My dear reader.

This story about collapse could start in so many different places, each of them true in their own way.

I could say, for instance, that it began a few years ago when there was a 30-hour power outage in my town. Or I could say that it began in 2020 with the covid pandemic. Or in 2008 with the global financial crisis. Or in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina.

Then there are the less date-specific beginnings: the first time I read the 1972 Limits to Growth report; the first time I learned about the unhinged underpinnings of finance (debt-based money, fractional-reserve banking, derivatives and options and futures); the first time I saw a list of all the species that went extinct in the prior decade due to climate change. I could go on and on, but I don’t need to because the thing that I am getting at is a thing that I’d bet every single person reading this already feels in their body: that modern life is simply not working anymore, if it ever was.

This essay is the first in a series I’ll be sharing over the coming weeks that directly confronts what I (and many others) call collapse, which is really just a one-word shorthand to say that the way we live in modern industrial society is coming to an end.

That sounds grim, I know, which is probably why many people prefer more academic-sounding terms like “polycrisis” or “metacrisis” instead of collapse. And I get it — nowhere in my writing will I tell you that things aren’t that bad, nor that they won’t get worse. (They are, and they will.) But I will also say, sincerely and with my whole heart, that collapse acceptance has changed my life for the better, and I’d like to tell you about the intimate details of that in this series, too.

So that’s where we’re headed today: into an explanation of what I actually mean when I say that we are in an era of collapse, and how that has shaped my own life and thinking about what comes next.

Thank you for being here with me in this messy exploration. It means more than you know.