Accepting the Imminent Collapse
To accept the imminent collapse is not easy. Very soon, you find yourself returning to the bargaining stage.
The first time I thought I accepted that humankind is a lost cause for anything truly valuable1 was in July 2023. I quickly went through the five stages of grief, and then, two months after I had accepted it and was simply enjoying my life, I returned to the bargaining stage.
In November 2024, I accepted the imminent collapse for a second time.2 However, again, I found myself returning to the bargaining stage and thinking that maybe this or that particular thing could work.
What would full and permanent acceptance look like?
That would be to accept that collapse will occur, to stop trying to find ways of preventing it, and simply focus only on enjoying your life while taking the imminent collapse into consideration only for personal life choices; in other words, only regarding your personal adaptation plan.
However, as I said already, accepting this is not easy. At least, accepting it fully.
Has anyone actually, fully accepted it? I would very much like to know… mostly out of curiosity.
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Such as preventing climate change, building a better world, peace, cooperation, and some other things
I've accepted it. It feels a lot like the death of close family. It means that life will change forever. There's no going back to the way things were years or decades ago. That "person" (civilization, in this case) is terminal and will soon be no more. Most folks alive today can't imagine how that could be possible. What would the world even look like? How could humans live?
What helped me was looking back to the last time humans lived 100% sustainably. No extractive practices. No toxic emissions. Completely cyclical energy processes (within the bounds of entropy). The last time our ancestors did that? Before civilization. In fact, it was immediately before. Some societies were able to avoid civilization, and they remained completely sustainable. We modern folks have called them "undeveloped" or "savages."
How are these folks different from "civilized" folks? They don't rely predominantly on agriculture. They might encourage certain plants to grow that they prefer, but mostly they just hunt and gather what the planet provides naturally. They never over-populate because they only eat what's available to them. Unlike agriculture, there's no need to store up food surpluses for later, so there's no big fertility spikes (or exponential growths). They managed to live this way for a couple hundred thousand years before civilization, and they stayed stable and, from everything we know of anthropological and archeological evidence, happy.
So, the modern world is dying. I suppose we could try to preserve the fading "benefits" of civilization for as long as they last, or maybe we could retry a previous version of civilization (feudalism, slave systems, etc), but we've seen this movie before. We know that such systems are very destructive for the planet and for the lifeforms on it. We know they lead to exponential population growths, boom and bust cycles, and violence-based hierarchy systems. In short, we know that every version of civilization that we've tried over the past 10k or so years doesn't work.
Or, maybe we could do what our distant ancestors did. I mean, indefinitely sustainable and... happy? Certainly healthier than we are today. Seems like a no-brainer.
Anyway, looking into this stuff made me realize that the way we do things today wasn't inevitable. We aren't a broken species. We aren't inherently "evil." We're just trying something that really doesn't work. So long as we don't manage to go extinct, we can always try something different, even if that's just going back to what we know worked before (with some modern alterations, because genies don't go back into bottles).
This is all some wild notions, I know, but wild things are happening these days. Might be time we reconsider some fundamentals.
I think I have. I've been reckoning with it since I learned about entropy back in 7th grade😬 We live in an Imaginary system based on extraction and destruction. We call it "development." Entropy is the force that breaks down solar systems. Just think what this force will do to our imaginary ones.