Post-Mortem: Living Collapse

I’ve been quiet.

I’ve been keeping my head down.

I’ve been depressed.

I’ve been distracted.

I’ve been paralyzed.

I’ve been healing.

I don’t know which of these is true. Maybe all of them. Maybe none of them.

What I do know is that it’s been about a year since I’ve written anything substantive. This is unusual for me. Since I started writing a personal blog in 2011, I’ve been nothing if not prolific. Over a thousand blog posts. Three books. Curating a half-dozen websites

Then my friend and mentor Michael Dowd passed away in October 2023. This coincided more or less with my separation from my religious home, my local Unitarian Universalist congregation, due to my growing disappointment over its failure to live up to its democratic, spiritual, and social justice ideals. And I’ve not really written much since.

The truth is, I had felt it coming on for a few years before that. Not writer’s block exactly. More like writer’s malaise.

It started with realizing, in 2018, that we’re fucked–as a civilization and maybe a species–because of the climate and capitalism. Then I had a personal crisis over a couple of years, from 2018 to 2020, which culminated in my becoming near-suicidal. Then there was two to three years of the COVID crisis and attendant coping. And then Trump’s two-year long presidential campaign, culminating (somehow both surprisingly and not surprisingly) in his reelection. It’s been a rough few years, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically (because the body keeps score). I’m sure a lot of you can relate.

The truth is, when I wrote about impending civilizational decline in 2018, I really wasn’t prepared for things to fall apart so quickly and dramatically. I had written about mass migrations, the spread of deadly diseases, wildfires, superstorms, expanding war and ethnic conflict, the collapse of governmental institutions, and the rise of charismatic authoritarian strongmen. But in 2018, it was mostly abstract. And I was still thinking in terms of decades and maybe centuries. I don’t recommend making predictions about the end of the world as we know it, but things do seem to be accelerating faster than I expected a few years ago.

I really didn’t expect our (so-called) democratic institutions to fall apart so quickly. (And it will continue to get worse–albeit unevenly.) It turns out, it’s all held together by not much more than the willingness of people to believe in it. There’s a lot of explanations for the phenomenon that is Trump, but at least part of it appears to be a disillusionment with American political institutions–by people on both the right and the left. Trump is a virtual grenade that half of American voters tossed into the political machine out of sheer frustration with the status quo.

None of this should have come as a surprise. I wrote about it after all. (I didn’t so much predict it, as repeat or quote others who had predicted it.) But I think I must have still had some unconscious residual hope in the system or in progress or in humankind.

I thought we could call gender into question, take away gender reveal parties and the absolute certainty of the blue and pink dichotomy, tell them to welcome assigned-male-at-birth people into the sanctity of women’s bathrooms … and I thought there would be no backlash.

I thought we could tell men that they all benefit from (and are hurt by) patriarchy, that we live in a rape culture, that we need to shift the burden of proof between the accused and the accusers … and I thought they would learn to be better.

I thought we could teach children that racism is systemic, that all White people have unconscious bias, and that our country is founded on slavery … and I thought the next generation would save us.

I thought we could accuse the capitalists of exploitation, that we could debunk the myth of the invisible hand of the free market, that we could demand education and meaningful work and homes and healthcare and water as a right … and I thought people would eventually thank us.

I thought we could bend the arc of history a little more toward justice. I thought that I could just see its horizon.

I wasn’t wrong to want it or to hope for it. But I was wrong to think there wouldn’t be a fight–not a single decisive battle, but a long, discouraging slog through the mud–ideological trench warfare–with no end in sight. (And I’m still not ruling out actual civil war.)

I was wrong to think that just declaring it, or writing about it, or yelling it from the streets would be effective. I was wrong to think that the ears of power and the gears of capital would hear or care. I was wrong to think that we lived in a democracy.

And I was wrong about where the opposition would come from. Conservative politicians, police, and billionaires–I kind of expected that. But what about parents and grandparents, coworkers and friends, neighbors and parents in my kids’ school district? What about other progressives and fellow travelers? I didn’t expect that.

I didn’t expect my one-time intellectual idol, former green anarchist, Paul Kingsnorth, to jump the shark and become a Christian proto-fascist. I didn’t expect that so many others, both individuals and communities, would fail to live up to their proclaimed ideals.

In spite of believing that I was being clear-eyed about the impending multi-faceted disaster on our doorstep, I wasn’t ready for it. Emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually. And I know I’m not alone in this.

I’ve been wanting to write something since the results of the last presidential election and all the “post-mortems” started coming out. It’s taken me this long to decide to just write something–anything–even if I don’t really feel like I have any answers.

I went back recently and re-read that first 2-part essay I wrote in 2018: “What If It’s Already Too Late?: Being an Activist in the Anthropocene” and “Die Early and Often: Being Attis in the Anthropocene”. Back then, my advice for what to do after you realize “we’re fucked” was to:

“Die early and often.”

This was a play off of the meme “Vote early and often.” I wrote that to “die early” means “to face our death, both personal and collective, the death of the myth of individuality and the death of the myth of human progress.” And to “die often” means creating “new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying well” (Donna Haraway).

I concluded by saying:

“Sometimes this seems like an inadequate response, too little too late, and I have to remind myself that I’m not trying to save the world anymore–I’m trying to ‘stay with the trouble.’ (Haraway) We are doomed to walk the path of the Dying God. We must do so not in the hope of survival or salvation. Our job is not to survive … or even to birth a new world. Our job is to die … to die well, to die-with, to die early and often, to die in such a way that the ‘ash heap of history’ might become the compost pile of the Goddess.”

It was good to re-read this. I needed to be reminded. So how am I doing with all that?

If I’m being honest, terrible. I’m still struggling with the first part (dying early) apparently. I thought I had come to terms with collapse, but it is obvious that I was not prepared for the speed or shape that it would take.

And as far as the second part (dying often), I’m at a loss. I’ve been searching for groups that are doing the work of creating new practices, and they are few and far between. I do want to hold up the work of those few that I have found:

Good Grief Network: LaUra Schmidt and Aimee Lewis Reau have created a 10-step program for processing eco-anxiety and climate grief and lead online groups. (I based my own 12-step program on their work and briefly led a group.

Michael Dowd’s Post Doom & affiliated communities: hold various weekly online meetings

Deep Adaptation Forum: An online community based on the work of Jem Bendell whose Deep Adaptation paper and subsequent writing proposes a framework (the Four “R’s”) for responding to the climate crisis:

• Resilience: What do we most value that we want to keep, and how?
• Relinquishment: What do we need to let go of so as not to make matters worse?
• Restoration: What could we bring back to help us with these difficult times?
• Reconciliation: With what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality?

But mostly these groups are online discussion groups. I have not found anyone doing much more than talking, and none of it is local to me. (The two closest Deep Adaptation groups I could find are St. Louis and Dayton–over 4 hours away.) There is no substitute for in-the-flesh community. And while talk is good, work is better.

Over the past few years, I’ve given a few talks (here & here) at my local Unitarian church about collapse awareness (and invited others to speak, like Michael Dowd, Holly Trular, and Dayan Martinez) which were met with good-natured bemusement, I think, but no real interest in growing a community around collapse awareness.

I have an idea for a skill-sharing community. Resilient communities are those that can better withstand the shock of environmental change and economic collapse, and an important part of building resilience is re-skilling. We have lost many of the skills that our grandparents took for granted half a century ago—but we can relearn them.   Examples might include recycling grey water, cooking, bicycle maintenance, natural building, herbal medicines, basic home energy efficiency, practical food growing, harvesting rainwater, and composting waste. We can learn to create much of what we consume rather than buying it. (This would be an example of Jem Bendell’s third “R”: Restoration.)

This is not about self-sufficiency, but building community. We don’t need to provide everything ourselves individually—and we can’t—which is why humans have always lived in cities, towns, villages, tribes, and extended families. We can relearn the skills of life, teach them to others, and use them to strengthen our communities. And least, that’s the pitch.

But the truth is that I’m tired to trying to start things on my own. And I feel very alone in all this right now.

I’m sorry I don’t have more to offer than that. You deserve better. We all do. But I’m convinced that, if we’re ever going to find it, we’re going to have to make it ourselves–together.