This really resonates with me. I have much the same fears and reactions.
I already had a large amount to deal with as a member of the sandwich generation. Elderly parents on one side and struggling kids and one grandchild on the other. So anxiety was no stranger.
While digging deeper into what the future will bring I ran into the collapse theory, and all the ugly truths it brings to light. What little hopeium I had left was extinguished.
I've become accustomed to shutting down and finding an escape even before climate reality set in.
I find solace within music, art and creative outlets. I started a large polinator garden to save a tiny sliver of the natural world. Being engaged in something you know makes a positive impact, no matter how small, is as healing an escape can be, I think.
I will never stop panicking inside wondering if I should be prepping or building a family getaway that may be self supporting.
I'm getting a little old for that challenge.
I'm retiring soon, after 45 years in a great job, and never dreamed that all of the money I've set aside and plans I've created could all become worthless over time.
Funny how our coping mechanism will keep us from doing the hard stuff because that requires facing hard realities.
I will be getting more involved with orgs that are trying to help us save what's left, if for no other reason to be with like minded individuals. Misery loves company.
I'm sorry I didn't start to really prepare sooner as well. I'm now 71 & health matters plus lack of energy & motivation make it seem impossible. Lo Siento amigo
I also am in my seventh decade. My kids are both grown and still fighting the good fight, but man this shit drags you down after awhile. An earlier post mentioned whiskey, which helps (in moderation). Also dogs or cats, or bycycles. My wife gardens, but it doesn't do much for me.
Yea, my 2 pups keep me company always. Two granddaughters bring some joy but also concern about their future. It is kind of exhausting isn't it? I try to stay present and enjoy the little things. I live in a constant state of "letting go", or working on it.
Mostly, collapse aware means the same to me. Instead of TV shows (my wife does that one), I live in video game worlds, usually playing a character who is my complete opposite. Presently, I'm playing Conan Exiles, which is a game set in the world of Conan the barbarian. I play as an extremely violent slaver who rarely speaks and has no friends (only "property"). The world is scattered with ruins of an old civilization that has long ago gone extinct. Tribes and clans remain, descendents of slaves of the old empire.
Honestly, the only thing I have in common with my character is that we're both tall and have long hair. I also have no friends, but I'm not about to go "collecting" some by means of bludgeons and chains. Somehow though, this setting, the brutality of everything, the absolute dearth of anything resembling human connection... It's bizarrely... soothing? I think it's like if you feel chilly inside your house on a very cold day, but you step outside for a few minutes into the frozen air. When you come back inside, it feels warm for awhile.
This makes some sense Patrick. But I'm concerned myself that our world will soon be similar to Conan Exiles. Then there will be no "warm again" to find. Lo Siento
I have been collapse aware since 2010. What that meant to me was the death of an idea of modernity which after dying (and a period of grieving) left me free to see some atrocious things modernity did and why it is important to undo them to embrace any hope for a future.
Native Americans predicted that the white man would spoil and poison the land even as we ethnically cleansed them off that land. Their insight came from thousands of years of homeostasis on this continent.
Being collapse aware made me aware of colonialism as a virus.
Being collapse aware means I could see the inherent stupidity of the "western civilization" that folks on the alt right (like Jordan Peterson) think they are defending.
Being collapse aware gave me insight about the folley of Carl Marx in trying to write a theory about the fate of the working class struggle in assuming the means of production - in complete ignorance of the relationship we must have with the land.
Being collapse aware means that I have become community aware: where do we have actual community in the West when we put parents in nursing homes and have no traditions which bring us together to be real contributors to each other's lives? You won't find community beyond meaningless events, pot luck dinners, county fairs, and the like which do nothing like a community. You won't even find real community in that rave in the dessert where they bring a bunch of consumer goods in and pretend to live off the land for a week while pretending they have created an alternate economy, and that they have had a spiritual experience because they burned a giant wooden man at the end.
Being collapse aware means that I am aware of the destruction of community networks that existed first in Europe with the pagans, the gnostics, the Roma, and the gypsies; and then in the Americas where we ethnically cleansed the indigenous, killed off their food sources, and sent their children to boarding schools to learn our ways of resource and expansion based prosperity.
Being collapse aware made me realize that we must bring back, rebuild, and reinvent the human community traditions that colonialism attempted to erase.
Yup, all of that. For us it also means desperately trying to put together a functional community now that will survive collapse, even though we know it's probably futile and we all still have to work so we don't really have the time to sacrifice but we're doing our best and hoping we can get something set up before we all collapse ourselves from burnout. It's effing exhausting
Collapse awareness includes most of what you listed. Lo Siento is a term in Spanish that means "I feel it". That's what I say when I hear you and others like you speaking about this. Everyone who resonates with this should follow each other. Community is helpful. It helps regulate our nervous system. I am going to follow those who understand this.
Surprisingly few comments about this so far. I have had a bit of time to think this through (I became aware that this particular civilization was going down when I was flying around the country patching up computers for the Y2K bug). When people lost their minds over what was really a rather small technical problem, I realized that they weren't going to do very well when a real crisis came.
And I started reading up on possible futures.
Really, I still have high expectations for humanity for many thousands of years to come, but the short term view is pretty horrible, and didn't have to be like this.
We have hit peak oil and peak industrial output already, we will soon hit peak population and peak food production. I think we can save enough scientific and other knowledge to create a better system after the crash, but there aren't many people working on that yet.
And if prepping for yourself isn't exhausting enough, add prepping for kids and grandkids. I have two grandsons. Most of my neighborhood is also old farts, who consider me the young and healthy one. Bah.
There's "hopium" and then there's peer-reviewed engineering. I've been where you are. I watched my son's 5 year old body wracked with pain during cancer treatment - and then learned about peak oil. "Great - gotta try and save my boy from cancer -and then get out of town and save my family from the Road Warriors and Warlords and find myself someone like Mad Max to buddy up with."
But I was not getting enough sleep, and was quite unwell myself. I helped arrange a book tour for Richard Heinberg back in the day and read most of his books. I got permission to screen a half hour cut of "End of Suburbia" in the NSW Parliament house. Our team did so much stuff, before we eventually all burned out.
And then? My boy pulled through, and the expected peak oil in production did not hit in 2011, or 2015, or 2018, or the many other predictions. I know oil is finite - I'm not pretending it isn't. But check this out! In the 20 years since I became peak oil aware, I explained to people again and again and again over the decades that because renewables are intermittent you have to Overbuild them SO MUCH, and use SO MUCH STORAGE, that it would bankrupt any first world nation that tried! I tried to explain this again and again and again because I was so scared, and it was true!
Until it wasn't.
That reality crept up on me. I became pro-nuclear - in Australia - a land that has nuclear banned! And in the meantime, the learning curves and economies of scale had brought down the cost. Overbuild was now economic - even cheaper than coal!
AND the EROEI was now fixed! Solar cells only used 1/3 of the high-embodied silicon of 2004. Wind towers were now so much bigger and taller they caught vastly more energy, fixing their EROEI. David Murphy was one of the founders of the very EROEI concept - and he says solar is now up around 10 which is fantastic.
That's just the energy transition. Then there's Precision Fermentation, Protein powder from Seaweed which could feed a world of 12 billion from 2% of the oceans, modern HVDC that could take power live from the equator to the North Pole for only 16% power loss - meaning NO NATION need have their renewables experience a dark northern winter, and so many other answers.
But sure - Trump could get in and we could nuke ourselves back to the stone age.
But is that inevitable? Or can we fight that?
Because there is no TECHNICALLY inevitable reason we must collapse. There are new sustainable building materials, more attractive and ecologically efficient town plans, and the possibility of exponential tech curves in Ai and robots that could end up fixing water issues, invasive species, cleaning up the plastic, replanting forests, and so many other things with super-cheap labour.
My question to you is this - what haven't you read?
You DO NOT have the time to read all their articles - but they are 2 amazing sources! I wish you would get a bit obsessed with both of them.
I have listened to 20 years of Doomerism. You know what I see now? Remember the story of the deer growing exponentially? Remember how exponential growth is surprising - even sneaky - because for the longest time everything seems OK - as the growth is invisible - then suddenly the Petri dish is full at 11:59? I see that happening now. But in a GOOD way! With renewables and EV's.
We are Electrifying transport so fast with EV’s that there will be an oil GLUT of about 4 mbd by 2028. (Edit - maybe 2029). "Big battery" is about to threaten "Big Oil."
In a world still STARVING for new energy (let alone replacing old fossil fuel energy) - where only 17% of us live in ‘developed’ or ‘first world nations’ - I’m amazed that only 50 GW of new coal was built last year. (Bad - but not as bad as it could have been.) But 7 TIMES that was build in new solar! That’s 350 GW! A couple times the coal figure was built in wind. AND Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
SOON many old coal plants will start to retire. The wind and solar and backup batteries should be there to help them close.
ENERGY IS ONLY HALF THE ENERGY TRANSITION STORY!
As we Electrify Everything - we’ll end up using less than half the energy we do today. How? Because burning stuff like cavemen wastes 60% of the energy as it wafts away as waste heat and noise and light.
(I’m still not convinced we’ll have cheap flights - but electric mining, industrial heat, transport etc are all possible - and becoming easier.)
The bottom line? If anyone tells you “We use blah blah Exojouls of fossil fuels a year” remind them gently that we only need 40% of that as we electrify everything.
Finally - OF COURSE clean energy is not the whole sustainability story. But it enables the rest of the fixes. Without it, we collapse, period.
This really resonates with me. I have much the same fears and reactions.
I already had a large amount to deal with as a member of the sandwich generation. Elderly parents on one side and struggling kids and one grandchild on the other. So anxiety was no stranger.
While digging deeper into what the future will bring I ran into the collapse theory, and all the ugly truths it brings to light. What little hopeium I had left was extinguished.
I've become accustomed to shutting down and finding an escape even before climate reality set in.
I find solace within music, art and creative outlets. I started a large polinator garden to save a tiny sliver of the natural world. Being engaged in something you know makes a positive impact, no matter how small, is as healing an escape can be, I think.
I will never stop panicking inside wondering if I should be prepping or building a family getaway that may be self supporting.
I'm getting a little old for that challenge.
I'm retiring soon, after 45 years in a great job, and never dreamed that all of the money I've set aside and plans I've created could all become worthless over time.
Funny how our coping mechanism will keep us from doing the hard stuff because that requires facing hard realities.
I will be getting more involved with orgs that are trying to help us save what's left, if for no other reason to be with like minded individuals. Misery loves company.
I'm sorry I didn't start to really prepare sooner as well. I'm now 71 & health matters plus lack of energy & motivation make it seem impossible. Lo Siento amigo
I also am in my seventh decade. My kids are both grown and still fighting the good fight, but man this shit drags you down after awhile. An earlier post mentioned whiskey, which helps (in moderation). Also dogs or cats, or bycycles. My wife gardens, but it doesn't do much for me.
Yea, my 2 pups keep me company always. Two granddaughters bring some joy but also concern about their future. It is kind of exhausting isn't it? I try to stay present and enjoy the little things. I live in a constant state of "letting go", or working on it.
Mostly, collapse aware means the same to me. Instead of TV shows (my wife does that one), I live in video game worlds, usually playing a character who is my complete opposite. Presently, I'm playing Conan Exiles, which is a game set in the world of Conan the barbarian. I play as an extremely violent slaver who rarely speaks and has no friends (only "property"). The world is scattered with ruins of an old civilization that has long ago gone extinct. Tribes and clans remain, descendents of slaves of the old empire.
Honestly, the only thing I have in common with my character is that we're both tall and have long hair. I also have no friends, but I'm not about to go "collecting" some by means of bludgeons and chains. Somehow though, this setting, the brutality of everything, the absolute dearth of anything resembling human connection... It's bizarrely... soothing? I think it's like if you feel chilly inside your house on a very cold day, but you step outside for a few minutes into the frozen air. When you come back inside, it feels warm for awhile.
Also, whiskey.
This makes some sense Patrick. But I'm concerned myself that our world will soon be similar to Conan Exiles. Then there will be no "warm again" to find. Lo Siento
I'm just enjoying what's enjoyable while it is.
I have been collapse aware since 2010. What that meant to me was the death of an idea of modernity which after dying (and a period of grieving) left me free to see some atrocious things modernity did and why it is important to undo them to embrace any hope for a future.
Native Americans predicted that the white man would spoil and poison the land even as we ethnically cleansed them off that land. Their insight came from thousands of years of homeostasis on this continent.
Being collapse aware made me aware of colonialism as a virus.
Being collapse aware means I could see the inherent stupidity of the "western civilization" that folks on the alt right (like Jordan Peterson) think they are defending.
Being collapse aware gave me insight about the folley of Carl Marx in trying to write a theory about the fate of the working class struggle in assuming the means of production - in complete ignorance of the relationship we must have with the land.
Being collapse aware means that I have become community aware: where do we have actual community in the West when we put parents in nursing homes and have no traditions which bring us together to be real contributors to each other's lives? You won't find community beyond meaningless events, pot luck dinners, county fairs, and the like which do nothing like a community. You won't even find real community in that rave in the dessert where they bring a bunch of consumer goods in and pretend to live off the land for a week while pretending they have created an alternate economy, and that they have had a spiritual experience because they burned a giant wooden man at the end.
Being collapse aware means that I am aware of the destruction of community networks that existed first in Europe with the pagans, the gnostics, the Roma, and the gypsies; and then in the Americas where we ethnically cleansed the indigenous, killed off their food sources, and sent their children to boarding schools to learn our ways of resource and expansion based prosperity.
Being collapse aware made me realize that we must bring back, rebuild, and reinvent the human community traditions that colonialism attempted to erase.
Yup, all of that. For us it also means desperately trying to put together a functional community now that will survive collapse, even though we know it's probably futile and we all still have to work so we don't really have the time to sacrifice but we're doing our best and hoping we can get something set up before we all collapse ourselves from burnout. It's effing exhausting
Collapse awareness includes most of what you listed. Lo Siento is a term in Spanish that means "I feel it". That's what I say when I hear you and others like you speaking about this. Everyone who resonates with this should follow each other. Community is helpful. It helps regulate our nervous system. I am going to follow those who understand this.
Surprisingly few comments about this so far. I have had a bit of time to think this through (I became aware that this particular civilization was going down when I was flying around the country patching up computers for the Y2K bug). When people lost their minds over what was really a rather small technical problem, I realized that they weren't going to do very well when a real crisis came.
And I started reading up on possible futures.
Really, I still have high expectations for humanity for many thousands of years to come, but the short term view is pretty horrible, and didn't have to be like this.
We have hit peak oil and peak industrial output already, we will soon hit peak population and peak food production. I think we can save enough scientific and other knowledge to create a better system after the crash, but there aren't many people working on that yet.
And if prepping for yourself isn't exhausting enough, add prepping for kids and grandkids. I have two grandsons. Most of my neighborhood is also old farts, who consider me the young and healthy one. Bah.
There's "hopium" and then there's peer-reviewed engineering. I've been where you are. I watched my son's 5 year old body wracked with pain during cancer treatment - and then learned about peak oil. "Great - gotta try and save my boy from cancer -and then get out of town and save my family from the Road Warriors and Warlords and find myself someone like Mad Max to buddy up with."
But I was not getting enough sleep, and was quite unwell myself. I helped arrange a book tour for Richard Heinberg back in the day and read most of his books. I got permission to screen a half hour cut of "End of Suburbia" in the NSW Parliament house. Our team did so much stuff, before we eventually all burned out.
And then? My boy pulled through, and the expected peak oil in production did not hit in 2011, or 2015, or 2018, or the many other predictions. I know oil is finite - I'm not pretending it isn't. But check this out! In the 20 years since I became peak oil aware, I explained to people again and again and again over the decades that because renewables are intermittent you have to Overbuild them SO MUCH, and use SO MUCH STORAGE, that it would bankrupt any first world nation that tried! I tried to explain this again and again and again because I was so scared, and it was true!
Until it wasn't.
That reality crept up on me. I became pro-nuclear - in Australia - a land that has nuclear banned! And in the meantime, the learning curves and economies of scale had brought down the cost. Overbuild was now economic - even cheaper than coal!
AND the EROEI was now fixed! Solar cells only used 1/3 of the high-embodied silicon of 2004. Wind towers were now so much bigger and taller they caught vastly more energy, fixing their EROEI. David Murphy was one of the founders of the very EROEI concept - and he says solar is now up around 10 which is fantastic.
That's just the energy transition. Then there's Precision Fermentation, Protein powder from Seaweed which could feed a world of 12 billion from 2% of the oceans, modern HVDC that could take power live from the equator to the North Pole for only 16% power loss - meaning NO NATION need have their renewables experience a dark northern winter, and so many other answers.
But sure - Trump could get in and we could nuke ourselves back to the stone age.
But is that inevitable? Or can we fight that?
Because there is no TECHNICALLY inevitable reason we must collapse. There are new sustainable building materials, more attractive and ecologically efficient town plans, and the possibility of exponential tech curves in Ai and robots that could end up fixing water issues, invasive species, cleaning up the plastic, replanting forests, and so many other things with super-cheap labour.
My question to you is this - what haven't you read?
What DON'T you know you don't know?
Try here: Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist who analyses the global trends.https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/
Michael Barnard is one of the most prolific energy bloggers online - and knows his stuff!
https://cleantechnica.com/author/mikebarnard/
You DO NOT have the time to read all their articles - but they are 2 amazing sources! I wish you would get a bit obsessed with both of them.
I have listened to 20 years of Doomerism. You know what I see now? Remember the story of the deer growing exponentially? Remember how exponential growth is surprising - even sneaky - because for the longest time everything seems OK - as the growth is invisible - then suddenly the Petri dish is full at 11:59? I see that happening now. But in a GOOD way! With renewables and EV's.
We are Electrifying transport so fast with EV’s that there will be an oil GLUT of about 4 mbd by 2028. (Edit - maybe 2029). "Big battery" is about to threaten "Big Oil."
https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
In a world still STARVING for new energy (let alone replacing old fossil fuel energy) - where only 17% of us live in ‘developed’ or ‘first world nations’ - I’m amazed that only 50 GW of new coal was built last year. (Bad - but not as bad as it could have been.) But 7 TIMES that was build in new solar! That’s 350 GW! A couple times the coal figure was built in wind. AND Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
It could be 2 to 3 times FASTER than the IPCC’s Paris goals by 2030! https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-one-terawatt-of-solar-deployed-annually/
SOON many old coal plants will start to retire. The wind and solar and backup batteries should be there to help them close.
ENERGY IS ONLY HALF THE ENERGY TRANSITION STORY!
As we Electrify Everything - we’ll end up using less than half the energy we do today. How? Because burning stuff like cavemen wastes 60% of the energy as it wafts away as waste heat and noise and light.
DW (Deutsche Welle news) explains all this in 10 minutes - a good intro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk
Then there’s Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie:- we’ll do 95% of the stuff we do today on 40% of the energy. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
(I’m still not convinced we’ll have cheap flights - but electric mining, industrial heat, transport etc are all possible - and becoming easier.)
The bottom line? If anyone tells you “We use blah blah Exojouls of fossil fuels a year” remind them gently that we only need 40% of that as we electrify everything.
Finally - OF COURSE clean energy is not the whole sustainability story. But it enables the rest of the fixes. Without it, we collapse, period.