Collapse Now, and Avoid the Rush
Sound advice, but what if you don't have the resources to "collapse now"? Then what?
Alright, so off the bat, I expect that this will be a “doomer-ish” type of post.
The headline says it all.
It implies that a societal collapse of sorts is coming, and that there will be a rush to secure resources.
I first learned the term through this tweet:
Just as the future is unevenly distributed, and societal collapse will likely be distributed similarly. The difference may reflect the opposite natures of growth and destruction. A fire can burn down a house in a day, a house that took months to build.
This post is not meant to scare or agitate.
I suppose I’m most interested in questions about what The Long Slow Decline looks like, and about how that will shape the world I live in.
What changes will we see?
Will it all be doom, gloom, death, trauma, starvation, violence?
What should we do, on a personal level, on a communal and local-level?
I’ve been thinking about collapse and decline for maybe a decade, possibly longer. If you’ve been paying attention worsening climate conditions, the ongoing extinction event killing plant and animal life, the decreasing standard of living in the US for the past 20 years–you may have been thinking about collapse and decline too.
It’s an existential crises as well as a global one. Trump’s presidency seemed particularly apocalyptic in some regards. Nothing seemed to be keeping America from spiraling into a neo-feudal Christo-fascist state.
During that time, I carried what felt like a large stone on my back, in the form of the pressure and urgency to “collapse now”–that is, to buy a house or a farm in the country and to begin the one-man job of “becoming self-sufficient”.
Home ownership has been historically out of reach for me as an oft-struggling freelancer. During the pandemic, I had a full-time job and was looking at properties but didn’t get far enough into the process to buy anything.
In the past year, I came across the idea that “there is no exit”. Even if you had the largest, most self-sufficient homestead, you’d need to know your neighbors, and sustain relationships with human beings who are not your kin.
The more I thought about it, the more arduous and boring being a solo prepper seemed. It’s actually really hard to grow all of your own food. Stores of food and water eventually run out. It’s lonely–and expensive.
Without a partner, solo prepping seems untenable. As someone who’s dealt with clinical depression for most of my life, living in a shack in the woods with a dog or two seemed even lonelier than living in a one bedroom apartment by myself.
The Best Case Scenario for Preppers
The best case scenario for being a prepper is to have a partner. This is the “trad” route.
Then you can move to the country, make friends with the neighbors, both work full-time to save up a nest egg, and start growing food and so on.
Honestly, this didn’t seem so tenable either.
I’m in a relationship now, with someone I care about a lot. I suppose the domestic prepper-life is still a possibility, but I realize this is specific to my experiences, dreams, and desires.
My goal for this newsletter is to help people find their way to slower, more compassionate, more interdependent lifestyles. I am trying to connect my personal experience to a web of possibilities that are available to the people reading this newsletter, ie you.
Living in community is a term that I use to describe this kind of lifestyle.
Maybe you too have felt the loneliness that many Americans and Westerners deal with. Maybe you too have wished and wondered for an alternative to the isolated day-to-day life that you may lead.
What’s ironic is that you can love people, have friends, and be active in your community, and still experience overwhelming loneliness, depression, and alienation.
With regards to earlier points on prepping made in this post, I think adopting the prepper mentality can actually exacerbate loneliness, depression, and alienation.
The apocalyptic “it’s us against the world” mentality can be debilitating indeed.
In fact, I’d say the way to transcend the default prepper mentality, is to get to know your neighbors, and to build relationships with them.
Perhaps there are analysts who can predict what degrees of societal collapse we will experience, and when. For the rest of us, we are sensing into a significant shift in “societal weather”, and great change on the horizon.
The level of chaos we are tasked with making sense of seems to increase slightly every day, with compounding effects.
Here’s a thread (with the caveat emptor that a lot of these survivalist/prepper/homesteader folks are right-wing and may have varying degrees of shitty politics).
Without public or private solutions to these problems(climate, economy, housing, medical care, mental health and drug epidemics), we are going to have to rely on each other.
Maybe you’re more realistic than I have been. I’d hoped that I’d be able to buy some land and have that land be a place where friends and allies could come and live, and we could create a sort of self-sustaining village, both in the resource-producing sense, and the socio-emotional/communal sense.
I’m realizing now that land ownership and village creation is not something I can do on my own. It’s something I’ve become less interested in leading or spearheading.
I’ve realized that I can’t just “exit”–it’s not realistic for me to “bug out” to the country and go full Ted K. And I realize that most other folks are not able to just drop everything and go homestead.
So, if one has let go of their dream of exiting to the country and becoming a self-sufficient prepper, where does that leave them?
If collapse is coming in some shape or form, if there is no escaping civilizational decline, what is rational to do?
The way I frame the question is: “How should I build resiliency and interdependency in my own life, and what should I be doing on a daily basis?”
Collapsing, But Make It “On a Budget”
I’m no expert on the topic of preparing for collapse, and a mitigating a long-term rise in the cost of living.
The ways I am thinking about dealing with it seem fairly obvious to me.
One is to continue trying to build relationships with people who are thinking about this stuff, for their own lives and to build community support.
It’s easy to become “theory-brained”, and to stay within your normal social groups.
I want to do a better job of meeting my neighbors, of deepening relationships with the people in my community.
I recently listened to a great Doomer Optimism episode, where @rizomafieldschool advocates adding people to group texts as a nuts-and-bolts way of building community.
There’s a 200-person group chat of young-ish, leftist homesteaders that I’m a part of that has been a wonderful resource in learning more about homesteading and collective land projects. Recently, someone in the group made the request that we all post intros about ourselves.
I’d been in the thread for two years and I was amazed at all of the cool people and projects contained in the thread. I posted my own bio and as a result made lasting friends in Paoli, Indiana, and met a handful of other “friendly weirdo homesteaders” that have invited me to visit their land.
The homesteader group chat is kind of a unique example, but I also started a group chat with my neighbors for the last apartment building I lived in NYC. We’d meet once a month at the bar across the street and trade notes on the state of the building, get to know each other, and exchange light gossip.
When I get back to NYC, I plan to do some more volunteering, and I’m hoping that is a way to build a stronger community in my own life, and to connect with more folks who are thinking about community support, and creating human-driven solutions for collective support and community care.
In a year or two, I hope to leave NYC for good, and to find a rural community to join, and to build my own “nice autonomous life”, living in community with others.