I tried posting this on all the main venting subs but it kept getting removed so hopefully I found the right one. FYI lots of this is about US politics. Trying to not be a US defaultism person.

I've been overwhelmed thinking about how it feels like the world has always been against us. our childhoods already started off on not the best note because of the 2008 market crash. Everything just keeps getting worse. We had covid halting our lives right as we were entering adulthood, and the price of education is crippling.

We have landlords causing a housing crisis making it feel impossible to get started in life. And there's billionaires hording all the wealth while grocery prices have skyrocketed. And on top of that we can't even get affordable healthcare.

And then now we're seeing the effects of global warming with no end in sight and we have a president who doesn't even believe it's real who's bought out by billionaires. Our clothes is all made of plastic so the next generations won't have anything to thrift like we do.

And then there's the rise of sexism, homophobia, and racism because of people like Andrew Tate, Trump, Elon, and Jordan Peterson. It's just feeling so overwhelming right now. And the government trying to control women's bodies and states banning anything related to LGBTQ people in schools. Sorry for the doomer post.

https://preview.redd.it/15ubl1nnglde1.png?width=2476&format=png&auto=webp&s=4082f5ec6abd111a06f02e7bb0ef6b70f561f936

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/jan/17/martin-rowson-global-co2-levels-met-office-carbon-dioxide-emissions-global-heating-cartoon

Basically, what I am suggesting is the possibility that living standard and lifestyle of most developed world might drop down to the level of...Amish people.

It's a devastating scenario for me, because I am a retired guy whose hobbies are drawing on ipad and use Blender on macbook pro. ( yeah not the best hardware choice, I know)

But part of me is kinda anticipating it, since it might be necessary for humanity. And although the collateral damage will be enormous, it will still fix a lot of existing social problems.

Hopefully.

I finished this a week ago. Easy read, very accessible. Regardless of where you are personally at with thoughts on collapse, most of the book is a firsthand account of a man who spent 30 years working in various US Federal conservation agencies and posting. As someone who's led a life less intimately tied to wild nature, I found it all at once inspiring and heartbreaking.

I particularly appreciated how Lewis approached the issue of making predictions of timelines. He specifically emphasized how futile it is to make specific predictions on timing but nevertheless presented his own idea for a timeline as an over-under. I thought this approach showed a high level of intellectual and emotional intelligence when approaching a topic like this, and his thoughtfulness was a breath of fresh air in this space.

I also felt his writing managed to capture both the human consequence side of collapse while emphasizing the tragedy that it is for wildlife, plant life, and the web of life itself. He came at the topic from the perspective of life as a whole without straying into saccharine sentimentality, which I think is very rare.

For those of you who have read it, I'd be happy to hear if you had any particularly strong thoughts.

I'll put his website here for anyone who's curious: https://race2extinct.com/

I'm in no way affiliated to Lewis, for the record--just really appreciated his writing.

Guessing most of you here are service or white collar office workers. I've got a pretty strong conviction that when collapse happens, money will be one of the first things to go bust. Think rampant inflation, distrust in fiat, central banks collapsing, social support networks failing, new monetary systems springing up and burning out. It's already been on track to happen in a lot of the developed world for decades, COVID just accelerated it, with climate change about to really exacerbate things.

Economies will collapse. Your current set of skills will no longer be in demand and you're going to need to figure something else out. By far the most important thing you can do right now to prepare to support yourself is learning and developing critical societal skills. Home maintenance and repair, tailoring, hunting, husbandry, auto mechanics, welding and machining, electrical work, logging and milling, something. Become physically strong if you're able. These are the kinds of labor that will be in demand. You can learn a lot of these things at a community college or trade school, or through volunteering in agriculture, construction. Become good friends with your neighbors, especially if they're laborers.

I just wanted to share some observations about an Emergency Preparation Event I went to yesterday. For context, I live in a very liberal town of about 10,000 people in Western Washington that has a large retirement population.

Anyway, one of the local libraries held a free event yesterday on emergency preparation. It started at 10:30 in the morning (on a Thursday). I go to events the library hosts every once in a while and there are typically about 20-30 people in attendance, and that's if it's a week night or a Saturday. But yesterday there were probably between 75-100 people! It was held in a decent sized room, but I they ran out of chairs. I had to sit on the floor up front with a handful of others, and there were people standing in the back as well.

People were also really concerned about the L.A. fires; it was something that kept coming up. We're not in nearly as dry of an area (although it can get rather dry here in the summers), but it was clearly on a lot of people's minds. I think people are quite concerned about the rapidly shifting climate and the extreme weather events that are happening because of that.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting how massive of a turnout it was on a weekday morning, even if a good percentage of them were retirees. I expected maybe 1/4 of that size, at most. It makes me wonder if more people are becoming aware of how vulnerable modern society really is.

Edit: grammar

I spent the bulk of last year dwelling inside of my own head and going through the 5 stages of grief relative to climate change. Over the course of the last several years, I went from being a climate skeptic to being fully collapse aware.

One thing that keeps bugging me is the desire to do something about it, either make a difference, or help open somebody else's eyes, but nothing seems sufficient. I am wracked with impotent rage about my inability to do anything of consequence about our current predicament. Being so powerless and unable to help actually causes my soul and spirit a significant amount of pain.

I realized late last night that maybe our job here is to simply bear witness. To observe and record our decay so that future historians might be able to make sense of what happened to us. I saw a funny Tiktok this week that had the caption "We are at the point in history books when readers ask themselves "Why didn't anybody do anything to stop it?" We are the citizens of post WWI Germany rallying behind a young, charismatic Hitler, we are the Native Americans shaking hands with newly arrived colonists, we are Roman citizens eating bread and watching circuses.

There is honor and value in simply existing at this point in history and bearing witness to the absurd atrocities of our times. Does anybody else feel this way? What is everyone doing to record their snippet of the zeitgeist? Do people journal, or blog, or craft interpretative pottery? I would like to be able to leave my perspective for some future historian to find so they can help make sense of what became of us.

I’m just curious what people think and speculate how the good old US of A will go down and what will happen to states or we just stay as we are just more Smokey just curious and here are my three theories.

Honestly h5n1 or it name bird flue will become a pandemic and a very bad one due to rfk probably being over the cdc and anti vax.

Good old war we might just got to war with Canada or the whole of South America talking about how we want Panama Canal back or we might go to war with Canada let see where the night takes us .

Solar flare we’re going to have a solar maximum this July so who knows if the light will stay on or not .

Knowing all my guess I want to hear yours see if we are sharing the shame Brain cell.

Collapse can get ya down. for sure. There's a whole subreddit dedicated to it r/collapsesupport... But in my experience both personally and with other collapse aware people I know eventually you reach a state of acceptance.

It's a form of grief really. The true realization of the inevitably and horror of our futures. And similarly to grieving a deceased loved one or a past relationship, eventually you accept it and it stops bothering you. Even slightly.

How many people here would see themselves at this stage? Personally I know I have frequented this sub a lot less since becoming okay about collapse. So perhaps others who are, aren't here either.

Nevertheless, I wonder, anyone else here on this boat?

Since the election in the US, I've been thinking about and having conversations about how men and women are relating. There's definitely an increase in misogynistic rhetoric meanwhile women are saying having a boyfriend or husband isn't worth the effort and stress. But as collapse unfolds, how will this change? How will women be safe? Will good men step up?