How do you write about collapse, from within in a collapsing world?

And how long before us Substack authors are up against the wall.

Gonna get a little bit Meta today.

I started trying to write what I thought would be my real break-out piece, this summer: "How to Live Like the World Is Dying". Real hot shit concept in a world filled with people trying to live as if the world they grew up in still exists and where change simply cannot occur, I thought. I went through five different revisions of the content, multiple feedback sessions, thousands of words ultimately shredded, it never went anywhere. Ironically, my own life collapsed shortly afterwards and I seriously considered suicide twice in the aftermath of that this winter, I explained the why on Reddit.

Eight months later and I don't think the topic really has any merit anymore. At best I come off as a shallow bestower of pithy advice to the already damned, a half-baked end times Guru, trying to give generic suggestions of how readers of any background should live their lives when the context and meaning which has driven us for our entire evolutionary history has been stripped away by a mass extinction of our own creation. There were some gems of prose, sure:

"So what do we do? I have written, in the past, about the agony of nostalgia. How living under its influence is a poison for the mind as you cannot ever regain the world it promises you. Again: That world is dead. The world everyone reading this grew up in, which is recorded in books and television shows and countless documentaries forty years out of date yet still broadcast to children: It. Is. Dead. Nostalgia for it, for that environment, for unbleached coral and unpolluted beaches and untouched old growth forests, for undeveloped idyllic small-farm countrysides and water which won't pump microplastics into your blood - that Nostalgia will drive you mad. We cannot go back. We cannot live in the delusion that this is a future which still exists."

Maybe I'll go for round six with it, I don't know. Does it matter? Does pushing this "truth" on people even benefit them, vs just letting them have the bliss of ignorance for what little time remains when the outcome is already out of their hands? Why are we writing about this, folks? What drives us to do this?

It's deeply ironic, in some ways, that I keep writing at all. Two or three years ago, in another life, I discussed with my group back then how little point remained in the discussion of Collapse - because it was clear that we had locked in all but the most absurd outcomes already. How little remained to be said, now that there was definitely no magical solution to any of the most dire crises we had set in motion, crises which would almost certainly kill all of us long before we would have otherwise expired. At that point in the breakdown what are you really doing, other than chewing well-worn fat together for mutual comfort and chronicling matters for the sake of acknowledging that you witnessed them? Yet, here I am years later, still chewing that fat, the only change being the ever-accelerating graphs charting our impending demise.

Thus, why do we keep doing this? How do we keep writing on this topic? I'm not alone in my writing. Crim has his crisis report, there's dozens of others engaged in the the same game of making sense of chaos with varying degrees of accuracy and hysteria. You have the handful of seasoned writers, who shall remain nameless, who have managed to pivot into doomselling and make a tidy career out of writing forward-looking essays in painfully generic terms about how bad shit is definitely 100% gonna get also plz sign up to my paid newsletter/patreon thx!. Black sheep like Zitron, etc who provide a surprising amount of well-cited insight from within industry. Casuals like myself just mind-dumping. It's a mixed bag of wanna-be seers of all stripes, seeking to interpret the world around us. I don't know what my personal motivation even is, anymore. Catharsis?

Is what we’re doing journalism? Interpretive writing? Screaming into the void?

But what is the point? Does there need to be a point? Despite an eight month hiatus in publishing, I feel that my writing has become shallower and more reactionary & emotion-driven than ever before, even as I'm told that it's great and delivers such clarity. I can barely keep up with the pace of the decline all around us, now, my writing folder a mess of half-finished thoughts and essays which already seem to be little more than historical footnotes attempting to explain a single facet of the savage jewel being used to roughly dismember our society. How do you write an essay about a high concept such as "societies will fall apart internally potentially decades before resource scarcity and temperature chaos would have induced their collapse", when you are watching the imperial core of western civilization commit suicide in real time and precipitate exactly that social collapse, while you are writing about it. How do you respond and interpret and write something insightful about the rapid-fire sub-events of such a major event? When the complexity of the background elements would take a book, and the sheer insanity of the events themselves overpowers ones ability to write with any sense of formality and just descends into vulgarity.

I feel somewhat, I don't know, dirty that the most popular writing I have yet published on here, by a significant margin, is a totally unpolished and somewhat hysteric rant about currently unfolding events - which I frantically pounded out in under half an hour before I rolled over and went to sleep: a profanity-backed screed making broad sweeping predictions of a future which may or may not come true, and yet in doing so I clearly tapped a well of fear in the collective consciousness - resonated with folks enough that they overlooked the glaring glaring flaws in that piece and just drank deeply of it. Is this how cult leaders and other high-profile personalities find success? An innate ability to simply speak to The Vibe so poignantly and appealingly that they gain a following? Refined over time or simply born with it? I'm not sure that I like that idea, or what it says about our little collective of subject authors who freely splash a little science and fact in with just enough rhetoric to capture the attention of readers and keep them coming back for more.

I've unpublished “The Death of An Empire Comes Swift & Mercilessly”: I'm not proud of it, uncomfortable with the amount of reception it got, and I don't think I will try and write about current events again vs. poking at the abstract which drives them on a very infrequent schedule. I don’t like that I flirted with little more than “clickbait” for doomers, and that it was successful.

I particularly dislike the feeling that I am simply feeding a vision of a future desired by those who would be better suited joining a cult. Folks so desperate for the world to end and release them from the mundane struggle of their shitty lives, yet too unmotivated to do anything to change that situation themselves, that they will eat up the words of anyone who suggests some sort of end to normality is coming to release them “soon”. Begging for the apocalypse has always existed, doesn’t mean it’s healthy to facilitate it, even if we’re barrelling towards a structural breakdown. There are better things people could be doing with their remaining time than drinking doom content and praying for the end (there’s that pithy advice again).

And, again, what's the point of this? We're all of us discussing topics which at the least involve the termination of the American Century - the end of the western bubble of comfortable ignorance and easy mass consumerism enjoyed exclusively thanks to American economic hegemony, topics which escalate from there right up to the sterilization of all life on earth by 2100. That is a bubble of ease which all of us exist within, have only ever known, one which even when we travel fundamentally taints our perspective on the cultures and lives we are witnessing. How long can we keep this up, as the topics get grimmer and ever closer to home, as the direct impacts of events cease to be an abstract concept happening half a world away - and start to be felt within our own familial and friend circles. How reliable even is our own perspective on this sprawling interconnected collapse, when we dwell at the very heart of it - and the causes of it are what sustain our lives?

I was workshopping another piece in my head a month back, about how the era of dissident writers is over. How, for most of history, the author who was able to pierce the veil with his pen and capture the essence of truth from reality and bring it back to the reader in a comprehensible form was considered the most dangerous element in a society. How possessing that power swiftly saw you imprisoned, exiled, or simply killed - depending on the degree of autocracy in the authors realm. I thought about how that's been rendered irrelevant: the dissident writers of our times reduced to little more than another pixel in the ocean of white noise of the internet, any risk completely neutered by the sheer amount of content and voices with which they now compete for attention. Only in the most oppressive regimes does anyone still give a shit about a voice raised against the dominant ideology, now, and the developed world has sterilized that threat by amplifying the messaging of every lunatic within the asylum - silencing the risk factors through overpowering volume.

Yet, again, it is apparent that this playbook for easy management of dissent is being fed into a paper shredder even as I type these words, with the hands now at the wheel of America wholly ignorant of the gentle methods of coercion which have allowed it to maintain such easy control over thought and action for generations - swiftly and alarmingly falling back to more brute solutions to discontent. An entire thesis on modern authoritarianism, outdated before it could be teased from my mind and into this blog.

How many of us will keep writing about the end of the world, then, when our own societies start to fail? When our friends join the ranks of the homeless, we hear the lamentations of our cousins starving, and we see the noose and the endless darkness outside of it drawing tight around our own necks? Who will keep publishing, when enough of our systems have failed such that those still in control see a need to silence any voice, no matter how small? When transferring a flight in America will carry the same risk of extrajudicial imprisonment as the critics of dictatorships such as Belarus or Iran have long known?

Who will look past the cascading horror and continue to stare into the void, chronicling it, for no other comprehensible purpose or cause other than to say they witnessed the dissolution of all creation right up until the moment the light left their eyes? Can anyone remain objective enough to do this unraveling justice, even as it consumes them?

How far out is that turning point for those of us compelled to write, I wonder. Looking at the avalanche pace of collapse in America, perhaps not as far as we all thought five years ago.