Collapse is not an event. It’s a lifestyle.
There is a saying: when you’re going through hell, don’t stop to smell the roses.
At first glance, it sounds sensible enough. Why linger in misery any longer than necessary? Why dawdle while the flames are licking at your boots and the demons are already arguing over your paperwork?
Fair enough.
The trouble is that haste has a habit of making certain wounds deeper. Sometimes the shortest route through suffering is not the fastest one. Sometimes rushing merely allows the rot to spread further beneath the floorboards.
And what is true for individuals is doubly true for vast systems over which the average person possesses approximately the same level of control as a squirrel has over continental drift.
I am in my mid-fifties now, and life has taught me the value of patience.
Not willingly, of course.
Patience was hammered into me by disappointment, sharpened by experience, and occasionally reinforced with a shovel.
Even so, despite the collection of mental scars accumulated over the decades, I still catch myself simmering with impatience.
Part of me still longs for the grand eclipse. The collapse. The cleansing fire. The dramatic finale that finally resolves the mountain of absurdity that has been accumulating for years like uncollected garbage in the alleyway behind civilization.
It is an attractive fantasy.
If everything is broken, perhaps it would be better if everything simply broke at once.
No more waiting.
No more pretending.
No more endless episodes of a show whose writers ran out of ideas three seasons ago.
Yet I am fully aware that this impulse is childish.
The world is exquisitely indifferent to our preferences.
It does not alter its trajectory because we are tired of watching it drift. It does not accelerate decline to accommodate our impatience. Nor does it postpone consequences because we have failed to prepare for them.
Reality has never been particularly interested in customer satisfaction.
Eventually I stopped waiting for the curtain to fall and began observing the madhouse for what it actually was.
And there is a strange beauty in ruins once you stop insisting they ought not to exist.
One of the great mistakes people make is imagining decline as a cinematic event.
They expect a climax.
A final scene.
A dramatic moment when everything snaps at once and the entire audience collectively gasps as the lights go out.
Reality is rarely so courteous.
Civilizations usually do not collapse with a bang. They decay through layers of denial, institutional inertia, distorted incentives, bureaucratic self-preservation, and collective self-deception. The process is often measured in decades rather than years, and in generations rather than election cycles.
That is precisely what makes it so difficult to recognize while living through it.
About two years ago, my best friend died.
He was politically active. One of those people perpetually trying to repair machinery that had already swallowed its own instruction manual.
I spent years trying to convince him that certain developments required time. That some processes had to mature before they could be confronted.
He refused to wait.
He pushed. Fought. Argued. Agitated.
In the end he moved very little while burning himself to ash in frustration.
When he died, he was broken.
Broken because the future he had hoped for never arrived.
That changed something in me.
I used to wonder how much lower our species could sink.
Then I remembered the Koreas.
Once upon a time, North Korea was the wealthier sibling while South Korea was the struggling backwater.
History, however, delights in humiliating confident predictions.
Decades later, the South became one of the most successful economies on Earth, while the North transformed itself into a dystopian museum exhibit dedicated to ideological rigidity.
What interests me is not the divergence itself but the lesson concealed within it.
People often assume there must be a floor.
Surely things can only become so bad before reality intervenes and forces correction.
History repeatedly demonstrates otherwise.
There is no dependable floor.
Human stupidity and cruelty possess an extraordinary ability to continue digging long after spectators assume bedrock has been reached.
Societies can become poorer.
They can become more corrupt.
More dysfunctional.
More authoritarian.
More irrational.
And they can remain that way for astonishingly long periods of time.
The belief that improvement must be imminent is not analysis.
It is hope wearing a fake mustache and pretending to be analysis.
That realization changes one’s relationship with the future.
If you happen to live in a place where the darkest impulses of humanity are flourishing without restraint, departure may be the only rational option.
Outside such extremes, however, much of the world remains tolerable for those willing to adjust their expectations.
Adaptation begins with understanding the nature of the problem.
Many people still speak as though our present difficulties emerged yesterday.
They did not.
Affordable energy is a blessing for nearly everyone. Lower costs benefit households, businesses, and productive enterprise alike.
Yet it is a mistake to imagine that cheaper energy alone can reverse decades of accumulated dysfunction.
The deeper problems were generations in the making.
For decades much of the developed world has operated on increasingly abstract economic foundations.
Money creation became policy.
Debt became growth.
Accounting became narrative management.
Financial engineering gradually displaced productive activity as the preferred route to wealth.
At the same time, corporatification and financialisation hollowed out many of the institutions that once provided resilience.
Small and medium-sized businesses—the traditional backbone of healthy economies—found themselves competing against organizations whose advantages were often political as much as economic.
Competition weakened.
Consolidation accelerated.
Entrepreneurship became increasingly difficult while speculation became increasingly rewarding.
The results are visible almost everywhere.
Productivity stagnates.
Infrastructure decays.
Housing drifts further beyond reach.
Young families postpone major life decisions.
Entire sectors survive only through perpetual intervention and financial life support.
None of this appeared overnight.
None of it will vanish overnight.
My father once told me that solutions require as long to bake as the rot required to spread.
There is considerable wisdom in that observation.
Problems often require roughly the same timescale to solve as they required to create.
If decay consumed forty years, recovery is unlikely to require four.
Unfortunately, we have not even agreed on the diagnosis.
In many cases we have yet to admit the existence of the disease.
Which is why so much public discourse resembles theater.
Observe the endless parade of targets conveniently positioned beyond the careers of the people announcing them.
The dates hardly matter.
The pattern never changes.
The people making the promises will be comfortably retired before consequences arrive.
Difficult decisions are postponed.
Costs are externalized.
The bill is handed to successors who had no role in creating the problem.
If these issues were confronted honestly today, an uncomfortable reality would emerge.
National economies cannot function indefinitely on wishful thinking.
Physics cannot be negotiated with.
Arithmetic remains stubbornly unimpressed by political branding.
Yet genuine honesty would require questioning assumptions upon which entire careers have been constructed.
It would require institutions to admit failure.
Public figures to admit mistakes.
Beneficiaries of existing arrangements to surrender privileges.
That is a great deal to ask of human nature.
So the can continues its long and distinguished career as the most frequently kicked object in political history.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Perhaps the most iconic example is the endless procession of climate targets and net-zero ambitions—always safely distant, always just beyond the horizon, always far enough away for the architects to retire before reality arrives with a calculator.
Because genuine implementation would expose many of these promises for what they are.
Future problems are far easier to manage than present realities.
Especially when someone else will inherit them.
The same pattern appears in politics.
People remain perpetually fascinated by saviors.
Every election becomes a turning point.
Every administration becomes a new dawn.
Every candidate arrives wrapped in promises of renewal.
But structural problems are not solved by personalities.
They are solved by long, unpleasant, grinding processes.
This is why I find many political debates strangely uninteresting.
Whether the discussion centers on Trump, Biden, or the next collection of ambitious faces, the underlying reality changes very little.
Trump, for example, strikes me less as an architect than as a solvent.
He does not build.
He dissolves.
His utility, if one wishes to call it that, lies in exposing weaknesses, accelerating conflicts, and disrupting arrangements that may already be unsustainable.
History has always had destroyers.
Their purpose is demolition.
Not construction.
And sometimes demolition is necessary.
A structure rotting from within may require someone willing to expose the damage.
But demolition and reconstruction are not interchangeable activities.
The fantasy that one leader, one election, or one administration can reverse generations of dysfunction is merely another species of denial.
The problems existed before these politicians.
They will survive long after them.
Inflation provides a useful example.
Today’s inflationary pressures did not emerge from thin air.
Many of the forces driving them were set in motion decades ago.
In my view, one of the most consequential milestones was China’s entry into the WTO, which fundamentally reshaped global production and trade.
The consequences unfolded slowly.
Supply chains stretched across continents.
Manufacturing migrated.
Incentives shifted.
Capital flowed toward favorable treatment.
For years the benefits seemed obvious.
Only later did many of the costs become visible.
That is often how history operates.
Consequences travel on delayed schedules.
By the time they become obvious, the decisions that created them have already hardened into foundations.
Politicians continue their rituals.
Policies are announced.
Committees assemble.
Experts produce reports.
Some of it matters.
Much of it does not.
The larger currents are already moving.
Recognizing this should not produce despair.
It should produce clarity.
I am cautious by temperament.
That means I prefer to make peace with risk by examining it honestly.
What is the probability?
What is the impact?
What can be done to mitigate it?
Those questions are useful.
Panic is not.
Paranoia is not.
You probably drive a car without conducting a detailed risk assessment every morning.
You understand danger exists.
You accept it.
You take reasonable precautions.
Then you get on with your day.
Civilizational decline should be approached in much the same way.
The goal is not certainty.
The goal is functionality despite uncertainty.
This is where the discussion becomes personal.
I left home at fourteen.
Not because of some dramatic confrontation.
Not because of family catastrophe.
I simply left.
I have always carried a certain pride in that decision.
I was the oldest of seven children.
In many respects I was the prototype.
The rough draft.
The test model.
The path was considerably harsher for me than for those who followed.
Years before his death, my father apologized for that.
He admitted that I received less support than my younger siblings.
They had learned from their mistakes.
The others benefited from lessons acquired at my expense.
I thanked him.
Not because he was wrong.
Because I genuinely viewed the matter differently.
The greatest gift my parents ever gave me was freedom.
Not comfort.
Not protection.
Freedom.
A very long leash.
The ability to make mistakes, suffer consequences, and learn directly from reality.
No safety net.
No rescue team.
No cushions.
At the time I did not always appreciate it.
Today I would not trade it for anything.
The experience taught me something that becomes increasingly valuable during uncertain times.
Resilience is not built by avoiding hardship.
It is built by surviving it.
Like every young person, I wanted more than I could afford.
More fun.
More excitement.
More things.
Reality charged interest on all of it.
Without anyone backing me up, the consequences of poor decisions arrived quickly and with remarkable educational enthusiasm.
I learned financial management by setting money on fire at a pace normally associated with industrial welding equipment.
The lessons were painful.
The scars were small.
There were many of them.
By the time I reached thirty, I was rock solid financially.
Discipline had purchased freedom.
And freedom proved vastly more valuable than consumption.
Which brings us to what comes next.
Humanity is approaching an unusual milestone.
Peak population.
For decades developed nations worried about declining birth rates while the rest of the world continued expanding.
Increasingly, demographic contraction appears likely to become a global phenomenon.
The implications remain difficult to predict.
Yet one possibility fascinates me.
Human labor may gradually become less abundant and therefore more valuable.
Simultaneously, technology may continue reducing the necessity of labor for large portions of society.
If that occurs, the people best positioned to thrive may not be those with the largest appetites.
They may be those with the fewest needs.
I count myself among them.
My sense of security has never depended heavily on wealth.
It depends far more on simplicity.
I require relatively little.
Not because of virtue.
Because of practicality.
I will probably continue working until the day I die.
Not because I must.
Because I enjoy creating things.
The act itself remains rewarding regardless of economic conditions.
Creators have always occupied a peculiar niche.
They adapt.
They improvise.
They manufacture meaning from limited resources.
Perhaps that is the real lesson hidden within long periods of decline.
History does not ask most of us to save civilizations.
Few possess the power to do so.
What it asks instead is whether we can maintain competence, dignity, curiosity, and independence while larger forces unfold around us.
That challenge is difficult enough.
The road to hell, it turns out, is rarely a cliff.
It is a slope.
A long descent paved with compromises, delays, excuses, rationalizations, and comforting stories.
The encouraging part is that roads work both ways.
If decline occurs gradually, adaptation can occur gradually as well.
We are not required to fix the world.
We are only required to understand the terrain well enough to navigate it.
The rest is patience.
Until then, we watch the tide.
And wait to see what washes ashore.
