Comedy is the salt of life. If there's no base to put it on, it becomes overbearing, as can be seen by the lives of people who cannot take anything seriously, but it can be sprinkled on top of everything to make the dish (and your life) shine.
We sincerely apologize for getting caught. We thought we could get away with screwing you guys without you filing any complaint, but it seems this wasn't the case. We will make sure this won't happen again.
Some people have such little understanding of societal collapse and what it would entail that they asks questions such as:
The idea that our lifestyles will be utterly different, far poorer and more local, in a society without access to cheap energy, cannot even cross their mind, because they are so used to our (abnormal) normal that they cannot conceive of any other way to live. The idea of commuting will be gone, because few people will have access to enough fuel to make that possible, and the office jobs that people take for granted will also be gone, because they won't provide enough real value to pay for themselves. Jobs will be about local food production, if you are able to live in a stable enough part of the world where looting and crime are somewhat under control.
Luxuries will be gone, restaurants and most businesses will close down, and the idea of holidays will be a long foregone thing, in order to save money (not that the transport infrastructure to get there would even be viable to begin with).
In other words, we will live lives where we think in terms of food, shelter, heat, clothing and community, rather than money, because global supply chains won't magically allow us to get what we need by trading in money. It's a wild idea for most to conceive nowadays, but we won't have a choice, it's simply what a low-energy society looks like.
Societal collapse by bureaucracy: the constant need to do admin so as to pretend that everything is under "control", until nothing productive is made anymore, and things start falling apart from there. We can already see it in the way that many people at work don't really do anything besides attend meetings all day, but it's going to get more widespread for a while, until the system as a whole can't afford to have so many people be unproductive, and massive culls to the complexity of our world will be necessary.
Of course the main driver for societal collapse is still the lack of access to (cheap) energy, but the bloat engendered by bureaucracies is one of the many factors that makes it even worse. Don't expect your insurance or your government to be responsive in the coming decades, they will somehow manage to be even slower in how they deal with people.
A fascinating anecdote and what it highlights about law and order, and how they are so utterly rigid so as to become the enemy of what they are supposed to protect. At the end:
“Were you happy?” Yes, we were until you came along. We had it worked out and were living comfortably. Now the question comes a bit too late. What we had before is gone, and we can’t simply return to it. The damage is done. I mean, it’s something that you recognize the folly, and begin to suspect or admit that things might have actually been better before all this. But damn.
We live in an inverted world, where a bureaucratic law system, and broadly speaking, the technological system that it serves, are seen as more important than the actual well-being of real individuals. Terrifying stuff. I think people in the future will think of us as insane and utterly stupid when it comes to the important things in life.
Sure we might have figured out some things in maths and physics (none of the stuff about computers will be useful or even understood in the future after the industrial world collapse), but what about living well with one another, and building the type of world that we want to live in, rather than being controlled by metrics, machines and the abstract forces of the market? Has any of that stuff made us happy?
The meme where a dude stands in front of a bunch of graphs and says "nothing ever happens" is a way of making fun of people who cannot see the blatant reality that everyone supposedly perceives, that recent events are actually significant.
But here is my view on it: this more accurately portrays the average person more than anything. While the average person pays much attention to the day-to-day events and makes a big deal out of them, they never ever change their life in any significant way. Most people, if we are to judge them by how they live and adapt, aren't any better than the people who keep repeating that nothing ever happens. Nothing ever happens in their actual life, while they change their opinion from week to week.
Watching the news conditions you into seeing a bunch of things happen without you doing anything about it. It's pure cuckoldry.
There is a platform for hacker news that I sometimes go on, mainly because I have nothing better to do while at work, a habit I will quickly try to change once I am actually out of the office. It is mostly geared towards programmers, and thus techno-optimist types, but once in a while you see a glimpse of clarity from there.
Here is one thread on war drafting policies in Germany, the thread in question not being particularly important to the following quote from the first person, who probably got downvoted into oblivion after I read it initially:
The only thing we can do is refuse to participate. Europe no longer needs its people, our governments have demonstrated clearly that the average person is irrelevant and replaceable. Our industries have been sold off and outsourced, we no longer make anything except spreadsheets to enable globalists and asset stripping private equity parasites. Our history and diversity has been deemed non-sacrosanct, if some other country in the world can provide infinite cheaper labour then they are invited to replace us.
In a decade there will be no jobs even for the Uber imported class - we will all just be a burden on the super-rich who want to enjoy the European land in peace without so many people. Do not let them have this. Refuse to fight.
And from another user, replying to the same comment, probably downvoted to oblivion as well, or even deleted by the time you read this:
Europe is preparing for the war, but against the wrong enemy. The enemy crossed the gates a long time ago. Cities and neighborhoods are falling one by one, knife crime rises, taxes rise, rape crime rises, terror attacks increase, education collapses, social state is dismantled, freedoms reduced, censorship rises. European girls are afraid to leave their homes at night, or go to swimming pool.
And the EU regime plans what? To send European military age men to die in a faraway foreign country fighting for foreign interests while their homes and way of living are under attack.
It's nice to know that there are at least some people who are aware of real problems, even on this type of platform, though whether their "solutions" and general frames are good is another thing altogether. I see the whole thing as an inevitable aspect of the technological system, and the latter is ultimately the real problem, but obviously that doesn't mean that there aren't elites with less than good intentions for the average person, and decisions that could be made differently for a slightly more comfortable collapse.
If you want to call me a bigoted, racist white supremacist, then as I mentioned in the February entry where I talked about some of the validity of the great replacement theory, I am a son of immigrant parents, but the decline in safety and trust in Europe, and the shifts in demographics are hardly debatable.
We must all interact with money and the law, yet those systems are significantly different whether you are a normal person, or a wealthy person, and even then, there are wildly different levels of being wealthy.
Money for most is something you need to constantly work for in order to eat and have a roof over your head. Money for wealthy people is almost a game, because they don't seriously have to worry about it. They can earn enough from passive investments to cover their basic needs, and on top of that, they can speculate it on markets to earn even more money, or lose it if they're careless, but either way they are under no real threats, especially if they are connected to other wealthy people.
Whether someone earns significant money from financial assets is a much more meaningful notion of wealth in the modern age than nominal wealth, because some people earn a big paycheck, but then equally spend a lot of it too just to keep their lifestyle going, and thus have to constantly work to stay afloat. They are nominally wealthy but not really wealthy, because they are shackled by the need to work, whereas the truly wealthy don't.
Likewise with the law. For most people it is something that you must strictly follow, unless it comes to very trivial matters like jaywalking or what not. But very wealthy people have a suite of lawyers on their side, which allows them to abuse loopholes in a way that average (and even somewhat wealthy) people can't. This is why the very wealthy pay less taxes than the wealthy wageslaves, because they have the power to game the law.
Which is really my point for both money and the law: once you are powerful enough, both of those essentially become games without real consequences, whereas for most people, they are primarily about incentivizing behaviors and forcing people to face the consequences of their actions.
I am becoming tired of thinking about power. Many of my entries in the first part of April, this second part here, and some of the recent pieces, like the ones on managers that don't listen were directly about them, and much of my writing on societal collapse (to be published on Substack) is also about examining power dynamics within society.
I hate how I have to understand power dynamics to navigate our incredibly complicated world. I wish we didn't live in such a complicated world and that I could spend most of my time just ... loving people and doing things important to my community. Nothing is ever rainbow and sunshine of course, but the type of struggle of the past used to be about surviving while you are surrounded by other people who are on your side, even if you would occasionally meet others who are against you.
But in the modern world, you basically spend all of your time in adversarial dynamics with other people, and have to navigate relationships where they have power over you, have to work within messed up incentive structures, or have to engage in bureaucracies that kill your soul. It might be "easier" on the body to live in the modern world, but it kills my soul to have to, by default, be on my guard against other people, because the technological system makes all of us live in a low-trust world, where the people on the other side of an interaction are rarely on your side, especially if they are powerful and face no consequences for defecting on social trust.
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2026-04-20