Becoming collapse-aware is a strange experience. You go from thinking civilization has a future—maybe even thinking its best days are still ahead—to realizing that civilization is already collapsing and has been for a while. It can be a bit disorienting.
In 2020, after several years of learning about things like climate change and sustainability, I came to the grim conclusion that the collapse will probably cut my life short, along with the lives of everyone I love and care about.
Naturally, I experienced a lot of negative emotions: fear, anger, grief, and many other feelings that are difficult to explain. One of the strangest feelings was the realization that not only is our civilization doomed, the fact that it’s doomed has been obvious for a long time, and somehow I never noticed.
Around that time, I read a wonderful book by William Kötke called The Final Empire, which explains in detail why civilization is inherently unsustainable and why it will collapse by the mid-21st century. Out of curiosity, I checked to see when the book was originally published, and it was 1993—almost 3 decades ago!
I was stunned. How was this guy able to figure out that civilization is going to collapse in a matter of decades while everybody else was still expecting a future like Star Trek? Of course, the answer was right there in the book:
“The consensus assumption of civilization is that an exponentially expanding human population with exponentially expanding consumption of material resources can continue, based on dwindling resources and a dying ecosystem. This is simply absurd.”
…click on the above link to read the rest…
