From Collapse Awareness to Collapse Acceptance

A while ago, a media company approached me about doing some writing and research for a show about prepping for the collapse of civilization. It didn’t work out, but the idea motivated me to dig deep into the premise. Until recently, I didn’t understand that I wasn’t just learning about survival.

I was going through the stages of grief.

As you might already know, the stages of grief first emerged in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s 1969 book, On Death and Dying. Psychologists have expanded her original stages, ultimately giving us seven.

They fit like a coffin.

Most of the world still lives in the first two stages, somewhere between disbelief and denial about the impending collapse of civilization. They reject the science on carbon emissions, overshoot, overpopulation, overconsumption, overreliance on fossil fuels, and just about everything else. When you talk about megafires, superstorms, atmospheric rivers, and famines, a wild silence blooms. Some of them would rather believe in weather machines than tipping points. Then there’s all of our friends and relatives, who just don’t want to talk about it.

Some of us reached the third stage pretty fast.

We got angry.

Our anger erupted on social media. We vented. We fumed. We preached to each other and shouted into so many voids. We scorched so many trolls, not always because we thought it would make a difference, but because we needed someone to unleash our rage on. We protested and protested and protested.

Sometimes, we managed to get some attention.

The anger felt justified, even righteous.

We got angry at celebrities and influencers for their private jets. We got angry at billionaires for their hollow pledges and their relentless greed. We got angry at politicians for their cowardice and incompetence.

For some of us, the anger evened out. We still get angry, but not as often, not as long as we used to, not with the same intensity.

Is that a bad thing?

Of course, some of us still feel the anger pulsing through us whenever we read about this billionaire’s $50 million wedding or that activist’s dopey comments about hope and doom. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Even among the climate activists, there’s a widespread and palpable rage at anyone who doesn’t share their optimism. Instead of getting angry at the ones ruining the planet, they get angry at us for being sincere.

When someone explodes in anger at you for talking about collapse, even if they seem to know what’s going on, understand:

It’s their grief talking.

Bargaining follows anger. So, it makes sense that some of us have gotten really interested in prepping and survival. We wanted to see what we could do to increase our odds. It wasn’t a waste. We learned a lot. We developed useful skills. The more we learned, the more we realized the truth.

We’re not just going up against a handful of disasters. Society isn’t simply going to revert back to the 19th century. We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event, caused by us. Things will get brutal.

In the early days of my collapse awareness, a sense of urgency would overtake me. It felt imperative to start the garden today. We had to get things planted today. We had to fill the rain barrels today. We had to get all the water filter gear today. It was exhausting. This endless sense of urgency, to always be moving forward on some kind of prep, isn’t something I’m going to miss.

It still gets triggered every time the orange menace stoops to a new low, but it feels more manageable now. Part of the reason it feels more manageable is that I’ve used the sense of urgency to make plans and steady progress. On any given day, what we manage to get done has to be enough.

We learn to hit pause.

We see plenty of preppers still in the bargaining phase. If we stockpile enough food… If we grow enough gardens… If we build a strong enough community… In this stage, we’re still in denial about what’s been set in motion.

Of course, bargaining can take a lot of different forms. Millions of people out there believe if they build enough solar panels and wind turbines, they can prevent the collapse, or at least keep it from touching their lives.

The billionaires are certainly trying to bargain with collapse. They believe they can build the perfect bunker to insulate themselves from it all. Meanwhile, they want to colonize outer space with a trillion humans.

What is that, if not bargaining?

Next up, guilt.

Some of us have felt intense guilt over the way we’ve lived. At its worst, you feel guilty every time you flip on a light or boot up your computer. You feel guilty about every piece of plastic. You regret the gas you burned on your way to work. You feel like you didn’t do enough. You didn’t protest enough. You didn’t vote enough. Then at some point, you realize you’re a tiny part of a massive system with the momentum of a thousand freight trains. If a hurricane clawing the mountaintops of Appalachia didn’t wake people up, what chance did you stand?

From here, you sink into depression.

It’s the sixth stage.

A sense of loneliness and futility settles over you. Maybe you wonder, what’s the point? Maybe you look at your options and your future prospects, and it makes you want to cry. Worse, you feel a deep, bottomless dread as all the history, all the science, all the dystopian fiction, all the logic coalesce.

These are the nights you stay awake, wondering how you could’ve been so foolish to think solar panels would ever save the world, or a few barrels of water would protect your family from a drought that lasts years.

As psychologists remind us, these stages aren’t linear. You can move back and forth between them. The process can stretch on for months or years, depending on the size and scope of your loss. When you’re mourning an entire civilization, an entire planet, an entire future, it’s going to take a while.

Good news, acceptance comes after that.

For someone like me, acceptance means being okay with the fact that I’ll probably never accumulate the means to get out of the suburbs that so many preppers and survivalists consider a death trap. It means choosing to live simply and conserve resources, even if my decades of efforts are wiped out by one billionaire in a couple of hours. It means choosing to store water and at least learn about rain catchment systems, even if they won’t spare me from a dust bowl.

Most of all, it means being okay with the fact that maybe we won’t have time to learn everything we want before collapse comes knocking. It means being okay with your limits and limitations. It means slowing down and resting, even if you run out of time. It means acknowledging that most people just don’t want to live in the kind of community you envision, even if that kind of community is the only kind that would stand a chance against what’s coming.

It’s ironic that a society so fixated on mental health wants to pass judgment on anyone who’s reached the acceptance phase of their collapse grief, treating it like a sickness, or accusing them of giving up. Western society in general and Americans in particular have developed a toxic aversion to grief.

So they remain stuck in denial.

On the contrary, acceptance is exactly what enables someone to live the rest of their life with a sense of meaning and purpose.

A lot of us have achieved collapse awareness. We know it’s happening, but we’ve all been working our way through these stages.

We’ve been grieving.

You could describe someone in the acceptance phase of collapse as collapse-adjusted. Psychologists say that when we accept death and loss, we don’t just get over it. We learn how to integrate it into our lives. We still miss who and what we lost. We still feel sadness, anger, fear, despair, regret, and everything else. Those emotions simply don’t control us anymore. We learn how to manage them.

We feel grounded again.

For some of us, that could look like spending more time with our families, taking up more hobbies, watching more sunsets, going for more hikes, listening to more music, making more art, taking more photographs, or just trying to stay grounded for the time we have left. We don’t want to waste that time churning in impotent rage or spending every waking moment trying to control things we can’t. We’re still going to observe and recognize the collapse as it unfolds, but we’re not going to try and bargain with it anymore.

Everyone has to go through this process at their own pace.

A lot of people aren’t going to get there.

But it’s a nice place to be.

Sure beats a bunker.

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