It certainly won’t come all at once, more like death by a thousand cuts. You might lose your home, you might lose your job, you might get sick, and there’s no way to prepare for everything that might happen.
You might have an intellectual understanding of what’s happening, but it takes one or more events to start hard-wiring what collapse really is. It’s a series of little, or not so little, things that are cumulative in nature, each occurrence builds on top of previous occurrences and the weight will eventually become more than you can endure, and then you know collapse. Then you have an understanding that will transcend the experience of others, “slowly at first and then all at once.”
Our capacity for accepting loss is finite, once you lose enough there’s no coming back.
I talked with a guy who helped out homeless people, and he was convinced that, on average, people had a three disaster limit before it broke them, and they “weren’t stronger in the broken places” they were irreparably broken.
Collapse is going to creep up on all of us eventually, it might sneak in on a hot night and turn off your power, you’ll wake up sweating and realize that you’ve been visited by the collapse demons, something might break (my situation currently) and you’ll have to struggle to somehow address it, there might be a fire, or a hurricane, or a tornado or disastrous flooding, but it’s the little things that may well get to you first.
As more of these events accumulate, you have to narrow your focus, it can be likened to having an extremely painful dental issue, if you are in pain nothing else matters.
The immediacy of a collapse type of event puts everything else on the back burner. When day to day survival is threatened, that has to take center stage.
There is an additional psychological burden imposed by having to think only of yourself and ignore the suffering of millions of people worldwide, that adds to the cumulative effect.
The big stuff will be along directly, meanwhile we get to collapse a bit at a time.
My heartfelt thanks and eternal gratitude go out to the following people for their generosity:
Leanne Sullivan
Corrine Davis
Carol Ann Barrows
Flowers ukraine
Crann-na-beatha.com (AKA Terrance)
Catherine McNair
John Inglis
Kirsten Eckert
Susannah Hough
Robert Obrien
I’m raising money for a down payment on a car and including this link so you can send me money if you can. You will earn my undying gratitude with a small contribution.
Humans live in a 'Now" bubble. If something happened yesterday, forget about it. If it's something for tomorrow, they'll check their schedule. Deal with it tomorrow, if they have to.
The collapse of the United States is coming on slow so people don't see the big picture. They see what the news feeds give them on a daily basis and that is what they focus on, what's happened today.
When a natural disaster hits, they worry about their house, their neighborhood and offer a prayer, maybe, for those affected but breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't them.
When the electrical grid, water and sewage systems, natural gas distribution systems, home heating oil and so on, finally fail to arrive at people's homes someday soon, then they'll start to pay attention. But until then, it's someone else's problem. "I have to get to work, take the kids to school, cook dinner, feed the dog, and watch the evening news on Fox. Nothing else matters."
Yeah true, and the totalitarian, ruling, billionaire class doesn't help the encroaching threat of collapse any by sending their fascistic, demented, criminal, child rapist and his cultic following after the rest of us in order to deliberately ratchet up the ever present, existential dread, fear and anxiety in our lives.