Dear Diary: Couldn't Someone Have Bloody Told Me That the Collapse of Our Civilisation Was Inevitable?
Huh. Collapse, it seems, is and always was inevitable. Would it have made a difference if I'd known?
My mind discretely implodes in a public building
Marlborough Library, Aotearoa New Zealand
Feeling…whatever the name of the feeling is when you’re quite sure your brain simply has to be oozing out of your ears
Dear Diary
It's rather humbling to be learning** about the intimately complex web of factors leading to The Unravelling of Practically Everything.
(**learning = having horrifying information thrust into my awareness… same thing)
I'm realising with growing disgust that my ignorance knows no bounds. The more I learn, the more I realise how little I know and ever did.
(did that even make sense? I don't know. I don't know anything, remember?)
My lack of knowledge can't just be my fault....can it?
"I can make anything your fault! Leave it with me while I rustle up some evidence that I will pummel into your mind”
I read books. I go outside. I talk to people. I went to school. And college. I've had many jobs, relationships and responsibilities, most of which were ...fulfilled or completed within their natural scope.
(“Fulfilled or completed within their natural scope”: is that a good way of describing the relationships with my ex-boyfriends ? I'll come back to that thought later).
Anyway, despite all this sometimes-above-average participation in society, and spells of curiosity and vague intellectual pursuit, I am utterly, pathetically, hopelessly uninformed about matters which underpin the world and the nature of life itself.
Humbling indeed.
I realised I harboured an unexamined assumption that once I crossed into my mid-thirties and settled into verifiable adulthood—where one is no longer flirted with (or, as it's referred to now, 'sexually assaulted') on a night out, or more accurately, where nights out are a significant burden and to be avoided—I would either know all the main things I needed to know or at least be aware of the existence of things I didn’t know about.
It would be at my discretion whether I explored, delayed or dismissed the things I didn't know about yet, depending on the level of interest or relevance the topic would hold for me.
Examples of things I knew existed but chose not to learn about would be mortgage rates, canals, dark matter, fly fishing, what cookies really are on a website and what happens when I click "accept all", Jungian archetypes, how an egg becomes a chick and the moral discussion around eating eggs, principle tools from the Iron age and how they shaped modernity, etc.
In other words, by my current age of 37, I mistakenly assumed I would know the things I needed to know and I would also know what I didn't know.
"Ah, so you have transcended mere ignorance into a realm of arrogant unawareness and naivety. You are one of the worst humans currently alive. I will infuse you with shame later and then at regular points henceforth until your death"
The latest thing I've learned that I didn't know I didn't know is that the collapse of a civilisation is a certainty, not an unfortunate possibility.
Civilisations, by their nature, strive for continuous growth and expansion (tick!) which inevitably leads to overconsumption of resources and environmental degradation (tick tick!).
This makes collapse inevitable, it follows, as the fundamental systems supporting the civilisation become unsustainable. Simples.
Not only is a civilisation prone to collapse, its nature is collapse. Collapse is inherent in its growth. It's a feature, not a bug. Collapse is inevitable. Its unavoidability is mundane, obvious, ordinary, and monotonously predictable.
"Mundane? Everything coming apart and all the suffering, pain, and destruction that will involve. Mundane? Monotonously predictable? You’re a monster"
This includes the collapse of the current civilisation we are unwitting hostages within. Our civilisation. Was. Always Going to. Collapse.
This has blown my mind as it's diametrically opposite to one of the key messages that was ambient in the educational, media and political environment of my upbringing.
A message that said "The human race in this moment is a species at the pinnacle of evolution, the best there has ever been. Our skill, innovation, technological ability and ingenuity know no bounds. Everything is already brilliant and will be even better in the future!"
The follow-up message was:
"And if, for any reason, you don't feel the excellence, the progress, the sheer visceral weight of possibility in your very bones, and you don't think that today is great or that tomorrow will be even better, then fret not! Luckily, there’s something wrong with you, and not something wrong with this promise of progress. Our amazing medical and psychiatric services will get you pathologised, medicated and institutionalised shortly. It's just you! You are broken! We will fix you! Everything else is great!"
But, instead, all that time, we were on an inevitable path to collapse. Interesting.
Collapse has been happening for 12,000 years, a few thousand years, a few hundred years, several decades, a generation, always, or never, depending on how one defines and measures collapse and whether a cherished aggravator includes agriculture, the 'enlightenment' (lol), the industrial revolution, post-war consumerist culture, neoliberalism, the rampant digitisation of humanity, etc.
Civilisations have collapsed before, every single one. The percentage of civilisations that have collapsed is 100%. Although, there's never been a civilisation as large and complex as our current one, which spans the globe in reach and impact. So...there's that.
Diary, are you getting this? Not that you need to 'get it,' I suppose, you are just a diary.
This is huge to me. Is it huge? It feels huge.
"Your thighs are huge. That's why you are an unloved spinster"
It would have been nice to have been informed about this before now. Gently taken aside, maybe at school, pulled out of maths class, or even summoned to a special assembly, and kindly advised that the very system we live within is not just systematically flawed and rather f&cked, but doomed to inevitable collapse. Likely within our lifetime. Splendid.
Would it have made a difference?
If, at school, I had been told that I am living through an unprecedented moment in history—the first-ever collapse of a global civilisation. Would I have made different choices?
Would it have affected where I put my attention as I grew older? Would I have spent less time worrying about others' opinions (mostly the opposite sex ), how I measured up (too fat, too poor, too unremarkable, too not-enough), or the prestige of my job title or coolness of my hobbies and past-times (always falling short)?
Would I have bypassed the quest for thinness, first fuelled by glossy magazine ideals and called a 'diet', later spiralling into a two-decade-long eating disorder, if I'd known our society was already declining?
Would I have invested my time, energy, resources, and money, into something other than vain attempts to fortify my fragile self-esteem (through drugs, alcohol, fashion, chasing the right crowd and status symbols), if I'd been aware that the illusion would dissolve by my late thirties?
Had I been aware, would I have paid more attention to that nagging, persistent squirmy feeling that something was definitely not ok? Would I have realised sooner that the problem was not - despite messages to the contrary - broken, little me? Would I have listened?
"Oh, boo-hoo, woe is you. Get over it, get back to work and stop this self-indulgent nonsense"
Or - if I'd been told about the inevitable collapse of civilisation while at school - would I have dismissed it immediately, thinking that the teachers were making it up to get us to stop smoking behind the gym?
XXX