There is a big chunk of my being that did not think it would get *this* bad *this* fast.

We're here! This is the last chapter of the book. It will run in two parts.

Oh boy we’ve done well. All of us. This is Chapter 25 and it will wrap this mad ride. It is divided into two parts (I may divide them into two chapters yet) and this first part is free, so do pass it around to friends and family. We are in something new and we need to support each other with what the hell is going on.

I most definitely drew on all the feedback that many of you - the paid subscriber community - gave me here. It was so incredibly helpful and fortifying - thank you from the full depth of my heart! As always, if this is your first time here, I’d recommend you start at the beginning. You can read the first few chapters for free, and this one here, as well as this one today.

As many here will attest to, the most valuable part of being a paid subscriber is the conversation we have behind the post together. It will be continuing for many months to come.

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HOMECOMING

“In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. … the Earth is where we make our stand.”

- Carl Sagan

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“We are all just helping each other home”

- Ram Dass

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There is a big chunk of me that did not think it would get this bad this fast.

In the time it took to write this book with you the world entered a new era. Phenomena I posed just a few months ago as Things That May Very Likely Come to Pass In The Not-Too-Distant Future are…here. We are in techno-feudalism, the oligarchy is real, climate agreements have been aborted, the Doomsday Clock just ticked closer to midnight and Britain’s army chief has declared we have three years to prepare for World War III.

All kinds of projections I flagged in the early chapters have been wrenched forward. Carbon emissions have broken growth records, far exceeding the most pessimistic predictions¹; research published in October shows trees and land are absorbing much less carbon than “they should”; inequality skyrocketed with the top billionaires’ earnings clicking over $US100 million a day, while a King’s College London study published last week says this alone will bring forward societal collapse to within the decade; it’s now predicted 1.2 billion environmental refugees will flood the world by 2050; 8-10°C of warming is in the pipeline, even if we stop emissions today; “mysterious hot spots” on every continent except Antartica are suffering repeated heat waves far worse than what any modelling, yep, predicted²; and changing ocean-temperature patterns have thrown out existing models that mapped El Niño and La Niña.

Readers note:

Are there any major developments (or degradings) that have struck you to this effect? What have I missed?

But for me the most horrifying decline has been in human decency. Is there a shelf in our beings on which to place Elon’s Nazi salute, the maniacal grab at resources by the obscenely rich, the mocking of existentially distraught Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and the numb-but-unkind righteousness in the comments sections from people we know from the annual street party? Is there a compassionate explainer? A way to hold the revolted alienation it triggers?

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Like I say, a sizeable chunk of me has been shocked, but little of me is surprised. As I set out all that grim data above with its earnest hyperlinked sources, I - worryingly - noticed my eyes (or was it my spirit?) glazing over.³ It’s like “overshoot” and “woke” and those monstrous figures ($100 million a day) are nonsense words; the zone has been flooded with so much shitful noise it’s turned white. For sure, you couldn’t make this shit up. But, equally, here we are. And the data and detail won’t change anything now. (Which is not to advocate giving in to the noise; that’s what “they” want. We’ll refine this point shortly.)

Because this is collapse. All of it, including the descent of decency. It’s serious “sixth stage” stuff.⁴

It’s also how complex systems go. When they hit their zenith, their decline is exponential.

It’s how life goes.

And I’ve come to know none of it could go any other way now.

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The collapse awareness journey is hard. It’s very probably the hardest thing we will ever do. It feels disgraceful.

We can find ourselves hovering over the harsh reality for a long time, like a dog that circles and circles, readying itself for the right moment to land. When we do finally plonk ourselves into truth we experience that wonderful cognitive relief, which holds us for a bit. But pretty soon we are met with our grief, shame and fear of death, and we return to the groundless circling. We might revert to strategies and certainties, even though we’ve just learned that such things don’t cut it anymore. Sarah, are you prepping? What about medications? Should I move my family to New Zealand? Where do I invest my money now? To which the truthful answer is: If you hoard stuff in a collapsing society you will have to defend it. Which begs a more brutally appropriate question: Are you prepared to kill those who come for your canned corn? Are you prepared to abandon your decency and humanity?

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In so many ways the collapse awareness journey we’ve been on here together is a process of crashing through layers of the most challenging reframings and truths (and being slammed relentlessly with “more brutally appropriate questions”). Just when we think we’ve arrived at something sturdy, the floor drops out from under us and we tumble to another terrifying layer. It is indeed like how poet David Whyte describes grief. He says grief is a falling toward something (much like we “fall” in love). We’re falling toward the thing we lost - a loved one who died, a broken dream, a friendship that ended. We fall and fall, the ground dropping out from under us over and over, until we finally land at what must take the place of the thing we lost. We land, invariably, at ourselves.

When we fall into the truth of collapse, crashing through all the heart-blasting truths, we, too, wind up landing at ourselves. But I think we actually then crash through one more layer, to our collective humanity. Which, of course, is the sturdy foundation we’ve always been falling - or aching - towards.

Community alert:

David Whyte is touring Australia later this month. The organiser has asked me to let you know. You can get details here.

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I’m not sure how to end this book. How do we wrap something that has no conclusion.

Perhaps a good way to leave things is by putting the truths we crashed through together in one spot so that we can acknowledge and honour how much the game has changed and how far we’ve come. If we were in a room together, and if I was in any way the type to lead group bonding activities, I’d suggest turning to the person next to you and looking into their face with your own softened eyes and saying, “Sitting with you here now, I can see the unholy terror you have faced and how much you’ve had to enlarge.”

There were the fundamental truths. The ones that shook us onto fresh rails. Like the fact that of course our civilisation is collapsing. It’s the nature of things to fall apart, come together, and fall apart again. But also this particular thing (our post-industrial civilisation) was built on bodgy moral foundations and accounting errors, bungled atop that little engine that huffs and puffs.

A natural consequence of this truth is the (crashing) realisation that we have been fighting for something that needed to die. This one hit me hard. Oh boy, we had it wrong! But, then, did we really? Didn’t we always know? A sadness imbues…

Another is that we can’t fix this, even if we wanted to. Bless us; we felt we were meant to.

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There were also the brutal truths that answer the questions that burn. Will we die? Will the beautiful galactic experiment known as humanity die? How long do we have? The truth (and it’s possible the truthiest of all the truths) is that we don’t know. We just know that it’s started and it cant’ be stopped now. And that there are only, yep, more brutally appropriate questions to be asking, like my favourite,

Who do you want to be in this?

Again, if we were in a room together, I’d get you to turn to your neighbour again and try to answer this wordlessly with them.

Although, “parenthèse”, as the French like to say when delivering a hefty qualification, I will say this (it may or may not be a truth you landed at): Humans and humanity will collapse to the extent to which we continue to tether ourselves to the dying structures of our civilisation. And while I’m giving my take, I think we (in the “West'“) will be hit by economic collapse in the first instance⁵ and in a matter of years from now. Further, “life” will likely land us at a global population of between one and four billion people (within the earth’s carrying capacity) and, indeed, we could “wind up living like the person who grows our coffee”… in our own lifetimes.

Which, I guess, lands me at the same frightening and far more important consideration regardless: In all of this, who are you going to be, Sarah?

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I also crashed through this realisation a few times on my way down: We are not that special. Nor that cursed. We were simply born at the stunning point in this particular civilisation’s cinched bellcurve where everything that went up does an about-face and goes back down the other side.

To this end, I found this meme sobering. It details the life of someone born in 1900. My great grandmother Priscilla Gladys was born in 1900 and died in 1997. She saw Haley’s comet twice, she played competitive tennis and worked in a curtain factory into her eighties. She cackled at everything:

Another truth: there is no one to blame (it’s moloch, baby!). And I think this goes some way in helping us forgive ourselves and each other. The imperative to forgive is absolutely in the top five truths we must take on.

It’s also true that we were never going to “get it” until now, which also helps us forgive. Humans don’t tend to jump from slowly warming pots. It had to get this bad, and we had to be rendered this choiceless, before we were able to appreciate the freedom that was always ours. Milton Mayer wrote in They Thought They Were Free about the way Nazism crept up on Germans:

"The one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.”

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And, look, “this is not for everyone”. We won’t be able to bring everyone along on this truth-crashing mission, including those closest to us. We can only role model the hell out of the situation and, as reader

Rochelle

wrote, “be here to hold the hand of anyone who needs to sit with someone” on those countless, bountiful archipelagos of islands of sanity.

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Similarly, it’s also true that collapse is too complex for many to handle. Which has helped me find something of a shelf in my being for that horrible decline in decency I flagged at the top. Our primitive nervous systems were not built for this level of complexity. (A line by investigative journalist

Rachel Donald

sticks with me: “Our brains are wired for finding bananas with friends.”) And so, as the truth of collapse begins to hit, a lot of humans revert to primal survival tactics - base flight or fight stuff. The more you’ve rear-ended yourself into the sinking system and the more you’ve defined yourself by the more-more-more imperative and by wielding power over others, then the more you will feel you have to lose. And so, the more feral and primal your response. As Rome falls, you might feel all you can do is let rip, digging in deeper into the individualistic, extractive, exploitative, narcissistic, hedonistic, colonialist tactics that rear-ended you, bringing the whole thing down faster than it otherwise would. The elites did the same with the fall of the Roman Empire. And in the French Revolution. And with the fall of the Soviet Union. As historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”.

I have a label for the shelf on which I place the godawful stuff our civilisation’s ultra-elites - the billionaires and techno-feudalists - are doing: “Tantrum Energy”. And I sometimes wonder if, like two-year-olds chucking a dangerously reckless fit, they are crying out to be rescued from themselves. I’m reminded, not for the first time, that all I can do now is channel some hectic Mother Energy, let it play out as it is going to have to, and put my energy into those islands of sanity.

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Crashing deeper still, we begin to arrive at a bunch of absurd and downright paradoxical truths:

I am in deep personal pain…and I am cosmic stardust and don’t matter a dot.

Death is upon us… and this just makes me love life more deeply than I ever have. As I say in this track, songs are more meaningful, birdsong leaves me exultant now.

This is so stupidly hard…and we must bear it.

What a dance, right? What a mad edge to be at! The absurdity of what we are in has cracked me open like nothing else ever could or would. It repeatedly stripped me back to essentials, to “what is left if we lose it all”.

And, so, more absurdities, still:

Collapse is indeed disgraceful… and it’s a gift.

Our humanity is the path…and it’s the reward.

And perhaps the maddest, most absurd, most delightful truth of them all, which we kind of clocked at the beginning but I don’t think could really land until this very moment:

There is no longer “hope”…and there is something else going on.

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In the second part to this final chapter I flesh out how I have personally landed and I do a wind-y-up-y thing with the idea of “hope”.

Not long to go!

Sarah xx

1. A report by CarbonBrief this month (January) announced that even record-high emissions from fossil fuels cannot fully explain the surge in carbon dioxide…other tipping points are at play.

2. Across places where a third of humanity lives, actual daily temperature records are outpacing model predictions, according to forthcoming research.

3. I have oodles more data to “proove” my point, but I’ll spare you somewhat and put them here in the notes. Global tree cover loss rose; methane and nitrous oxide levels accelerated; it was found climate change will cut global GDP in half by 2070; in Finland, forests have stopped absorbing the majority of the carbon they once did, becoming a net source of emissions, which, The Guardian reported, swamped all gains the country has made in cutting emissions from all other sectors since the early 1990s; a 2024 study examining global banking investment trends confirmed less than 7% of global financial assets are currently aligned with a 1.5°C pathway. And so on, so forth…

4. As you might recall, the sixth stage of collapse - The Age of Decadence - is historically characterised by “hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism” and an amplification of inequity and destruction, specifically by the elites.

5. Caused by energy shortages, which are caused by fossil fuel companies filing for bankruptcy (rather than using their capital to fund the increase in EROI), which will be accentuated by food price increases, that ripple on from climate collapse taking down food bowls. And so on, so forth.