Why does everything feel so chaotic? Aren’t we supposed to live in the best of times, technologically speaking at least? Why do things seem to get worse and worse as the years go by?
Why are there so many conflicting views of what is going on? Not just on any particular topic, but even and especially on what topics matter in the first place. People don’t argue about the technical details and remedies for Covid, anthropogenic climate change, ecological overshoot, AGI, and the major wars, but they argue whether those things are even real to begin with. And why do people believe in crazy things to begin with? Why do the most influential people, writers, politicians, podcasters, seem so insane in their beliefs?
Why are there so many people going out of their mind? Generalized depression and anxiety, endless worrying, restless mentation, normalized addiction, social atomization, and so much more. Why do the young spend so much time on their screens, playing video games, 1 endlessly scrolling on social media, or watching pornography?
Why are so many products and services so terrible nowadays? Why are so many services outsourced to other countries? Why does technology (hardware and software) seem to break all the time? Why does our food feel less and less nourishing? Why are so many people silently quitting their job, doing the bare minimum in order to keep their position?
Why are the top companies valued so highly on the stock market when the average person struggles more and more to afford the necessities for life? Why does the economy feel so vacuous and volatile? Where is the actual wealth on which our economy is built on?
And more importantly, why do so few people talk about all of this? The big picture. The general trend. Why is everyone so obsessed with the minute details of the most recent crisis, instead of trying to examine why the crises exist in the first place, and how we can, individually and collectively, learn to stabilize. Remember how Covid magically disappeared off the face of the Earth as soon as the war between Russia and Ukraine became a big thing in the news? This is just one notable example of how short and fleeting the collective attention span is, but why is it that way? Why can’t we collectively take a step back and make clearer, longer term decisions?
I can’t say I can answer all of those questions, but all of those are the ripples of, or at the very least vastly amplified by, a single earthquake, which I call here clusterfuck collapse.
Collapse is one thing, in the case of civilization at large, it is the decline of cheaply available energy through diminishing returns, which then makes the rest of society stall out, because everything requires energy. There are many, many other factors that precipitate collapse in practice, but because energy is utterly fundamental to all human activity, it is the main cause, though the final nail in the coffin might be completely different in nature. 2 All of the civilizations before us have collapsed 3 for those reasons, and that process will be examined in this series.
But there is an extra component that makes the process of collapse difficult to identify and make sense of in our times. None of the past civilizations had access to light-speed communication, which is often used as an argument to justify how we can solve problems that they couldn’t through our superior communication, but in fact what we see is that the very same technologies which could be used for communication and making sense of our society are constantly used for misinformation, agitation (agit-prop), misdirection, and plain old distraction.
This is something that was made crystal clear during the Covid pandemic. If you feel yourself revving up into a state of tension just thinking about it, preparing yourself to launch ready-made arguments to defend your own view, then notice that response and wonder about what it creates at a societal scale when everyone acts this way. You can have your own opinion as to what measures and attitudes were right or not, but I would say it is abundantly clear that the process of how the severity of the virus was assessed, and how the ideas were then enacted in the broader population were disastrous. There was no discussion being had, because the sheer state of panic was such that people immediately jumped into segregating themselves into a binary of ingroup and outgroup, and felt the need to silence the other side.
As a result, there were no considerations of trade-offs—funny how a society which puts economical growth above everything else doesn’t seem to care about the impact that the lockdowns had on the local economy—no charitable view of people who were skeptical of the safety of the vaccines being rolled out—many of the vaccines that are commonly used today have many decades, if not more than a century, of history, which makes people like myself feel comfortable with them, yet if you doubted the interests of a large multinational focused on profits and which produced a treatment with considerable side effects, you were immediately considered an “anti-vaxxer”—and no social cohesion as to what should even be done. One week you are told that you need to wear masks and distance yourself by more than 2 meters. The next week you are told that masks don’t really do anything but people still need to wear them. The next week the social distance decreases to 1.5 meters but it is now measured differently. And the next week it goes back to 2 meters and now you need to use hand sanitizers. The details are obviously not right in my account, but you get the point.
This post and this series aren’t specifically about what happened during the lockdowns, though we can learn a lot from it, but the general dynamic that prevents us from seeing problems clearly and making level-headed decisions at a collective scale. The reality is that we cannot expect the current set of institutions, companies and governments to be of any help to understand how to orient in our world, and to help us navigate the future, especially during times of crises, because again we got a clear example of that during the Covid period.
What every institution and company is ultimately concerned about is its own self-perpetuation. This is why news outlets can hardly be trusted, because they will always put their own profits and capture of public attention over the need of truthfully reporting events back to us. It is not that they lie, because in the age of light-speed communication, lying can be very detrimental to one’s reputation, because it only needs to be brought in public light once or twice to create a scandal. But it is possible to describe events that have genuinely happened in an untruthful manner, by omitting crucial information, by focusing on irrelevant matters, by leaning into outrage and drama, and so many other tricks of building narratives. We humans care about narratives, not mere facts, and the idea that we don’t is itself a narrative.
Because so much of power nowadays is downstream of attention, many parts of society have converged onto a set of strategies 4 which largely revolve around grabbing it at all costs. This is why the things that spread so well on social media tend to make us so mad, because polarization is a very easy way to get lots of people to talk about the same thing. But the problem is that all of this has a negative influence on the lives of the people on the receiving end of those strategies, which is essentially everyone. The lives of the people reading and listening to the news might as well not matter to those who are in charge of communicating them, and this is true for every institution and company.
The consequence of all of this is that the inevitable decline of our society doesn’t result in a quiet transition to a radically simpler world, one with significantly less access to energy and thus without the global supply chains and the institutions we are used to living with, but rather it results in a mad and chaotic environment where dozens of different sides are competing to assert to other people what problems are really happening and worth paying attention to, and what they should do about it, because again, attention is power, and power in a declining world is a matter of survival. Every side wants their own problems to be seen as the most important of them all, which leads to an escalation of agitation, panic, outrage, drama, blame, and much more at the global scale, the same way that kinetic warfare leads to an escalation of military technology.
Hence, the clusterfuck component of the title.
There were will be two parts for this series. Part 1 will mainly be about noticing the reactive nature of our world and how it shapes our society—essentially an extension on what I wrote here about how the news use outrage and polarization to grab attention—and how we can step out of it in order to be more conscious and make more clear-headed decisions. And part 2 will mainly be about the description of societal collapse, its fundamental causes at a global and local scale, and some of my predictions of the coming decades of our society.
The main concern for me is not to focus on any specific event, particularly if they are recent, because I want to see trends, and focusing on the discourse of the day has a way of making us see the trees instead of the forest. 5 Specific events however are useful as examples of larger trends in our world, which is why I will have to use them, but I hope that you dear and intelligent reader, can discern between what is fairly inconsequential in the long term from what is genuinely important. To the extent that we disagree, we need to focus on the things that matter, the larger trends of our world and how we can live our own lives, not what this politician said on that given day and how we can interpret it. There isn’t enough time to focus on trifling matters, which is why my recommendation, if you are inclined to get angry about what people say on the internet, is to take a step back and think for yourself how you want to live the rest of your life, especially considering that societal collapse is an ongoing reality, not merely a theoretical exercise or the ravings of an apocalyptic cult. 6
Part 1 - Reactivity and attention
Part 2 - Understanding collapse
One last thing. I disable comments on the majority of my writing because I find that the average person doesn’t use comments in a way that is productive for me (or even for them). Most of the time, people blurt out whatever stream of consciousness was happening to them while they were reading a piece, instead of commenting something that adds to the conversation, or asking good questions, which means that I have to spend time and energy deciphering whatever they wrote, which in the vast majority of cases is a waste of time because there isn’t much substance there.
That being said, there will be a post at the end of part 1 and part 2 respectively to allow people to post their thoughts and questions. My hope is that adding friction to this process means that whatever comment remains will be of higher quality. In practice I expect that there won’t be any comments at all, just cricket noises at the reception of my writing, which in a way is fine too.
1 Or even watching other people play video games.
2 Just like the human body is guaranteed to slowly age and lose its ability to heal and maintain itself, while its cause of death might be sudden and mostly unrelated to aging, so can a civilization collapse for reasons secondary to the energy issue. That being said, those secondary issues at a collective scale are pretty much always downstream of the energy issue, because societies don’t collapse overnight. Think for instance of how the continual assault of barbarians starts eroding the resources of a declining empire, which compounds the main decline of energy access.
3 A process which unfolds over decades, if not centuries, despite how the term ‘collapse’ implies a catastrophic and immediate break. This is why John Michael Greer talks about the long descent.
4 ‘Strategy’ doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a mastermind behind it all, scheming away to grab the attention of the population for his evil scheme. A strategy can be part of a broader emergent phenomenon, such as how short form content is typically much better at capturing attention because it requires less effort to engage with, or it can be unconsciously employed, such as how a man might find himself spending longer and longer hours at work to avoid spending time with his wife if his relationship is becoming sour, a strategy that he adopts unconsciously.
5 On top of the fact that current events almost always boil down to asking the question: “who can we blame for this?” over and over again, instead of figuring out what is happening and how to take responsibility. There is a world of difference between blame and responsibility, and our world is dominated by the former, and has little of the latter.
6 Even if apocalyptic cults do exist, whether they are religious or “rational” in nature, and even if the temptation to catastrophize to make the supposed end of times more potent to human psychology is real. Undeniably, this has an influence on everyone who seriously considers societal collapse as a reality, myself included, but this also doesn’t mean that the unsustainable society that we live in can perpetuate itself forever.
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Attention Racket News Clusterfuckcollapse
2026-07-01