A week of observations of a world collapsing into collapse

Polycules, authoritarian rule and Stanley cups.

😎 Before we get started on today’s post, a quick PSA:

I’m touring with, and hosting, Wanderlust True North in February and March, coming to Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne. Joining me on stage are Adam Goodes and a bunch of other Indigenous voices, Isabel Lucas and more. It will be an evening of meditation and deep chats and the Wanderlust crew are offering a 50 % discount code for This is Precious subscribers. There are a few tickets remaining in each city… I hope to see you there!

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Every few weeks I like to do one of these posts where I share a bunch of news items and observations that seem to point to a theme coagulating in the Zeitgeist. This week, events conspired to paint a picture of a world on the edge of something, or tipping into something. I also detect an awareness of this tipping. I’m hearing different kinds of conversations on the events going down.

For those new here, I’ve been exploring what is referred to as civilsational collapse, but that I’m - more and more - preferring to call “simplification”. You can catch up a bit here if you missed it. It’s not as frightening as it sounds.

According to collapse theorists, the final stage of a civilisation’s rise-and-rise-and-then-demise - the Age of Decadence - is characterised by (I’ve bolded bits relevant to the below):

“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses; they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”

The argument is that we are in this final stage.

Unlike the Romans and Mayans, who were largely oblivious to their society’s demise, ours is being televised (and blogged and podcasted about). As Rome burned, Nero played the fiddle. As the post-industrial complex eats itself, we have to watch it on TikTok.

I think the fact we are all watching the (r)evolution in real time is changing us. And speeding things up. See what you think…

In 2024 MORE THAN HALF THE WORLD is set to vote in elections

In another surreal episode of this thriller called Life, an estimated 65  countries just happen to be holding elections in a year that will be make-or-break for a whole range of existential issues, including climate change, geo-politics, AI advancement and …democracy.

I’ve been looking at the role of democracy in relation to collapse a bit. According to Barbara Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, the biggest predictor for mass civil unrest is when a nation downgrades its democratic ranking.

Here’s are some things I’ve been looking at, separately:

• Democracy has been on the decline globally for 17 years in a row. America is currently at its lowest ranking on record.

• Of the 43 countries expected to hold free and fair elections this electoral megacycle, 28 do not actually meet the essential conditions for a democratic vote, according to the Democracy Index from the Economist’s Intelligence Unit.

• Experts are warning of a massive swing to authoritarianism globally as 4.2 billion humans in existential crisis go to the polls, aided and abetted by misinformation and Deepfakes, Facebook, Google, TikTok, X and the various bot factories around the world geared at stirring up chaos.

I don’t have a pithy or uplifting takeaway to offer here. Only that I feel a momentum, a speeding up. As my dear friend Tim would say, “we must keep the camera rolling”.

Polycules taking up our attention molecules

I reckon the dictionaries already have a contender for Word of the Year and it’s not even February. “Polycules” are ludicrously convoluted polyamorous set-ups within friend circles where everyone at the dinner party is married but banging everyone else.

https://www.them.us/story/what-is-polyamory-according-to-queer-relationship-experts

The Cut ran a feature on the trend, profiling a group of New Yorker 30-something friends:

The easiest way to explain all of this might be in the love language of most ethically non-monogamous people: Google Calendar. Sarah and Nick share a calendar. Nick and Anna share a calendar. Alex and Anna share a calendar. Sarah and Anna do not share a calendar but are aware of who has Nick’s time on any given day; same for Nick and Alex. They are Sarah and Nick and Anna and Alex, a modern polycule, living, laughing, loving, and doing a lot of therapy.

I think this this is a near-perfect paragraph, apart from anything else.

Helen Lewis

’s response to the trend this week is equally tight:

Middle-aged (adj.): When you read about polygamy and you’re mostly jealous of… all the free time these people seem to have.

My head hurts to think of all the time all this complexity would take up. And I immediately think: distraction!

I am reminded of something collapse theorist and polymath Oswald Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West in 1918: “When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard having children as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come”. The other marker he identifies: when a society spends its free time in “philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol questions and vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness—such being the gravest problems.” The guy was a visionary.

Spengler’s point is that societies crumble when its people have become that distracted by narcissism and cringey indulgence. I am all for pushing gender and sexual norms, but an over self-conscious, self-important obsession with anything right now is striking me as, well, perfectly collaps-y.

System-aware memes

Here are only two examples of phenomenon being discussed beyond the surface level. I’ve spotted many more. You? I feel there is more awareness that the pickles we find ourselves in are symptoms of the system we’re embedded in, and not just the direct result of nefarious individuals, organisations, governments. (Also see the Stanley cup fiasco below.) I feel this more sophisticated, realistic engagement in issues may result in less aggression and more compassion toward each other. There is a long way to go (the first meme is still locked into “blame” language), but I think it could be a route forward.

The whole Stanley cup blow up

I’m sure you read/heard about it.

My short take: It’s an implosive moment in crass capitalism and social media vulgarity that, within hours, moved into a high-octane online infight about greenwashing, before switching to a reactionary backlash defending teen girl behaviour, and then becoming a parody of…everything… when a 23-year-old woman in America bundled 65 said “40-once bullies” into a shopping cart and…just walked out of the store without paying. All within a few days.

Amid all this, a video went viral of a car that exploded where the only thing that survived…was a Stanley-bloody-cup. Cockroaches. Of the Apocalypse!

Again, it’s all speeding up. And we seem more alive to the absurdity than ever before. Where will this lead? Hopefully to some Camus-esque conclusions about the meaning of life (to be of service to others!).

We must learn how to die...especially now

Rich are getting mega-rich, everyone else has got poorer

This is not a new headline. But the ludicrous extent of it is fresh.

To coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam puts out an inequality report each year that maps the gap. This year they reported:

"The world's five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour— while nearly five billion people have been made poorer."

This is extreme. Separately, the GINI Coefficent, which measures global inequality and gets mentioned in a few of my podcasts, has dropped in 90 per cent of all countries.

Again, I’ve been looking into inequality, not just as an injustice, but as a global stability issue. Here’s a bit from my (in progress) book that speaks to this:

The Complexity Science Hub in Austria has found that a stable society can withstand – or handle - even a dramatic climate challenge, whereas a small one can lead to chaos – and collapse - in a vulnerable society.

They drilled down deeper and found what determined the required stability: the level of inequality and political polarization in the system.

Peter Turchin, a Russian-American scientist builds on this in his recent book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. He argues that inequality and polarisation “produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions."  and that this is what tips societies. Turchin identifies “the problem of an excess of educated men” who feel locked out of socially-accepted positions of success and who then stir up conflict. They launch the podcasts that spread conspiracy theories, they champion the soveigrngty movement, they start up the controversial think tanks.

I’m interested in your thoughts on all this. Do you think awareness of the system is increasing? How do you think this could shape things going forward?

Sarah xx

PS I just reposted a great Wild interview with adventurer Beau Miles, in case you missed it. Some great ideas for the last days of the Australian summer holidays!