How To Get Over The End Of The World

I'm trying to let go of collapse

Hello friends. Happy New Year. Have you heard the world is ending?

Rosie Spinks is a wonderful writer who I’ve gotten to know through Substack in the past year. She recently did a follow up to her viral post from last year “How I became ‘collapse aware’.”

How I became 'collapse aware'

The original piece became part of the gradual mainstreaming of conversation about societal collapse.

To catch you up, if you are not yet “collapse aware” —

We are living in a time of:

• The murderous gospel of endless growth on a finite planet.

• The near-term inevitability of worsening climate catastrophe.

• The encroaching front of fascism and wizening of democracy.

• The unknown systemic risks of AI.

• The well-known systemic risks of nuclear conflict, hyperfinancialization, et. al.

• Unstoppably aging and declining populations across the globe.

All of it converging into a hydra-headed polycrisis, faster than we could ever have imagined.

Collapse sweeps all of this up, and forecasts that what cannot go on, will not go on. Wealth will decline. Human population will peak, and may even crash.

And something very big and very bad, bigger and badder than anything in living memory, might/probably will/very definitely will arrive, and irrevocably, or at least for tens of thousands of years, reduce the complexity of human civilization, killing the myth of endless progress, busting us back centuries, just like the Dark Ages dropped the curtain down after the long orgy of radiant heating, running water, cataract surgery, and, well, orgies that was the Roman Empire.

I’ve been talking and thinking about this stuff for awhile. As I write in my forthcoming book, I came of age during the 3-hole-punch of the dot-com crash, the stolen election of 2000, and 9/11, followed swiftly by Hurricane Katrina hitting my hometown. My antennae for crisis went up around that time, and never really came down.

Here is a screenshot of a slide I used to include in presentations more than a decade ago. I was invited to talk about student loan and consumer debt, and I would use the opportunity to talk about other forms of bills coming due.

The image is of a famous example of ecosystem collapse: when a population of reindeer was introduced to an island in the Bering Sea where they had no natural predators, their numbers grew until they had consumed all the plant matter on the island, at which point the herd starved to death.

Sustainability is a friendly- sounding word, used to describe recycled toilet paper. But that anodyne definition belies the reality that most of our default world order is unsustainable. Meaning it will end.

Collapse-awareness, or for the French, collapsologie, is, not surprisingly, gaining steam in the United States in the second Trump administration.

Spinks cited writers who have shaped my thinking on this topic, like Jem Bendell (who I interviewed here), who defines collapse, wonderfully, as “an uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, well-being, meaning, communications, play, all aspects of our lives,” and Douglas Rushkoff, who writes incisively about the billionaires-in-bunkers aspect of the equation, and Sarah Wilson, (who interviewed me here), whose TEDx talk on “How to respond to societal collapse” you can watch here:

Other essential thinkers in this space are Dougald Hine, who comes from a deep philosophical perspective (you can read his Dark Mountain manifesto here), and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, whose lens is anticolonial (read excerpts of her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism at her organization’s web site here.)

It is with the greatest respect for all these writers and thinkers on the topic of collapse, that I say, I’m done with it.

I’ve been obsessed with apocalyptic narratives for decades. They have been formative in my life and work.

But now that so many things are pretty clearly not okay, collapse as a central reference point just is no longer serving me, or adding much to my understanding of the world. And it’s causing me some harm, too.

Collapse has become a measure of my discomfort with uncertainty. Even when the alternative to that uncertainty is certain doom.

It feeds my childish desire for a Hollywood ending—even when that ending is “Blow it up!”

It’s a drastic oversimplification of a vast complexity.

It turns the world into a morality play and tells you who to hate and to blame—white people, billionaires, and for that frisson of auto-flagellation, yourself.

Collapse discourse has become a symbol of my ego’s need to be more right, more serious, and know more than the next person. And like a first grader on the playground who has just heard how babies are made, it’s a manifestation of my urge to shock you with my newfound secret knowledge.

Collapse is a fact-based conspiracy theory that fulfills all the cognitive-emotional purposes of fictional conspiracy theories. It explains everything, ties up all loose ends, is a handy repository for anxiety, creates an in-group and an out-group, and lets you ignore nagging little everyday problems in favor of the ONE BIG IMPORTANT THING THAT’S DEFINITELY OUT THERE, COMING VERY SOON.

It’s unfalsifiable, but also not exactly provable. When will we officially be in collapse? Will we be able to recognize it when it happens? Is this a centuries-long process or will it unravel overnight? When will collapse be over and we’re on to the next thing? If Dems take back the House this year, does that push back collapse a couple of years or months? Who can say?

Worst of all, like any religious myth, collapsologie pairs its terrifying Revelations with a flimsy promise of redemption.

Because we’re still living in a society obsessed with happiness, collapse-aware writers often feel bound to promise that collapse will take away our meaningless, boring lives of distraction, overconsumption, and bullshit jobs and replace them with a cottagecore tradwife fantasy of simplicity.

Subsistence agriculture (that is somehow easy and part-time), barter, potlucks, village-scale democracy, earth-based spirituality, equality, authenticity, relocalization, drum circles. No Netflix but also no war. No advanced medicine but also no pressure to take GLP-1s or Botox. No TSA security lines because no vacations to Bali.

“We are now coming back into sync with the flow of life and with our true nature,” as Wilson puts it in her TEDx talk.

Rushkoff, in a recent post, forecasts a downright utopia on the other side of this: “…the former peasants of medieval Europe only worked two or three days a week…in order to have as much time to love and make art and eat and play and fuck as they could get.”

Even the great light of speculative fiction, Octavia Butler, does this. In the 1993 Parable of the Sower she first describes a brutal, frightening collapse with eerie precision, down to the fascist slogan “Make America Great Again.” But she ends this volume with a post-collapse hazy agriculturalist commune fantasy:

“a single tiny hill community squeezed into too few cabins, and sharing an almost nineteenth-century existence…

“To us it’s as though we’ve come to a somewhat gentler version of the homes we were forced to leave. Here, there is still water, space, not too much debilitating heat, and some peace. Here, one can still have orchards and groves…

“With our work, and with Earthseed to guide us, we’re building something good here. It will grow and spread. We’ll see that it does...”

I don’t buy it.

I’m not sure why anyone would expect that the post-collapse world would look like this:

When we can see that it actually looks like this:

child playing in the rubble in Gaza, via The Guardian

Or this:

child in an ewaste recycling facility in China

or this:

A woman searches through the burnt remains of her shelter at a displacement camp in Darfur, Sudan via Unicef

Which gets me to my major problem with “collapse awareness.”

Collapse is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed. There is nothing more inherently colonialist than Columbusing the apocalypse.

Collapse is not going to be cute. It’s not coming to simplify our lives like some Mad Max Marie Kondo.

Collapse is just entropy. The basic law of the universe. The mess that accumulates when you stop straightening up. The wreckage that people with power inflict on those without. Collapse is what we imperfectly try to forestall every day when we show up and work to make the world just a little bit better.

This whole post, in a way, is a restatement of Joanna Macy’s insight that there are three stories about what’s going on in our world. Three stories that are all true, that are all happening, right now.

1. Business as usual - what Spinks calls “There.”

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

2. The Unraveling - aka collapse.

And, Macy’s third story is The Great Turning.

The Great Turning is the green shoots we tend of a life-giving world. The Great Turning, according to Macy’s Work that Reconnects, consists of:

• Holding actions—the political, legislative, and legal struggle to reduce the destruction. What we typically think of as activism.

• Transforming the foundations of our common life—building alternative infrastructure, strengthening communal ties and relationships, making, growing, buying and selling in more sustainable and just ways. Permaculture, gardening, cooperatives, co-housing, mutual aid, foraging, mending, Buy Nothing groups. [But also, I’d add—science, technology, research and innovation for good. Electric airplanes and new immunotherapies for cancer belong here, too.]

• Shifting values and perceptions—rituals and healing, restorative justice, truth and reconciliation, nonviolent communication skills, child-centered education, writing and reading and conversation, art and creativity, music and dance, celebrations and festivals, trauma work and gratitude work. All that strengthens us and keeps us going, lifting up what is good right now, what we value, and what is the right next step.

You’ll note that The Great Turning consists of things we choose to do, not things we sit back and watch out for. The turning happens when we put our shoulders to the wheel, in the name of something that is better right now and better for the future.

It is good to be aware of the unraveling. It is good to feel your feelings about the unraveling, and not to deny it as a possibility. All three stories are true.

So if you’re new to the concept of collapse, yes, read up. Sit with your feelings. Get support. Keep working on giving up the dream of “up and to the right forever.”

But me, in this new year, I’m ready to devote more of my energy to The Great Turning.

Thank you for reading! If you found this essay insightful or enjoyable, you can support my work by liking, commenting, re-stacking or emailing to a friend. And if you have the means, I would really appreciate a paid subscription. The tiny fraction of readers who pay help me earn a living wage for my work, almost all of which is free to read.

Come study and practice with me!

I’m offering a 5-week online program, February 26 – March 26, 2026, in line with my forthcoming book, to examine our collective emotional responses to the crises of our time and learn to find inspiration even in the depths of despair.

Explore your emotions with curiosity – building resilience and working with the energy within our bodies. Together, we will:

• Map our collective pain for the world: identifying the spiral and the wheel

• Discover the healing alchemy: transforming your grief, rage, apathy, fear and despair

• Call In your resources and refuges: exploring body and breath, relationship and community, nature and the sacred, ancestral mentors and deep time

• Practice each week: grounding ourselves in guided meditation, creative exercises in movement, art and writing, and group work

• Study the wisdom: tuning into prophets, rabbis, lamas, mystics, Indigenous sages, neuroscientists, ecologists, and activists.

  The Institute for Jewish Spirituality has a number of wonderful offerings you can check out here; you don’t need to be Jewish to sign up!