- Joined
- Mar 29, 2021
I don’t mean this to be a doomer thread. Instead I wish to inspire an attitude of vitality in the face of a world falling apart, because I have faith in that the coming age will only be as dark as you’ll be prepared for it.
First, I must lay out why I believe we are heading for a dark age.
From what I’ve seen, there are three major theories predicting a future of collapse. I rank them in an order of sooner predictions to more long spanning prognoses.
Firstly, Modern Monetary Theory is likely to lead to global hyperinflation under current global economic pressures within this decade.
Secondly, under MIT’s 1972 “Limits to growth” model we are most close to the Buisness-as-usual-2 scenario in which world’s industrial output starts to go down gradually around 2040.
Finally, I think John Michael Greer’s theory of Catabolic collapse and Joseph Tainter's "COLLAPSE OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES" is very compelling and our current global civilization is in no way immune to their diagnosis.
In a more general sense the problem is that our modern global society has formed itself on the dependency that there always is room to expand by investing in the future and getting consistent material returns for almost a century.
What ever limits to growth were foreseen were always written off as problems that science would figure out. Biggest example being that once we go interplanetary and then interstellar we would essentially enter a post-scarcity paradigm. Well, we are closing in on 2023 and are not that much closer to an interplanetary civilization than in 1972. Instead we’re getting less and less return on resource extraction and those resources that have formed the backbone of our civilization are being regulated for environmental preservation.
We will probably never literally run out of oil, lithium and other important resources, we are just getting less return on investment to get them. A resource we are more literally running out of is the human resource due to a global demographic collapse and aging populations.
We might possibly never surpass the material abundance that the world has enjoyed for the last few decades.
However, here is my whitepill...
However, here is my whitepill...
While the coming economic crashes are gonna be a major blow, in all likelihood it will not turn our civilization into Mad Max within 2020s.
I believe the actual decline will last many decades until we stabilize at bizarro 1920s where the world is polluted with ancient plastics and material reclamation is one of the biggest industries.
It won’t have to be as bad as the 19th century. We will still inherit a lot of objectively useful knowledge. Everyone right now has the opportunity to supply themselves with a library of information that was not available to anyone before information era.
Besides we are much more built for an older way of life than how we are living now. That is why resource gathering, framing and crafting games are so addictive. Yes, real life is much harder than Minecraft, but difficulty in real life is really dependent on skills and how much you know what you are doing. Right now we have plenty of time and resources to learn how to thrive better than those who lived in the old days and those who right now are just sitting on their assess.
I’m cautiously suggesting to get into “Prepping” for a lack of a better word. More specifically greatly suggest getting into DIY hobbies like growing and carpentry to start building a mental map on what it takes to locally source your food and comforts.
Yes, learn to grow.
In fact, believing that your hobby bestows you with important future skills makes it that much more fulfilling.
More importantly people should get over the fantasy of being the lone wolf. What I believe is more realistic and valuable is getting over one’s autism and putting a foot in the door in building relationships with anyone who is part of smaller self sufficient communities.
People will suffer relatively to how dependent on modern complex supply chain comforts they allow themselves to become. City slickers will suffer the most. But again, the collapse will be slow and gradual, so those who “collapse” voluntarily won’t suffer like those who will be forced to give up their modern way of life involuntarily and unprepaired.
It’s not like the modern life is that fucking great. Most people have to wage paycheck to paycheck. Whatever is left over most often get spent on entertainment technologies that are only about indulging in escapist illusions of not living in our “modern day utopia”.
I believe the welfare of your next generations and your twilight years will benefit on how early you make the time and energy investment into preparing for an older life.
An existential consideration.
I think for many modern people the hardest existential pill to swallow will be the fact that it probably was never meant for us to reach the stars and the only peak of technology has always been the gimmick of very, very intricate silicone devices that could automate some rudimentary logic processes very, very well.In a way StarTrek’s vision of the future was a utopian myth made by nerds to justify letting them dictate the direction of humanity.
I don’t think the death of that myth should be mourned. Over the decades I’ve come to see that Ted Kaczynski was right. Following this path will only demand more and more sacrifice of individuality in order to sterilize humanity into being a “right-think” cog in an ever expansive technological machine.
Space-jumpsuit-communism was always pretty gay anyway.
Additionally, Peter Zeihan also deserves a look.
He mostly focuses on the global demographic collapse and predicts that it will cause a folding back of the modern global economic system.
However, I think he underestimates how much the US was already reaching it’s growth limits in the 70’s which forced it to move to a more globally expansive debt based economy and how much that is now part of US’s economic ecosystem.
Also, he believes that demographic problems can be remedied by the growth and influx of the Latin American population, which I’m sure plenty of you would object as a viable solution.
Great Reset
The “Great Reset” that has been pushed by WEF should not be viewed as elites turning contemporary normal way of life into Techno-Euro-Communism just because they got more greedy than they had before.I believe they are more or less seeing what I am trying to relay. However, since there is no historic precedent of a societal downtrend of this scale, they have no concrete models to predict the future with. So, to secure their grip on power they are doubling down on control.
The reason they are pushing the global warming narrative (whether it's true or not) is because admitting any other factor for the coming economic woes will only serve as an argument for less centralization and more for self sufficiency, which goes directly against their interests.
“What about Nuclear?” some may ask.
While I believe it can do a lot to keep the growth-train going, it is nowhere near the magic power source that cheap oil was before it became an environmental issue. Uranium might be astronomically more energy dense than oil with virtually no carbon emissions, however for nuclear energy to reach a somewhat similar integration it also needs batteries.I strongly doubt that lithium can ever be extracted efficiently enough cover the same demand that fossil fuels do.
“What about Automation and AI?” some may ask.
While automation does fill out a lot of human positions, it also greatly increases the need for human maintenance of those machines. The problem with those new work positions is that they will require an ever higher qualification and intelligence. The main problem with the demographic collapse is that we are most intensely losing the high IQ experienced autistic people, not the dumb ones.
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