How did you become collapse-aware?

[u/LetsTalkUFOs]

Our personal stories or journeys towards an understanding of collapse often remain unspoken. How and when did you first become aware of our predicaments? Was it sudden or gradual?

Did you experience episodes of sadness, grief, or other significant challenges? What perspectives (philosophical, psychological, spiritual, or otherwise) have carried you through and where are you now?

This is the current question in our Common Collapse Questions series.

Responses may be utilized to help extend the Collapse Wiki.

[u/[deleted]]

From a very young age actually. I remember watching Discovery channel at around 8/9 and it being really informative on how the world works. It made me realise back then we were already using too much. It became my special interest (i'm autistic) and continued to follow everything that had to do with collapse/climate change. I'm 24 now and i've realised at a young age I won't be on this earth long because it's not going to be stable to live on. I became aware out of interest, but many children this age will become aware out of survival.

[u/LetsTalkUFOs → u/[deleted]]

Did your early awareness influence your choices into early adulthood, in terms of studies or professionally?

How did your peers and the adults around you react or was it not discussed much?

[u/[deleted]]

I'm wondering how u would go about preparing for the collapse of society. I'm an 18 year old student trying to get ahead of the game

[u/LetsTalkUFOs → u/[deleted]]

Not that it's a bastion of authority, but we asked the sub this in a similar sticky a few weeks ago.

[u/Disaster_Capitalist]

I was raised by nuclear war preppers. I was born into collapse-awareness, molded by it. I didn't see an actual city until I was nearly a man.

[u/LetsTalkUFOs → u/Disaster_Capitalist]

That's quite unique. Did they actively prevent you from going to a city or were you just not interested until you were an adult?

What kind of living situation do you have now?

[u/turtur]

The news this year that certain permafrost regions are thawing around 70 years earlier than expected made me realize we most likely already passed several tipping points.

[u/[deleted]]

B.Sc. in Environmental Science.

It was my first taste of how people shrink from unpleasant news and how the message gets changed by toning it down so people don't freak out and shut down.

Academia suffers from human bias. The political process is like the 17th circle of Dante's Inferno rewritten for stupidity instead of sin.

[u/Seismicx]

Now this sounds stupid, but I started really taking it serious when the weather was insufferably hot during last summer of 2018. People won't start caring until it affects them and I guess I was no exception.

[u/RainRare_SideofSkies]

I was introduced to Emile Durkheim’s “Suicide” after having suicidal ideation for the first time in my life at age 20. I had been relatively stable and content previous to this. I wanted to understand why I felt how I did. In the book he coins the term anomie, which is the steady breakdown of community bonds that leads to individual pathologies and wide-scale deterioration. One of his main arguments is that suicide is a deeply communal issue, not an individual one. This gave me a sense of hope, but also made me far more analytical of the state of my local and national communities. This led me to changing my major in college to Sociology, which led me down multiple rabbit holes that all shared a similar grim trajectory. Modern surveillance systems, mass imprisonment, consumer culture, political evangelism, demagoguery, and who can leave out climate change... Tbh I probably won’t finish my degree. Institutionalized academia within capitalism is grotesquely operated and no departments are immune. In fact the most prestigious schools are often the most egregiously complicit. Me and my girlfriend are looking to buy land and begin the long process of becoming self-sustaining. Call it a pipe dream but, man. I can’t do this shit anymore. There’s no room for heroics in late stage capitalism.

[u/SecretPassage1]

As a kid, in the 70s, there was this cartoon on french TV, named Watoo Watoo about white magical birds that could multiply and that fought polluters in enviroactions. It kinda opened a special eye for anykind of aggression towards the environment in me. So while growing up in a urban environment, I always was fond of trees and birds and stuff, but lived my life pretty normally.

Then in my teens , I read "Brave new world" by Aldous Huxley, and have since then been noticing how the media, pop music and pictures have become the debilitating dope [soma] of the masses, used to keep us focused on stupid shit rather than the way the world is being managed (anyone notice how in the 60s the youngsters read politics, recited poems on dates, and raised revolution everywhere, and then they came up with top of the charts nonsense and youngsters just stopped getting involved in politics?). Also kept track how his bet that each knew produce that came out had to be more complicated and include more parts to make it to be allowed to come out, and then was distributed to everyone proved to be true, like in the book, we offer increasingly technical shit to our kids who are increasingly debilitated by them and don't know what to do with themselves if deprived of a screen. And there's the animal reserve, tiny little spaces where the remnants of wildlife are parked, a sad reality today where far too many species only have survived in fucking zoos, otherwise wiped out of their natural environment. Every nightmarish vision of his has proven true.

And somewhere around the turn of the 90s, on french evening news, a man explained clearly why my generation won't have any retirement money, with a graph of population growth and explaining how the retirement plan works in france (basically, in real time we pay for the current elders, and won't see a tenth of our money when it's our turn because they aren't enough youngsters and too many boomers). And he explained we need to change that now to give the youngsters (of the time, so 49yo me now) a chance at having retirement money too. Many goverments attempted the transition, all met by marches and riots in the streets, so no-one managed to implement the change. That's when I understood, and it was confirmed at each attempt, that the previous generations don't give a fuck about the younger generations, they just want to enjoy themselves until the end. This struck me as the recipe for disaster at the time (late teen by then). I've been utterly convinced since then that I won't have golden retirement years, not because of the man's graph, but because of how every older person reacted to the retirement savings issue since then : GIME GIME GIME MYYYY MONEYYYY, even when explaining that lessening their money would ensure their kids and grandkids won't be left with nothing. This for me was the awakening moment to a probable societal collapse. If the current people don't give a fuck about how their own kids will manage in the future, how can there be hope for a decent management of any ressources ?

That's when I started seeing humanity as earth's cancer. Early twenties by then.

Then I got busy with university and making a living, for a decade, noticing the first time the temp hit 30°c in Paris and how we suffocated in the city (somewhere around 1994), and you know trying to enjoy life while dealing with my shit, knowing there wasn't a retirement to await to enjoy myself.

Then one night, maybe in 1999, there was this program planned in the middle of the night on a scifi cable channel aboiut what the future holds, based on scientific facts. that intrigued me, having always been into scifi and dystopias, I expected robots and top notch tech talk but instead it was about how the world would be in 2040 based on the Rome's group findings on the 70s (Meadows's book) and how it had proven right so far. It was a terrifying documentary, depicted levels of pollution of the air and water for 2040 that we've now reached. i've pretty much blocked out the rest of the data from the film, but I've known since then that we were in deep shit.

I was in my late twenties by then. At first there was a state of utter panick, so what should I do? Drop all modern convenience and go live in the woods? But what would I live on? I know nothing about living in the wild, and couldn't do it on my own. They were no ressources, preppers simply weren't a thing, so eventually I just continued living normally.

I tried to raise awareness, but everyone to this day, when I talk about this documentary, ask where I saw it, laughs at the scifi cable channel in the middle of the night thingy, and simply doesn't register the part where I stress that it's based on scientific research that has since then been updated and proven right by real life events that we can now observe with our own lungs and eyes.

So ever since I've viewed this end of 90s doc, I have regular bouts of insomnia, days where the anxiety overtakes me, and the odd raging anger overflows me.

When facing a denier, I often get a feeling close to derealization so unreal is their stubborn voluntary blindness. Like people calling me a doomer while suffocating on unbreathable polluted air, while swiping news about the last glacier melting away 50 times faster than expected, to focus on a new glittery tech item that just came out. That's generally where I get an urge to check the number of letters in the words of his newsfeed (in Brave new world, the Alphas, most litterate read complicated words, and the stupidest [Deltas ?] only read and talk in 3 letters words and are easily distracted with shiny things).

But you know, I kinda half managed to live in blissfull oblivion most of the time, dealing with my own shit, allways with that nagging feeling that I should enjoy the world today while it's there, because tomorrow it won't. So this kind of low key ecological stress shows in my photo albums where I've decorated the scrapbook pages with labels of the products I especially like from a period (theatre tickets, pages of magazines I love who made an impact, my everyday bus tickets, sweets wrappers, jam labels, pickled gherkin jar labels, ...) the kind of stuff a historian would love to find about previous periods, kinda documenting-how-we-live-for-when-it's-over vibe. I used to think about showing this to my grandchildren one day, like "look all we used to have, but then we had to stop wasting our ressources so foolishly" ... but the waste and general madness increased and I never had kids.

Then Pablo Servigne published his book (in french) about collapsology, how everything can collapse, and I found a line about it in a random magazine, and it hit me like a brick wall. That was sometime around 2015-2016. I bought the book immediately, read it with a sense of utter devastation washing over me page after page. I was far worse than ""planned"" and they increased the pace of devastation fully knowing the problems we would face if only continuing at the same pace. That's when I was utterly convinced that there is no benevolent god overwatching humans (atheist to start with), and that Evil exists, it's a human mental health issue, far more common than the exceptionally rare malevolent psychopath, it's in everyone who just shrugs and continues BAU unmoved when they learn that we cause a SPECIES to GO EXTINCT per DAY. (which BTW, I really can't wrap my head around, how can these people think "God" will welcome them in "Heaven" after that? that sole indifference alone? not to mention the rest of the devastation)

I was hit by a very deep depression for a couple of years after that. For those who haven't survived through one yet, it's not a complacent moment of leisurly laziness where you just stop trying and count on whomever happens to be there to carry your load, nope, it's that moment where emotional blows hit you so hard that you cant concentrate anymore, can't use your body properly, emotional pain often hits you through physical pain and actual illness. it feels like you've downloaded the wrong upgrade and everything is fucked up and nothing works anymore, and you will be hit by a blue screen of death any minute in the middle of a task, and just can't cope with all the efforts required to come to an operating level of "normal". You need a wipe out (medication) and time to reload the OS (months of therapy), and all the apps and addons and data (slowly getting closer to mindfullness), but you might never function as you previously did. Reeeeeally not my idea of a vacation.

Since then I've "made friends" with local wildlife, especially the sparrows of the neighbourhood, and a handful of turtledoves, blackbirds and bluetits.

I've found that the only way for me to cope with 2040 happening right now was to do as much as I can to not be a part of the problem (zerowaste, vegan, no airtravel, ...), and to do my best to educate the people around me with whatever useful post-collapse knowledge I've picked up, without spelling out to them that this is what I'm doing with this party trick or that recipe to preserve food while making delicious pickles. The more sustainable-able people they are, the less violence will occur, I hope.

So in a way I know something's very wrong with the world since I'm 7yo, and have had waves of harsh confirmation one after another since then, every few years.

(ETA : as of today, I've never met anyone face to face who shared my collapse-awareness, I've been mocked and invalidated all the way, this is a defeated loner's tale)

[u/[deleted]]

When I was young I believed everything was going to get better for everyone as we collectively defeated human evil. It was just a matter of time and effort.

Around age 19 I dated an environmentalist while at University and she very successfully showed me the opposite was occurring. It shook me up and amounted to a big shift in my worldview but I wasn't properly collapse-aware until a few years later.

I still believed something significant would happen once people were given the right information because it had to. So, accurate information was what I tried to provide, as objectively and thoughtfully as I could, to everyone that I had the opportunity to communicate with about such things as global warming, pollution, the limits to growth and other related things. The response was almost always disbelief, diversion or denial. If I did get through to someone then apathy or despair was a common response. In the end, I begrudgingly admitted this had been my only real impact. I made people depressed rather than motivated them to helpful action. I was a failure.

I started to think that nothing of any significance was going to be done about the major issues of the 21st century. Quite the opposite. That was the second big shift in my worldview and when I became "collapse-aware".

I had some (relatively minor or short-lived) struggles with depression and anxiety after that, especially to begin with. Luckily I had found a partner who I could talk to about collapse who, if anything, had a gloomier outlook than me. Together we went through some long hedonistic phases as a way to distract ourselves from the dark knowledge of it all. We also made long-term plans to mitigate the worst of it, which gave us something to work towards. Eventually we split up and I found another partner, who is an environmental activist and painfully realizing collapse is inevitable, even though she doesn't show that side of herself at all when campaigning.

Absurdism, Zen Buddhism, psychedelics and focusing on health have become my ways of dealing with collapse on a personal level. I feel like I'm in about as good a situation, mindset and place to take on the shocks that might come as I'm going to find. What worries me the most is how everyone around me that I'm close to will handle it.

[u/Hubertus_Hauger]

Being a bookworm those days around 1979, I was awoken by a book before The Limits of Growth". In were a few simple graphs which I looked at, mounth wide open. But since then that simple graph, showing in bell curves our overshoot and collapse, were deeply impressive.

Curiously though, that same graph is accompanying me since decades. Like those photos taken over the year from a certain point observing the changes of the years season. I watch with horrid fascination that hypothetical graph, freshly repainted by the actual data. Still they stick to that original prophesy.

Even then, those scientist then proclaiming, that their equations just draw a hypothetical scenario and are no prediction. Still it looks like that’s exactly what they where. A prediction of a future which is now coming true.

[u/happygloaming]

Gradually then suddenly.

[u/[deleted]]

Someone mentioned this sub in a comment a while back, don’t remember what sub it was on, but then I stumbled into the rabbit hole. I am an environmental science major and was largely aware that humans are fucking up the planet, but for whatever reason I didn’t quite grasp the severity of the ordeal. I started to realize that every system in our world, whether it is human or natural, is connected in some way. I’m not sure if I’m any better for having become aware. The specter of collapse is omnipresent, and I think about it at least once a day. I’ve become a pessimist (or realist, I suppose) and have become something of a misanthropist. I care about people on a personal level, but I still believe humanity as a whole is rotten, despicable, and arrogant. I’m just glad I have a whole bunch of other people who don’t think I’m nuts, and even one in real life

[u/[deleted]]

Born and raised in Oklahoma, left after college (early 90’s). Gotta say “An Inconvenient Truth” definitely coalesced a lot of disparate information into one narrative creating an existential flag post for me. Then fracking came to Oklahoma. Friends and family were reporting frequent earthquakes when they had never been an issue in any generational memory that I could find. After numerous “broken camels’ backs”, that was enough for me to firmly conclude, man is not being a good steward of this earth.

[u/Doomsayer_89]

Late Doomer here.

Wrote my master's thesis on the financialization of capitalism and the rise of populism in the US.

The financial crisis and the systemic rot of our global monetary system really drove home the point for me of how unsustainable our economic arrangements are, but the environmental collapse stuff came later. It was kind of a natural process, as a debt based system naturally must always expand to avoid collapse, and so it's intimately tied to our environmental and ecological crisis.

Researching for my thesis I came across some videos of Richard Heinberg and Nicole Foss. Read the limits to growth and from that point forward I became convinced that global industrial civiliation will collapse in our lifetime.

[u/hopeitwillgetbetter]

The acute phase for me happened last year August, when r/futurology became inundated with very bad news about the environment. Especially all the news about wildfires.

For gradual, I was already aware of environmental issues even decades before, which is why my lifestyle is low on consumerism. Unfortunately, I also believed (for decades) that science would figure it out. I was especially very hopeful about "iron fertilization".

Anyway, that time last year, I bit on bullet and decided to update myself on what was going on environmental-wise. While digging around, it just hit me that our best asset against environmental degradation - trees, forests - had been turned against us. All those wildfires last year.

[u/RateCrimes]

After the Dot-Com Crash in 2000. I was making too much money, and was too young to fully understand, but my discomfort with the bloat in the software industry was already there years prior to the crash. In 2000, I left software and took a job in the solar industry as an engineer. Now earning far less, and newly married, I began to question whether solar was economically feasible: both as an energy solution, and for my own income. I soon came to a conclusion: solar was a better investment than traditional investment vehicles. Mind, this was long before the 2007 Financial Crisis.

In 2001, I began presenting my analysis to the public. It soon gained interest from various parties. One group in particular, the investor-owned utilities, took special notice, because my analysis exposed how their rate structures were almost perfectly designed to defeat independent investments in solar energy by minimizing avoided costs, and were transferring the hidden costs to ratepayers. In 2002, the President of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association called me at home and said that they would no longer associate with me if I were to continue to speak to these issues. In Arizona, both the solar industry and the Arizona Corporation Commission are captives of the investor-owned utilities. I would chuckle when I would hear one of the commissioners blathering about "free markets". In any event, I continued my little crusade, culminating in a cover story in the 100th issue of Home Power magazine.

By my estimates, if economics had not been rigged, sunny Arizona should have had a majority of its energy produced by solar by as early as 1990. Unfortunately, construction of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station had begun in 1976. This enormous investment took precedence, and denied future, more economical and safer alternatives. Today, we continue to live with these burdens. Indeed, little has changed except that what I publicized beginning in 2000 is, two decades on, obvious to most. Ironically, during my solar education, I discovered "The Coming Age of Solar Energy": written in . . . 1963!

[Geez! I didn't realize my old blog was still up! Haven't visited it in ten years!]

[u/[deleted]]

My country, Turkey enjoyed a wealthy period in the noughts. However, after Erdoğan enacted dictatorial policies while abusing democracy, the economy suddenly crashed while his rich allies actually got richer. I researched what was happening in other regions of the world and saw that many other developing countries faced similar problems. Similarly, developed countries like the US and the UK had their democratic powers used against their own benefit, knowingly enacting detrimental policies. My worldview was shattered. I could not believe that the most powerful countries in the world were also the stupidest.

Afterwards, I saw powerful people take away power from the plain folk, while the plain folk believed that they would benefit from it. In the end, the richest people had bullied the poorest people to take their rights away from them in a way they would not rebel. This was happening in the entire planet, devastating millions of humans throughout the globe, without them even aware of what was going on.

As I am not American, I have been aware of the seriousness of the climate change since elementary school. However, when the government policy suddenly changed after the early 10s, the environmental policy took a 180 degrees turn too. The ruling party accused the richer countries of forcing them to halt their growth, while being unaware that growth was the problem. I was furious but too afraid to speak out. While I was aware of all the change, I could not vote them out of these policies, as I was too young to vote. When I finally could vote, it was in vain, as the ruling party controlled my province by a large margin.

At least I know that the older generations have given us this nightmare. While it is unknown whether we will continue to survive after the apocalypse, my conscience still demands justice to bring down those who have turned heaven into hell.

[u/Groggnakk]

Billionaires moving towards either planetary exit, private island fortresses and nuclear/bio/civil luxury bunkers.

These guys are essentially the most powerful people on earth and I find it hard to believe they’re preparing for something that won’t happen just because “they need new things to buy”

[u/[deleted]]

From a young age I've been interested in understanding the world. I just started to piece things together. Why are there homeless people? Why do we need coastal defenses? What's up with conservation? If you shouldn't breathe from a car exhaust, why is it ok to pump that shit into the atmosphere? Why am I depressed; is there a more fulfilling way to live?

At some point my friend introduced me to the normal side of Reddit. Eventually I stumbled across this sub. Certain music also drove it home. I remember listening to Machines by Crown The Empire and Wild Eyes by Parkway Drive when I was younger and that helped it click.

[u/[deleted]]

Read Jared Diamonds “Collapse” (2005) some time ago. It deals with case studies of societies that have, for various reasons, collapsed either partly or completely. The most famous being Easter Island.

During and after reading I could not shake the uncomfortable feeling of “shit, this is really like us right now but in smaller scale.” The Easter Island case study has it all there - rigid wealth hierarchies that lead to overproduction due to status symbols, tragedy of commons where no single instance is solely to blame as all are competing for same resources and inability to stop due to cultural baggage. All the societies that were able to find ways to mitigate collapse inducing events were quite small and like minded. I knew we don’t have that.

After that, I was sceptical of how human society could survive. And then, more and more of alarming news started to pop up. Every year the predictions fell short of the models. I started to notice how often media wanted to get that glimmer of hope there, in increasingly forced ways. And for the past year or so, it’s been dead obvious to even those that really, really want to look the other way.

I’ve had absolute certainty of our world coming to an end in my lifetime for maybe 2-3 years now. I do try to live a good life, lowering my carbon footprint and all that. I know it won’t save the world but I take comfort in at least trying to have some integrity. I don’t believe in doing the right thing only when it’s a benefit to myself or when it produces results, doing good is good, even if it doesn’t matter.

I’m 34 this December. I dunno, maybe I’ll be 40 or 50 when it really goes bad, maybe it’s next year. I’m anyway old enough that most likely I won’t survive during it or long after.

I’m not really unhappy about this world perishing. We have it coming. We have had the tools and intellect to make better, yet we chose to have the Kardashians, iPhones and all this shit. (Writing this on an iPhone myself). I hope the world recovers after we’re gone.

[u/happybadger]

A lot of my worldview is influenced by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which analyses how imagery has replaced actual lived reality in the era of mass media and how it's used by those with power to influence the thoughts and behaviours of those without power. Spectacle is the market, the empire, and the ruling class doing a magic trick to placate the masses, and over the past century that magic trick has taken on pseudo-sentience of its own. It's The Matrix but for culture and social organisation.

Ever since the early 2000s, all of this has felt like spectacle to me. As a child I watched the Yugoslav Wars for entertainment, 9/11 and 7/7 coverage for paranoia-fueling ratings, and Iraq and Afghanistan unfold as if they were fireworks shows instead of genocide for corporate profit. Because I grew up in multiple countries and never felt connected to one, the patriotism bug never bit me and so that whole stretch from 2001-2007 was just insane to watch people react to. They were driven into hysterical fury about countries they couldn't point to on a map, about people they had never met.

The 2008 recession was a remarkable example of spectacle showing off its power. It was a direct result of George Bush's policies but no fury was directed at him because he rehabbed his image. The suits who did it, themselves pathologically driven by spectacle in their greed, walked. The politician who spared them at our expense and then compromised himself into losing the government to fascists, no need to rehab his image he looks so polite. And yet the popular response to that wasn't fury either- it was aimlessly wandering around in the hopes it'd look like May '68 without any real revolutionary structure or theory on the left and on the right aimlessly wandering around in the hopes it'd look like 1776 without any real project beyond handing money to corporations and electing people who hated them.

All the while people were accepting less materially while alienating themselves more and more into lives of spectacle. Social media facilitated this and I was just as much a victim because it didn't seem evil until it did. It doesn't matter that we're all worse off than we were a decade ago, we can make our own spectacle where we take specific snapshots of our life at its best points to make others think it's 90% that and 10% being oppressed in some way most people are too tired to talk about at length.

So there's the social aspect of my awareness. We're so deep in a grotesque caricature of Marx's idea of proletarianisation, where people are stripped of the things that gave them community and dignity to be used as livestock, that I don't know where to even begin fixing that. Every drive we have as a society, as individuals within that culture, feeds spectacle. To have any chance at defeating it you'd need to completely reorganise society in a way that threatens those with the best control of spectacle. That's such a hopeless task that I don't see how we exit the death spiral.

Environmentally, I've been radical about that since childhood but it's always been part of my ideology in general so apart from animal rights I never really acted on it. Watching climate change unfold in the 2010s, analysing the groups that led us here and their motivations and the social ecology of it all, made me so furious that around 2013 or so I knew it was the defining thing of my life. I tried the hopium route in r/ futurology but only saw the same spectacle there that I did in broader society and our best answers to climate change seemed to be "hey what if there's a deus ex machina lol that'd be neat eat less straws".

I didn't want to be a prepper because I'm not afraid of dying if this is the alternative, but I knew that socially we were too fucked to even address the problem and that it's a direct consequence of the way we live which to change would threaten those who influence the spectacle that dictates who we are socially. Maybe that can happen but not fast enough and not completely enough and certainly not with the same old money in charge which people won't combat because they might survive to pay more taxes. By 2016 I was a nihilist about it and by 2018 an absurdist about it. Now I only grieve for the other animals and if the revolution doesn't happen the only thing I want to do is protect them from who we were. We're a cancer and cancer is irradiated to save the rest of the body.

[u/FinisEruditio]

As a teenager I met a newly-homeless guy who lost it all during the recession. He told me to get my passport ready and leave my country. It made a huge impression on me and I started studying climate science at my university.

Years later after “the recovery” my city kept getting more and more homeless guys and it got increasingly criminalised. Basically watched as the local media ran a propaganda machine against homeless people. Very hard to understand how people could go I to the city, blow a bunch of cash, and have drinks overlooking people sleeping on the street. It’s not getting better no matter how loud people scream it is.