Making specific predictions for the future is always a losing game, because if you are ever right people will knock it off as sheer luck, or that it was "obvious" (only in retrospect though), whereas if you are wrong, people will keep bringing it up for how deluded you are. There is virtue in sitting in our own ignorance, and admitting that we don't know things, but also, everyone has an implicit idea of what the future is going to look like, and I prefer to make that explicit so that I may reflect on my failures in thinking.
I am very confident in the trend that I see in our industrial world, which is collapse of course. Or rather as John Michael Greer calls it, a long decline, but I think it's going to look more like a downwards staircase, with punctual shocks which are then followed by periods of stabilization of a few years, on and on until humanity settles into something more sustainable, and far lower down the technological tree.
Specific events on the other hand are far more volatile, and this is what I am going to attempt here, though of course I suspect that most of them will be wrong or inaccurate to an important degree, but they still inform how I view the world and make decisions.
§1. You cannot rely on the news to tell you what's going on, all you will get from it is reassurance that things are fine, paradoxically coupled with the stream of news that tell you that things are not fine. What explains this seeming contradiction is that people enjoy despair because it's an excuse to not take responsibility for anything. The world is going to shit, so might as well binge watch porn eh?
§2. The rich will keep getting richer, because they have the power to do so, while the average person will keep struggling more and more to afford the basics. The "economists" will keep looking at the top 10 or 5%, or on the growth of overhyped sectors, and tell us how great the "economy" is, looking at ever more vaporous statistics, but everyone knows at this point that they are full of shit.
§3. Techno-optimists will keep talking about their perfect utopia paved by a combination of: renewable energy, nuclear (possibly fusion), AI, digital currency, electric vehicles, UBI, gene editing, carbon capture, laboratory meat or even insects, and whatever gimmick preferred by the thinker of the day. They don't care about the consequences of their ideas because they are rich and well-connected enough to keep living in their bubble. Don't bother arguing with them, they enjoy and need their ivory tower too much.
§4. Wars will keep happening. Mostly around energy of course, in the form of fossil fuels which are to this day still the cheapest and densest form of energy. Energy remains the one and only thing which allows global economies to maintain themselves, because thermodynamics doesn't care about our ideas or wishes, and without it, there is no raw material to build other things, no industry, no supply chains, no transport, and thus nothing we are used to as being "normal" in the modern world.
§5. A bunch of measures will be justified as for being for "our own good". Bans on freedom, whether physical or digital will be more and more common. Not that the governments issuing them will be able to enforce them, but more as a way to fine whoever they can find, so as to siphon money from people. Taxes as well. Taxes everywhere, again because governments want excuses to suck money from people. Cars will be especially taxed, creating even more of a divergence between the middle and the lower class.
§6. There won't be a solution to the fertility crisis in the short-term, our population will be on the decline in the coming decades, especially in the West, until it stabilizes at a significantly lower level. This also has very important economic consequences, since you can't easily have a growth economy with a declining population, meaning that the demand side of everything will keep decreasing: products, services and housing are the main ones, and who knows what the downstream consequences of that will be.
§7. Everything I've outlined and will outline after this will be blamed on the problème du jour: it's all because of Putin, or woke making us unproductive and hate capitalism, or because of Trump's tariffs, or what have you, I don't pay attention to the news.
The problems at the center of civilization will never be seen for what they are, which is the utterly unsustainable nature of a self-informed collective, which has to put its own growth over everything because it is not guided by conscious decisions, but instead, headless actions. No one wants to see the forest for what it is, because the inhumane nature of the system mirrors the inhumane nature of the self-informed self which dominates most of our lives, the same self which makes everyone addicted, cowardly, self-obsessed and unable to see the other for who they are and love them.
My general prediction is that every ten years or so there will be a major financial crisis, and that the time between the two will get closer and closer, until there is no financial system to begin with in the West, though there might still be localized economies here and there. The situation with BRICS countries might take more time to be destabilized, so remember that these points onwards focus on the West primarily.
We had the 2008 housing crisis, then we had the 2020 covid "pandemic" (even if you think it was unwarranted, the lockdowns still had massive impact on the financial markets and the economy). My sense is that before 2030, there will be a major financial crisis, in the same scale as the two I cited, perhaps even more this time.
Due to what? The economy is so complicated that no one can answer these questions well, but the unsustainability of our world can't keep going on forever. From the little I can tell, so-called 'AI', derivatives and to some extent the sector of renewable energy are way inflated, and sooner or later one or several big bubbles will pop, but whether this will happen directly or indirectly no one knows.
Markets can indeed stay irrational for very long, but not forever. Less and less people can afford things, as the basics of life are becoming more expensive, which means that businesses produce things for less and less people, and that the real economy is thus declining, while financial markets make it seem that things keep getting "better", because we are propped up by more and more debt, which keeps getting more and more complicated, and thus more difficult to make sense of. 1
The financial crises we will experience will lead to a cascade of problems, or more precisely, the problems have always been there, but the cracks will finally reveal the unsustainability which couldn't be hidden forever. My sense is that this can get incredibly bad, culminating in starvation and long lines for food which people experienced during the Great Depression. 2
It will be interesting to note how most people will cope with those situations, considering how everyone is plugged into their screen nowadays, and most people do very little physical labor and know what real hardships are like, which means that there might genuinely be a very high number of suicides as the chain of financial crisis and worsening material conditions affects us.
Those who decide to keep fighting for their life might turn to organized crime, such as looting or even gang activities, and we might even see civil wars pop here and there in the West if people genuinely feel like they can't improve their situation.
The nature of modern warfare is difficult to track because technological innovations keep changing the playing field, and I am not super interested in that subject, but drones of all kinds of sizes are now available and have been amply used in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which means that we can expect them to also be used in any future civil war.
Before all of those atrocious events will unfold, a much more basic set of problems which will occur is a series of disruptions of our globalized ways of living: the supply chains, the internet, and the energy grids as well. It might take several financial crashes for the real problems of feeding people to show up in our lives, but supply chain disruptions strike me as fairly likely to already occur in the 2030s.
Not as one giant shock which will throw the world in darkness, but rather an increasing number of countries whose infrastructure is more and more fragile, increasing costs of shipping which lead to less and less international trades, and potentially breakdowns in certain specialized areas of manufacture, such as computer chips.
Because it's useless. I think Russia doesn't care that much about Europe, and will prefer to just let it die on its own, because it doesn't really have anything to gain from invasion. Ukraine was special because of the unique relationship between it and Russia due to their history, and more importantly because of the potential nuclear threat from Ukraine.
Russia is already a massive country, one actor in a global play of power dynamics, I don't see anything it would gain from such a costly investment to be on the offensive. The only thing I can think of is the Norwegian oil, but that's quite a stretch to go through Finland, Sweden and Norway to get that. Perhaps there is a long-term strategy of outlasting Europe and seizing the oil when the Scandinavian countries are weak, but I don't know, Russia is not immune to internal fragmentation, external conflicts and societal decline as well.
In practice, I think Europe is far more likely to implode through internal conflicts than to suffer at the hand of Russia. Maybe European leaders are stupid enough to go to war with Russia, but I think the militarization is done out of preparation for defense, rather than offense. The way I see it is that the general landscape of warfare is such that no country wants to completely reveal their hand, because societal collapse is very difficult to assess, even in your own country, so countries want to keep their moral as high as possible.
I doubt that Europe would enter into conflict with Russia, because that would require cooperation from European countries which dislike themselves more and more as the cascade of EU drama has been getting longer and more painful over the years. This is why I think internal conflicts within Europe are more likely, perhaps something featuring one of the first countries to really swing all the way to right-wing authoritarianism, which other countries will try to stop and lead to a cascade of conflicts similar to WWI? Who knows.
BRICS and the surrounding nations will rise, simply because Europe and the USA will lose whatever they have left in the global market. Europe has much less access to natural resources than the USA, so it will be the first one to collapse, but the USA isn't looking too great either, since the BRICS countries are more interested in forming alliances between themselves, rather than the USA, and also because the USA has a long history of making very stupid decisions when it doesn't feel respected by the other countries on the global stage.
I wanted to call this section "the rise of BRICS", but the reality is more that they will float to whatever level of power they have, while the rest of the world declines. They won't keep growing that much because our economy is so dependent on cheap energy which is getting more and more scarce, but at least they have much of the world energy and manufacturing on their side, which means their decline will come after that of the West.
More and more small services will be augmented with AI, but the drastic scenario of technological unemployment, or even AI doom, which get a lot of people talking won't happen. It's simply because the technology requires a massive amount of energy and hardware, and the return on such an investment is dubious at best, which will become obvious once the AI bubbles pop.
AI is the type of subject that is very good at getting people to talk, and our world loves noise and distraction, because it's much better than looking clearly at what is ahead, which is collapse. People love to have those fantastic scenarios of technological potential, because the dreary reality of living in a world of low energy is far too boring and rather depressing for most. Peak oil is simply too boring for most people to even consider as a reality.
It was the same with the conquest of other planets, or even solar systems—remember that?—or all the hype about nuclear fusion, which trust us will definitely happen this time! As mentioned in the beginning, techno-optimists can't keep talking about potential, but actualization is not something they are very interested in, their promises always far exceed their delivery.
It's not that AI is a nothing-burger, it clearly isn't, and it's not that it won't get better, it can and very likely will as long as the AI bubble doesn't pop. But the problem is that it runs into diminishing returns like everything, it isn't magically "exponential". Its impressive results are due to the massive amount of data and hardware that we've thrown at the problem, but this won't magically get better because there are diminishing returns to throwing more resources at the same problem with the same methodologies.
Maybe there will be some new LLM architecture which will solve many problems that present-day AI can't, but my point remains that technology is not seamlessly exponential, it's more like a series of sigmoids, where the jump from one to another is due to a new good idea, not merely throwing more resources. And even if AI became significantly better, there is still the fundamental bottleneck on energy that our civilization has and cannot solve, because nothing can replace the cheap energy and versatility provided by fossil fuels.
§2. I talked about urban vs rural sustainability in the December 2025 journal entry and my general sentiment remains that going all out on rural living and trying to be self-sufficient is a very bad idea for the vast majority of people right now. If you have a solid network of people, are willing to work hard and already have some practical skills, you might manage the transition, but for most, it will be far more work than they are prepared to take on, while still relying on driving a lot, and perhaps living in an equally fractured community, this time more isolated from everything they might need.
I think it's much better to stay flexible and be able to adapt to any circumstances, while benefiting from the modern world while we still can. Someone who makes a bit of money online can live practically anywhere, meaning they can look for cheap rent and learn to live by on little, without a car and without all the modern forms of entertainment that people spend money on.
Of course the internet won't be there forever, and eventually people will have to rely on local sources of food as global supply chains break down, but how quickly that transition will happen and how is a question that I don't think anyone can answer well. But I think it's dangerous to commit to the rural homesteader lifestyle without doing a lot of research about it.
The insurance crisis is real. With global warming making natural disasters more common, and the economy doing worse as the years go by, insurances are walking on a tight rope towards nowhere. They won't be able to back up the prices related to natural disasters, which is why there is an increasing number of houses which aren't even insured to begin with, because the area is at too high of a risk, or have premiums which are so ridiculously high that no one would want to pay them.
As for pensions, if you are a young person, don't bother saving for them. I am 25 as of writing this, I will never have access to the money promised to me in the future. This is what financial structures are at the end of the day: promises. They are more official in that they are backed up by the law in some fashion, but the law changes all the time, and once society breaks down, there won't even be a global system of laws and financial markets to begin with.
The people who promise you that you will have money 40 years from now are not going to be the same people who will give you that money. The former have an incentive to overpromise, the latter actually have to deal with finite constraints and have an incentive to underdeliver. Pensions are bullshit for young people now, but people haven't caught onto that yet.
What is one to do then? Well, one thing for sure, hope is not the solution. If the future is not looking great, then all we can do is accept the present as much as we can, love other people, work on what we care about, appreciate the little things, and be prepared for hardship.
Many people resist change because they have this idea in the back of their mind that "this isn't how things are supposed to be!" I'm not supposed to take public transport with poor people, I deserve my own car! Never mind how much money it costs me, that fuel is only going to get more expensive, that I spend many hours in commuting every day, I need a car because that's what every human being is supposed to have right? This is an outmoded idea from a period of human life which was a complete anomaly, historically or ecologically speaking.
Things are going to get worse materially speaking, so you better not attach yourself to those trifle things, especially if they are going to get significantly more expensive as time goes by.
Likewise, pain, uncertainty, loss and death are going to appear more and more in our lives. Again, you can resist them, in which case you can spend the last years of your life in denial that the glorious day of modern consumerism are never coming back, doubling down for one last hedonistic binge, or you can accept them so as to live consciously.
People who are obsessed with shoulds, that the world is not supposed to go in this or that direction, will miss out on the astounding reality of the life in front of their eyes. Yes, even in the midst of collapse, life is beautiful. Why would it suddenly change? Even in the worst days of your life, the sky was still above your head, and perhaps in those moments, you caught a glimpse of the clouds gently drifting, without a care in the world about worldly problems.
This isn't an invitation for escapism, all the contrary. This is an invitation to feel everything: the ugliness, the misery, the pain, the loss, as well as the beautiful, the mysterious, the love, and the strange sense that everything is going to be fine. Yes, even when society is going to shit, there is still a sense that everything is fine, the same way that all great tragedies have a glimmer of the Divine in them, because pain is never personal, it reveals something that we need to integrate to become more whole, more conscious. This is the invitation of our times: can you face the pain? Can you live consciously amidst the panic?
1 It's similar to how people can convince themselves that they have built a perpetual motion machine, by designing something so complicated that they can't track the way in which their contraption breaks the laws of physics. The economy is similar, it's utterly unsustainable, but it's so complicated that we can't track the way in which it will break down, and so many people end up believing that it can actually keep going like this forever.
2 I intend on reading about the Great Depression, from the point of view of the average person, not the economic causes, and will expand more on what we might see based on this.
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2026-01-15