Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCXLVI–
Laughing at Our Self-Destruction.
Today’s Contemplation is a little different. At the start of this year, I was contacted by award-winning author and humourist Scott Erickson, who offered to send me a copy of his recently released book, Laughing at Our Self-Destruction: How to Stop Worrying and Accept the Impending Collapse of Human Civilization. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to engage with it, and what follows is my review of his thought-provoking work. It’s taken a bit longer to complete than I’d hoped — life, as always, had other plans — so my apologies to Scott for the delay. For those interested, you can find his book through various retailers (including Amazon.ca).
Book Review: Laughing at Our Self-Destruction: How to Stop Worrying and Accept the Impending Collapse of Human Civilization by Scott Erickson
Scott Erickson has accomplished something genuinely rare: he has written a book about civilizational collapse that is both intellectually rigorous and genuinely funny. Laughing at Our Self-Destruction guides readers through the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — with wit, honesty, and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how unsettling. The result is a work that functions as equal parts diagnosis, eulogy, and survival guide for the emotionally conscious.
The Diagnosis
Erickson pulls no punches. His central thesis is that collapse is not merely possible or impending — it is already upon us and accelerating. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, he weaves together the ecological, economic, psychological, and historical threads that have brought humanity to this precipice. The litany is familiar to those who follow these matters: ecological destruction on a planetary scale, a debt-based monetary system that functions as a Ponzi scheme, banking cartels that prioritize extraction over stability, grotesque inequality, and a perpetual growth imperative on a finite planet. What distinguishes Erickson’s treatment is his ability to synthesize these disparate crises into a coherent narrative without ever losing sight of the human dimensions.
The book is particularly strong in its exploration of the psychological mechanisms that keep us locked in self-destructive patterns. Erickson argues that the human ego — our attachment to identity, status, and certainty — is the primary obstacle to clear-eyed assessment of our predicament. “Human beings are not inherently irrational,” he writes on page 214. “It’s the process of defending our paradigm in the face of glaring facts that makes us irrational, that makes us defend what’s killing us.” This insight animates the entire project. Our addiction to growth, our worship of technology as salvation, our political paralysis — all are understood as expressions of ego defending itself against uncomfortable truths.
The treatment of technology is particularly nuanced. Erickson refuses the easy binary of techno-optimism or Luddite despair. Instead, he demonstrates how our technologies have trapped us in our current trajectory, how each “solution” to an existential problem often exacerbates others. The proposed buildouts of green energy infrastructure, for instance, require resource extraction that accelerates ecological destruction elsewhere. The book’s engagement with concepts like peak oil, planetary boundaries, and tipping points is accessible without sacrificing scientific credibility.
If you’re new to my writing, check out this overview.
See my free book offer to readers at the end of this Contemplation…
The Critique
Given the scope of the project, Erickson cannot cover everything in depth — and he is honest about this limitation. Still, I found myself wishing for more sustained engagement with several issues.
The most significant gap concerns the problem of scale. Erickson gestures toward it but does not fully reckon with its implications. The issue operates on at least two levels: the scale of human population relative to Dunbar’s number (our cognitive limit for meaningful social relationships), and the scale of proposed technological “solutions” that merely exacerbate overshoot. The former suggests that our political and social institutions are fundamentally mismatched to human cognitive capacities; the latter suggests that our addiction to techno-fixes is itself a symptom of the ego-based thinking Erickson critiques so effectively. A deeper treatment of these scaling problems would have strengthened the book’s already compelling argument.
Similarly, Erickson’s section on internalizing costs feels somewhat optimistic. He seems to believe that if we could properly account for externalities — the environmental and social costs that our economic system ignores — we might make better decisions. But this misses the issue of scale entirely. Even if we internalized all costs, the sheer magnitude of the challenges we face — climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, resource depletion — may exceed any feasible response, cost-internalized or not. The problem is not merely accounting; it is physics.
The distinction between problems and predicaments also deserves more attention. Problems have solutions; predicaments have only responses. Our ecological and economic crises are predicaments, not problems. Erickson hints at this but does not develop it fully. Recognizing that some challenges are inherently unsolvable — that they can only be managed, endured, or adapted to — is essential to the kind of acceptance he advocates.
The Hope
Given the title, one might expect the book to be unremittingly bleak. It is not. Erickson’s acceptance is not resignation, and his humor is not nihilistic. The book concludes with a call to savor life, to notice and appreciate what remains, to add something life-enhancing to every moment. “Add something life-enhancing to every moment,” he writes on page 255. “Make every interaction as life-affirming as possible. Leave every situation better than you found it. If you allow humanity’s downfall to destroy your capacity to affirm life, then the bastards have won. Don’t let the bastards win.”
This is not hope for salvation, but hope for meaning. It is the realization that our self-destruction is only depressing if we remain emotionally attached to outcomes we cannot control. Letting go of expectations does not mean giving up; it means freeing ourselves to act with integrity and compassion without requiring that our actions “work” in any grand sense. This is acceptance, not defeat.
Erickson recommends comedy as a coping mechanism, noting that comedy is tragedy you are not attached to. This is a profound insight. The capacity to laugh at our predicament — to see the absurdity of human behavior, the way our ego-based solutions generate the very disasters they purport to prevent — is not a flight from reality but a deeper engagement with it. He evokes Dr. Strangelove, the film that began as a serious drama about nuclear war and became a nightmare comedy, reflecting the absurdity of human behavior and suggesting, perhaps, that the end of humanity might be a good thing.
The Paradox of Action
This raises the question of what, if anything, we should do. Erickson is clear that activism aimed at “saving the world” is pointless. Every fire we put out pops up somewhere else, because the problem is not any particular policy or practice but the paradigm that generates them all. Even working on the edges is pointless, especially since no one appears willing to address the biggest issue of all: the pursuit of economic growth, which exacerbates every other problem and will lead to our extinction. Acting against this paradigm will get one labelled a domestic terrorist.
But if activism is pointless, what remains? Erickson’s answer is a kind of existential authenticity: act in your personal world, make every interaction life-affirming, savor what you can while you can. This is not a politics of transformation, but a politics of presence. It is a recognition that humanity has to change for any type of salvation, but that humanity doesn’t even think it has to. In the absence of collective transformation, the only sane response is to cultivate individual integrity.
This might seem like a retreat from responsibility, but Erickson would argue otherwise. The refusal to participate in the fiction that our current trajectory is sustainable — the refusal to collude with denial — is itself a form of resistance. And the cultivation of joy, of appreciation, of life-affirming connection in the face of collapse, is the most radical act possible. It denies the forces of destruction their ultimate victory: the destruction of our capacity to love and affirm life.
Conclusion
Laughing at Our Self-Destruction is an important book for anyone who has looked at the evidence — ecological, economic, historical, psychological — and found themselves unable to maintain either the optimism of the techno-utopians or the despair of the doomers. Erickson offers a third way: clear-eyed acceptance of our predicament, combined with a commitment to living meaningfully within it. The book is not a solution to our crises — there are no solutions to predicaments — but it is a wise and humane response to them.
One might quibble with some of the book’s emphases — I would have liked more on scale, on problems versus predicaments, on the ways technology has trapped us. But these are disagreements about emphasis, not substance. The book is already ambitious in scope, and Erickson has accomplished what he set out to do: guide readers through the grieving process and toward a provisional acceptance that is neither defeatist nor delusional.
In the end, the book leaves me with a nagging sense that hope persists despite all evidence. But Erickson has convinced me that this hope should not be for salvation — for the preservation of our current lifestyles or complex societies — but for something more modest and more precious: the capacity to affirm life even as it slips away. This is not hope for the species, but hope for the self. And in a time of species-level self-destruction, perhaps that is hope enough.
You can also find a short Q&A regarding the book that Scott did late last year with Sarah Connor of Collapse 2050 here.
Special Offer
If you have made it to the end of this Contemplation, I have an offer for you. Send me an email at olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com requesting a copy of Part 1 of my trilogy and I’ll fire off a PDF of it to you for your “fictional” reading pleasure. If you like the beginning of the tale, please consider ordering the trilogy here: Purchase Book(s) — Olduvai.ca.
What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:
Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.
Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.
If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my “fictional” novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the “profits” of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars):
Book 1: $2.99
Book 2: $3.89
Book 3: $3.89
Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a “tip” on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
https://paypal.me/olduvaitrilogy?country.x=CA&locale.x=en_US
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.