Rx #1: Inner Work for Your Apocalypse

“The illiterate of the future are not those who can't read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” - Melanie Challenger

Photo by Ben Blennerhassett on Unsplash

I can’t force anyone to pause and process their thoughts and feelings about our metacrisis, but I’ll say that it would be a very valuable step to do so instead of rushing ahead to stumble through whatever your impulsive reaction would be. In case I’m the first collapse-aware know-it-all that you’ve encountered, I’ll take this opportunity to inform you of the etymology behind the word “apocalypse”: In Greek, kaluptein means “to cover or conceal”. Apokaluptein means “to uncover or reveal”. The nature of the world isn’t changing; it’s just becoming obvious to you for the first time. What’s ending is the illusions of the world that lived inside you.

Onto some self-help suggestions. Relax - you’re only resetting your entire sense of reality.

Enjoy the validation

Have you ever been super into someone’s energy and then, only after multiple distressing interactions, allow yourself to see that they’re delusional? Our entire society has been gaslighting you. We aren’t just drinking the Kool-Aid; we’re swimming in it, immersed 24/7 in the lie that “this civilization is all there is and it’s destined to carry on forever”. With everyone else is still invested in that narrative, this doesn’t feel great, but at least now you know that you aren’t the crazy one.

Explore collapsology

In my opinion, it isn’t enough to scroll through headlines and conclude “yeah, I get it, doomsday is upon us.” So far (writing in 2025), I’ve noticed that most people’s imaginations have only a few settings: everyday “normal” existence, fascist crackdown, natural disaster, temporary AI-induced layoff. Tornadoes! Explosions! What I don’t see many people seriously envisioning is daily life that looks like peasanthood, where everyone is collectively responsible for procurement of food, water and fire fuel. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of First World, industrial-era lifestyles. Your understanding of the situation is going to influence how you respond to events and make decisions (minor and major) going forward, so it’d be wise to invest some effort into a fairly thorough understanding. Studying this stuff also leads to more interesting conversations. One place to start is with the books, videos and podcasts that I cite/link in my posts.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Be open to new/truer narratives

Who are we? What kind of trouble are we in and where are we headed? What got us here? What do we know? The dominant culture has its own, false answers to these questions. Dougald Hine writes that they’re becoming ruins. As you navigate the dying world, notice these phantom pillars and keep an eye out for ones that seem sturdier.

Work on seeing how ridiculous and vulnerable “civilized” cultures are

This gets you out of a less-helpful blaming mode and into a more-helpful “identifying areas for improvement or at least developing humility” mode.

In Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira urges readers to see themselves as “cute and pathetic” and to “experience the absurdity of modernity within and around you as a form of connection, endearment, and liberation from the grip of arrogance; as a way to laugh at yourself and be taught by the precarity, brokenness, and imperfection of our collective existence"

Tom Murphy, in “Eye of the Newt”, encourages us to see our struggles from the perspective of our more-than-human kin.

Be skeptical of others’s ideas & humble about your own

“Don’t be too quick to adopt the new maps that are offered when the ground is still moving under our feet. Stay puzzled by what has been revealed, take time to find your bearings and carry whatever claims you are offered around for a while to rest them against your own experience and see which ones you can steer by.” Dougald Hine knows what’s up! Thats from At Work in the Ruins.

Example of doubting others’ advice: The Post-Carbon Institute (and particularly Richard Heinberg) has suggested that you can brace for disruption by:

1. Joining an intentional community… Reality: These are hit-or-miss and it remains to be seen whether most of them do much better than regular suburban neighborhoods and rural towns.

2. Putting your money in a credit union instead of a major bank … Reality: Of all the actions you could take, this seems odd to me. (And yet I did it. And moved to an intentional community, too - like a sucker! Clearly I have no idea what I’m doing, either.)

3. Getting a work-from-home job so that you don’t need to worry about commuting when gas prices increase … Reality: In this age of artificial intelligence and power outages and supply chain disruptions and a rising cost of living, is any job a safe bet? Those we recognized as “essential workers” in 2020 were those who tended to perform labor in-person.

Photo by Mark Rohan on Unsplash

Get comfortable with uncertainty

Much of this is a “wait and find out” kind of thing. There are hints of various possibilities. The following examples illustrate that we can’t be sure how things will play out. The “🚫“ arguments are drawn from subscriber Cimbri’s comment on this post.

Example 1: Hungry humans hunting wildlife to extinction

✅ In 2024, in response to drought and food insecurity, Namibia culled 700 wild animals for meat, including elephants, hippos, buffalo, impala, blue wildebeest and zebras. Granted, 700 isn’t actually that many, but given how dramatically human mammals collectively outweigh wild mammals (see the bottommost bar’s blue and teal segments in the chart below - and presumably we’d have already exhausted the livestock option), one might imagine that humans would eliminate the small remaining population of land mammals, plus many birds.

source.

🚫 Cimbri writes: “Modern hunters rely on tech and energy to set up cameras, drive to site, shoot with a gun, haul out with an ATV, drop off at processor, pick up and store in a freezer and never do they harvest all the edible parts … so it would be comically removed from real skill at subsistence if it weren't also so sad … The average person thinks ‘I'll just go hunt’ despite never having to do anything more involved than hunting down a Hot Pocket and still failing at processing that properly when he burns his mouth on it.” He notes also that during the Great Depression, Americans were desperate for food and had more skills than we do today, yet wildlife survived, probably in inaccessible locations.

Example 2: Desperate humans chopping down every tree as firewood

✅ In 2024, in Mali, people desperate for firewood chopped down trees that activists has planted. During war-induced fuel shortages in Syria, residents removed 20% of its forests in 10 years.

🚫 Cimbri writes: “If the system is not working, the majority of people (this is talking about the first world and specifically America here) are too unconditioned, unskilled and unequipped to just go out and start burning the woods down, especially if the driver in the scenario is a lack of [industrial] energy because that [lack of industrial energy] would [also] mean no food, no water, etc”

Example 3: Desperate humans burning tons of (toxic) synthetic material as fuel

✅ As of 2025, it’s becoming common to burn plastic as a fuel for cooking and heating homes (e.g. 13% of Nigerian households). In Indonesia, tofu companies use plastic as fuel because fossil fuels and wood are more expensive. The fumes cause lung disease, cancer, and reproductive and developmental problems.

🚫 “It's more likely that there'd be mass death before there was both the combined incentive and ability for mass couch burnings”

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Catch yourself being a total Homo colossus

Related to the previous tip, notice when you…

• default to machine-dependence - I’m not saying don’t buy a generator to keep your fridge running. I’m saying take a moment to be aware that other humans (even today and definitely in the past) manage without refrigerators. And that there’s a limit to what back-up systems can do. If you’re going to spend time and money on something, maybe spend some on trying to learn to live without the most modern technology, as others did/do. At least it’ll be a chance to marvel at other species’ and cultures’ superior competence.

• fail to take a hint - Most species (and many human cultures - but not civilizations/empires) gather holistic information about their environments and strategize based on it. Our culture is uniquely oblivious. Signals are constantly coming at you - from “the Universe”, from your gut… Receive them.

• demand “mastery education” - Vanessa Machado de Oliveira defines mastery education as a modality that “gives us predictable learning outcomes, and that is based on the transfer of content and the development of competencies and skills that can enhance a person's efficiency and value within modernity… [It promises to] keep them [learners] comfortable, hopeful, motivated, validated and satisfied… It feels empowering, strengthens identities, and is often oriented toward affirming and boosting learners’ egos.” In contrast, depth education prompts us to “become open to being taught by the world in unexpected ways. Depth education focuses on complexities and paradoxes and it invites all of us to sit with difficulties, unpack investments, confront resistance… [It] encourages learners to step back to observe with skepticism one’s own personal narratives, desires, and identifications and dis-identifications.” Are you insisting on answers and solutions and relief from tension? It could be keeping your engagement with this topic shallower than it could otherwise go.

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Detect the old/false stories & catch yourself pretending along

I think that many people realize that our situation is going downhill, but then they get stuck at that step, acting along with outdated scripts while dread haunts them. I think this is partly because they’ve acknowledged “at the surface of their brains” that many familiar things are coming to an end, but they haven’t truly internalized it, stripped away the old myths and integrated this into the lenses through which they view the world. This can feel like living in two worlds or stories at once, which isn’t fun for our minds.

The next time someone tells you that they’re moving to a penthouse apartment in a major city, catch yourself - What are you imagining? Are you reacting with the standard superficial “omg I’m so jealous!!” or are you aware that it’s going to suck for them when power outages become the norm and supply deliveries to cities become sporadic? Maybe someone tells you that they’re planning a backpacking trip to Europe next year. Are you picturing something Instagram-worthy or are you picturing heatwaves, fires, floods, blackouts, software system failures, conflict…? Pay attention to how often our culture’s unrealistic fantasies about a luxurious, high-tech future (or present) infiltrate your mind.

I mean that as an internal exercise. I’m not suggesting you rain on your friends’ parades - Reality will take care of that, and they wouldn’t believe you in advance anyway. They’d think there’s a problem with you rather than with our world.

Accept that most people won’t be willing to face or able to grasp the depth of the trouble we’re in

Since I’ve become aware of our predicament, I’ve also become aware that people have a fairly strict filter for which ideas they’re willing to entertain. Picture conversation topics existing on a spectrum (it should probably be more than two-dimensional…) with “simple & delightful topics” on the left end and “complex & insurmountable issues” on the right end. Generally, people might be willing to go toward the center or right-of-center, but rarely to the far-right. I’ve written previously about how powerfully our brains resist information about our situation. Don’t bother trying to convince others to see things your way. (In terms of your social life, there’s hope, but I’m saving that for a future post…)

Give up

Dougald Hine says something like “we don’t know how to know” that our world is ending. Culturally, behaviorally, we have only one mode. Tom Murphy suggests that we “embrace disillusionment”. Dis-illusionment. Removing the layers that were fake anyway. Uncovering, revealing …Throwback to the beginning of this post!

Believing civilization’s myths inspires “ambition”: pursuing a Linked-in worthy professional life and Instagram-worthy personal life. How does it look when you recognize civilization’s supposed destiny was a lie? Maybe like a lack of ambition, refusal to participate in the same games that others are investing so much energy and precious time into. I don’t know much about yin and yang, but it seems that to offset our cultural overload of yang-type optimism and boldness, you might bring more yin (so-called passivity and right-brained thinking).

Ajit Varki’s “Mind Over Reality Transition” (MORT) theory, building on Danny Brower's work, posits that our culture’s tendency to extremely compartmentalize our knowledge of our inevitable death is critically tied to our futile, psychotic pursuit of exceptional status among Earth’s creatures (“progress”). To counteract this effect, you could contemplate the future circumstances of your own death. When I remind myself that my death is unlikely to occur when I’m elderly, lying peacefully indoors, it provides perspective and a reminder to chill out and focus on what really matters.

source.

Grieve

“Good Grief Network (GGN) is a peer support non-profit serving individuals and communities experiencing eco-distress and collective trauma from social and ecological injustices.”

[More resources coming soon! I feel like many “eco-anxiety” or “climate grief” resources mainly help you deal with the ideas of destruction of the more-than-human world and disruptions to our lives, but not with civilization-based existence coming to an end, y’know?]

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

Ask yourself: What does this change? What still matters?

*The universe is indifferent.* On a long enough timescale, everything gets pulverized and incinerated. Yet certain things feel like they matter, even when you realize that civilizations’ project on this planet is coming to an end. This new angle only kills your ability to care about certain things - probably pettier things. I’ve found that, after an initial big wave of despair and occasional little ones, «whether or not society is on the road to greatness» and «my ability to feel enthusiasm about some things» are separate issues. Thanks, hedonic treadmill / happiness "set point"!

“Maybe ‘the point’ isn't to live more in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.”

― Jenny Odell, “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock”

Ask yourself: What would make sense if I have 5 years left OR 20 years left (of “normal” or of life in general)?

I’ve been musing on three categories of effort:

• Suffer now to prosper later (suffering as prerequisite)

  • Examples: Boomers who spend decades in jobs they’d rather not be performing and then enjoy retirement. Many religions that preach about enduring hardship on Earth to reach paradise in Heaven.

  • Makes sense if: you have 20+ years remaining

• Prosper now but suffer later (suffering as consequence) (when people start to suspect that the first option will be unavailable, they often skip to this equally-unwise one)

  • Examples: Getting a drunk, having a great time, then facing a hangover. Spending all your savings on an amazing vacation, then being unable to afford an unexpected big bill.

  • Makes sense if: you have <5 years (or <1, or whatever) remaining

• Prosper now and prosper later - This is the move!!

  • Examples: Exercise (assuming you enjoy it). Planting trees (assuming you enjoy it). Connecting with others over deep conversation (assuming you enjoy it).

  • Makes sense if: UNCONDITIONAL! These activities are rewarding enough in the present that you don’t need an agenda, any secondary outcomes to justify them. Meanwhile, if there is time for them to have long-range repercussions, those will likely be positive ones. It’s a win-win.

You could also consider people’s top deathbed regrets:

• “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

• “I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”

• “I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.”

• “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

• “I wish I had let myself be happier”

Photo by Hansjörg Rath on Unsplash

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us”

- Joseph Campbell

Ask yourself: What could it look like, for me to incorporate awareness into how I exist / behave / invest time & energy?

Some thoughts:

I’m not necessarily inviting you to figure out how to survive (which is where many folks first go mentally when they become concerned about collapse). Life isn’t something that anyone survives. If you got news that you had an incurable disease that would kill you in a few years, how would you adjust your life to align with that information? That’s the distinction I’m trying to call attention to: adaptation-as-integration, which can take many more forms than adaptation-for-survival.

Know thyself…

• Are you an “enjoy it while it lasts” kind of person or a “get over it” kind of person? Two minor, personal examples: 1. Coffee. I’d like to quit on my own terms before it becomes unavailable. This would give me a sense of agency, keep my teeth whiter (I’m vain) and calm my racing mind. 2. Travel. When I realized that plane travel is a temporary phenomenon, I fell out of love with it. The trips I’ve taken since then have been kind of fun but kind of eerie, so I’ve mostly discontinued long-distance travel, rather than continue it half-heartedly. … But maybe you want to chug all the coffee and take all trips, while you still can! Tune into how you feel about it.

• What was the last time you learned something new or made a deep personal lifestyle change? Do you do better on your own or with support from others? Prefer independent projects or team efforts? This all pertains to the “prosper & suffer” activity categories above… Personally, I know that I’m fairly good at learning as an adult (when I find the topic/skill interesting) and I’m fairly disciplined. I like to be alone when I want to concentrate, but I’m happier if I have company when performing physical tasks or digesting ideas together.

• How committed are you to staying where you are? (& What are the limits to the benefits of fleeing?) From the interview that Jem Bendell gave on the Liminal News podcast… :

“Is it more according to my values and who I am to live my current life to the fullest, most caring, most helpful, most creative - until things go snap, and then I’ll be in a disaster zone like everyone else, queueing up for a bit of bread and waiting for the truck to take me off somewhere? … I’m just going to stay here and live my life and try and help my neighbor with techniques like Non-Violent Communication… and help us collapse with a bit less nastiness, but this is certainly not a place to live if I’m interested in further longevity”

Examine (and regularly revisit) your philosophy / motivations / strategy / rationale

Toward which efforts do you feel compelled to devote your time and energy? Why? Is the activity likely to yield what you’re expecting it to? … Later, ask: Is this going as expected? Is it yielding the intended outcome and does the outcome feel as valuable as you expected? … Review this whole post after time some and see if you answer any of the questions differently or relate differently to Life / the World / our predicament.

Photo by Mike Lewinski on Unsplash

Have faith

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira observes that we cling to cultural myths of triumph because “we fear the void.... We forecast that this void will leave us empty, story-less, and that there will be no vitality in this emptiness because everything will be meaningless, pointless, purposeless, and sad.” It’s like stepping out of a train car when you know you can’t remain, into the space in-between. Your courage may or may not be rewarded. You don’t know that there’ll be another car for you to jump into, or what it’ll be like. But you have to face that the one you’ve been in can no longer continue to operate properly.

Similarly, Dougald Hine advises that we let go of trusting things that were supposed to keep us safe but will probably betray us; that we trust that dropping false beliefs about the world we inhabit and where it’s leading us at least creates the possibility, as the Big Path fails, of seeing what the appropriate moves might be. “We will need to learn again what it is the take seriously things that are larger or smaller than were allowed to be real or significant, according to the scale and systems of modernity.” We might just find “hope in a strange form” (quoting a podcaster paraphrasing Kafka and later Camus…): “There’s plenty of hope out there, just not for any of us… It always lies outside of what we as human beings could ever actually have access to.” We can aspire to develop an understanding of “It’ll be okay” that doesn’t require the ultra-specific, highly-unlikely element of things-going-well-for-civilization-members.

Wikipedia page for Post-Doom

Dowd’s shortest “Post-Doom, No Gloom” presentation

from Sterling College: “Vocabulary for Our Time”

Sid Smith, “Why You Shouldn’t Let Collapse Get You Down”

Paul Chefurka’s stages of collapse awareness

Wikipedia page for “Wicked problem”

on Environmental Coffeehouse with Sandy Schoelles, Jeremy Jimenez presents several ways to think of humans (at the 8:00-35:00 mark)

Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper

One more episode of Post-Carbon Institute’s “Crazy Town” podcast: the pros and cons of “High Energy Modernity”

Shaun Chamberlin’s Dark Optimism blog

“How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times” by Pablo Servigne et al

“Another End of the World is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It)” by Pablo Servigne et al

Goodreads page for “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” by James Howard Kunstler

Goodreads page for “The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age” by John Michael Greer

“Eco-Miserabilism and Radical Hope: On the Utopian Vision of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism”

Karen Perry on post-doom benefits

Reflections on an Argument - an email thread between investigative reporter Rachel Donald and ecological footprint originator Bill Rees, which exemplifies how collapse awareness inspires two people to be vulnerable, humble, empathetic