John Michael Greer refers to it as The Long Descent. Either moniker works for us; the point is that we should prepare for a series of variable changes, not just a single seismic one.
And after each change, we’ll have lost a little of what was possible before. Things will normalize around a new, simpler, baseline. We already have a number of examples of this. Take the nation of Greece, for instance. Before 2010, the people of Greece were able to do an awful lot more than they can do now. They built new infrastructure (construction for the 2004 Athens Olympics alone topped 8.5 billion Euros), had one of the most generous national pension programs, and had an unemployment rate in the single digits. Today in 2015, now that creditors have become fed-up with the staggering debt the country has amassed, the Greeks live under a fiscal austerity regime on par with the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930s.
The number of those living in poverty and homelessness has spiked, the unemployment rate has tripled to 25% (over 50% for workers under 25 years of age!), and business are shuttering at the rate of roughly 60 per day. To underscore our point: all this didn’t happen overnight, instead it steadily worsened over several years. But the end result is crystal clear: much of what was possible in Greece just a half-decade ago is but a distant memory today.
We see the same dynamic playing out in our oceans, with collapsing fishery stocks and the rise of acidification levels. Here’s a chart of the collapse of the Pacific sardine population, one of the base pillars of the food chain for the world’s largest ocean:
Just eight years ago, the sardine population was measured at a multi-decade high. But each subsequent year since, more fish were harvested than were replenished. Each individual year didn’t in itself look like a collapse; but now that we can view the past decade in its totality, the severity of the situation becomes immediately visible.
In this way, and in a multiplying number of others, we and our planet are experiencing a “death by a thousand cuts” as key supports for the economic, energy and environmental systems upon which we depend fail on our watch.
REALIZING IT’S ALL ABOUT POSITIVITY, NOT FEAR
Understandably, it’s hard for most people not to react to this information without anxiety.
After all, in many ways it’s a story of loss, which means it’s about being unable to continue practices we’ve been accustomed to for our entire lives. So, emotions of fear, worry and grieving are in many ways to be expected by those new to this material.
We too experienced these feelings, along with healthy doses of anger and depression, in our early days of coming to terms with the data. With the experience of our own journeys of processing through this material, as well as helping thousands of others (millions, if we include our website) with the same, we’ve come to realize that this emotional path follows a similar progression as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief model. This makes perfect sense, as folks are essentially wrestling with the death of a dream, of a dearly-held belief of what the future was supposed to be.
But at the beginning, before they’ve successfully gone through these five stages, most folks find themselves living with a sense of existential dread. They describe themselves as feeling unfulfilled, unhappy, and powerless. This often creates a paralysis of despair which breeds inaction because, Hey, why bother? We’re all doomed anyways.
If this sounds in any way like you, take heart. There is a good reason you’re feeling this way (and, no, it’s not because things are hopeless). What you’re reacting to, possibly on an unconscious level, is the realization that the system itself is unsustainable and, as such, is destroying itself—for all of the reasons itemized in Chapter 2 and in The Crash Course, or perhaps additional ones you’ve observed in your own surroundings. Simply put: it doesn’t feel good to participate in such a system.
Our observation of thousands of people like you have convinced us that when your actions are out of alignment with what you know to be true, we can predict two things.
The first is that fear takes residence in that gap between the actions you’re taking and the actions you know you should be taking. Deep down, you know that denying reality only delays its arrival and magnifies its impact. That gnawing in your gut when you’re charging more expenses to a credit card you know you should be paying off instead? That’s the kind of angst we’re talking about. But worse. For many, putting on a suit each day, fighting traffic on the commute to and from work, and living a frenetic consume-and-spend lifestyle feels increasingly like a sacrilege they’ll be punished for as the post-peak-resources era arrives in force.
The other important development is that your integrity becomes compromised, and that feels awful. The simple morality all children are born with rebels within us when we engage in behavior we know to be wrong, triggering self-rebuking feelings of guilt, cognitive dissonance, and regret. If you truly believe that the system in which you live is destructive to both yourself and everybody else, then continuing to live and operate within the rules of that same system is self-harming. The mind rebels, and often forces itself to dissociate from this contradiction. As a result, since your consciousness is ignoring the issue, it manifests elsewhere as stress, depression, health issues, etc.
This duality of fear and compromised integrity is toxic to our health and happiness. Yet we see it all around us. In the 80% of Californians living in homes not inspected or retrofitted for earthquake resistance. In the millions of Texans and Pennsylvanians permitting natural gas fracking in their counties, despite the resulting contamination of their groundwater. In the millions of American workers annually at risk of losing their jobs due to automation and off-shoring, who are not taking steps now to re-train for a more secure role. Clearly, there’s a widely shared human trait of ignoring an existential risk above a certain magnitude. Yet the long-term cost of such behavior may prove to be as high as the feared injury.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! And here is where we get to the heart of this chapter: Why resilience is so important. In the natural world, it is the resilient systems and organisms that are best able to survive existential threats. During times of evolutionary transition, omnivores fare better than animals with specialized diets. Those who produce frequent and large litters outcompete those with fewer young and longer gestation periods. Those with adaptive traits like warm-bloodedness or parthenogenesis are much more likely to persevere through periods of environmental hardship.
The same is true for humans. We are one of the most adaptive species nature has ever created. And we are capable of greatness. We can be builders or destroyers. Stewards or spoilers. On the same acreage, we can choose to erect a strip mall or an organic farm. It all comes down to choice. We’ve been pursuing a course of de-generation. But it’s just as much in our power to embrace re-generation instead.
The Kübler-Ross model mentioned earlier dials through Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression—finally ending at Acceptance. And we find that once people make their way to this stage, a whole new set of possibilities starts to open up. At this point, emotions swing away from fear and back to hope as realization sets in that we have an over-abundance of opportunity to do things differently, more intelligently, and more sustainably. We have the chance to look at everything afresh, challenge old assumptions, and make new choices—many of which, while potentially quite different from the ones we’ve made in the past, nurture us in ways we didn’t realize we needed.
And so we return to the importance of narrative, and of the need for a new one that better serves us.
Two quotes from the great civil rights leader Mahatma Gandhi underscore the wisdom of cultivating useful narratives, whether at the individual or societal level. The first explains how our beliefs, which are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves, have a cascading impact on the reality we experience:
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits