates, to abandoning the nuclear family entirely and living in large extended households again.
This is what collapse actually looks like. Prices on everything slowly rise until we look around and realize that the global population has been cut in half by starvation and all but the riches survivors are living in penury.
Honestly, true.
We are indeed going to face massive, catastrophic changes to society broadly.
But they will take place over such timespans that most people are just going to get used to things being shitty and the death-tolls from storms, flooding, starvation, forced-migration… it will just be more dull noise in the background for decades and decades.
The “nothing ever happens” shitheads are in the middle of things happening, but our attention-spans have been so thoroughly eroded that people don’t think anything is real unless it literally shakes them out of their bed.
I had a conversation with an older dude this May. It was +30°C in Germany and Germany doesn’t really do air conditioning. The older dude, while sweating bullets, was telling me that we don’t need to do air conditioning because we rarely have high temperatures.
It was +30°C in May. It was +30°C in May for the last 10 years. I think that dude will die of heatsroke, and till his very end he will believe that nothing ever happens and things are exactly the same as they were when he was a child.
People also have this idea that collapse is this overnight thing, like a zombie apocalypse. But while that does sometimes happen historically, a gradual degradation is much more common and realistic. What that actually looks like on the ground is just a general decline in the standard of living all around. In an advanced capitalist economy, we rarely have actual shortages, where the supply of goods simply runs out. Rather, whenever the supply of anything gets tight, the price soars until demand drops.
As things degrade, everything’s just going to become ever more expensive. People used to eating beef will have to switch to chicken. Then they’ll switch to tofu. Eventually just rice and beans. And as prices rise, the world’s poorest, a few million at a time, will find that they can’t even afford rice and beans, and no one will be able to afford to give them food aid either.
Housing will gradually become ever-more expensive. We have a finite capacity to construct housing. And as natural disasters destroy more and more homes and infrastructure, we have to spend more and more of that finite capacity just rebuilding what we’ve lost, rather than constructing new homes. This drives the cost up ever-higher. People switch from owning their home, to renting an apartment, to living with roommates, to abandoning the nuclear family entirely and living in large extended households again.
This is what collapse actually looks like. Prices on everything slowly rise until we look around and realize that the global population has been cut in half by starvation and all but the riches survivors are living in penury.