Is it any mystery then why millennials are much less able, let alone interested and willing, to make major purchases (car, home, etc), get married, have children, or work a standard 9-to-5 corporate job as previous cohorts their same age?
We see similar pressure brewing between the haves and the have-nots. Across the world, the wealth gap between the rich and poor has rarely been as extreme as it is now. Remember that competition for pie slices? Well, as the pie itself stops getting bigger, those in power use their authority and influence to keep their share of the pie growing for as long as possible afterwards. This results in less and less for everyone else.
We can see direct evidence of this reality in the dramatic jump in wealth disparity that has happened since the 2008 financial crisis. For a few years, the credit pie stopped growing—and what happened? The response engineered by our governments directed trillions of new dollars into the asset classes owned by the already-rich, resulting in a robust boost to their portfolio values while the rest of the 99% has been left to simply watch and struggle onwards.
The outbreak of protest the world saw during the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2009-2011 was an immediate reaction to the unfairness of this class dichotomy. We are likely to see this pattern again, this time with more vitriol and violence, as the wealth gap grows further.
There’s a similar dynamic at the geopolitical level. A general East vs. West tension is brewing as developing nations increasingly look to wrest resources from the clutches of the OECD members, whom they understandably argue have consumed more than their fair share over the past several centuries.
The key conclusion to draw here is that, as the Club of Rome predicted in the 1970s, modern civilization is finally encountering the limits of a finite planet. If that’s indeed the case—which we hope The Crash Course and our related works empirically show it is—then our societal “growth = goodness” narrative is no longer enabling for us. In fact, it is now dangerous and destructive to our well-being, as its continued pursuit will only accelerate the drawdown of remaining resources and exacerbate the resulting conflicts.
Our warning is this: if we do not adopt a new narrative, the destructive status quo will continue…until the point it simply can’t. When that moment abruptly arrives, our entire system of living will break. At that point, we’ll be forced to make do with less—whether we like it or not—and our options for moving forward will be much more limited than they are now.
The first step towards achieving long-term sustainable prosperity is, of course, to adopt a better narrative. A narrative of living within our means, of resource stewardship, and of finding happiness in a life of purpose, not of possessions.
We don’t think it’s realistic to expect our leaders and social institutions to make this mindset shift on their own before calamity arrives. There are just too many people who are invested (emotionally, financially and otherwise) in continuing the status quo for as long as possible. As Upton Sinclair wrote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” and all evidence since the last financial crisis shows that if the establishment can deny, ignore or delay dealing with problems, it will.
This is why we urge individuals like you to develop a mindset of resilience. You can make changes to your lifestyle now, before the next crisis, that will greatly reduce your vulnerability—while quite likely, boosting your quality of life at the same time. And when the whole house of cards comes tumbling down at some future point, you’ll be fine, as you’ve already acclimated to and learned to enjoy a low-input lifestyle. As our friend the archdruid John Michael Greer cheekily puts it: Collapse now and avoid the rush.
The rest of this book, and the workbook that accompanies it, will walk you through the details on how to prepare for tomorrow’s “de-growth” today.
WHEN? WHEN? DEAR GOD, WHEN???
When is this collapse going to happen? is a question we get asked all the time. If we only knew with certainty, we could make a mint. Sigh…
We don’t know. And neither does anyone else, by the way, which is why we deal in probabilities, not absolute forecasts.
The reality is that the collapse is happening right now, all around us. It is just happening at such a slow rate that people not consciously paying attention tend to miss it. You can see it in rising grocery prices, increasing political rhetoric between major powers, ice shelves calving at unprecedented rates, acidifying oceans, and depleting oil reserves.
As a scientist, Chris learned through years of study and observation that complex systems under stress tend to resist change until they reach a breaking point, and then they alter their state very quickly. The actual moment this trigger occurs is nearly impossible to predict, as physicist Per Bak demonstrated in the mid-1980s through his work involving the power-laws of self-organizing systems—most memorably by drizzling grains of sand onto a sand-pile. At some point, adding too much sand causes an avalanche that reverts the pile back to a lower-energy state. But as each individual grain is dropped onto the pile, current science has no way to predict its impact with mathematical certainty. Will it be the grain that triggers the avalanche? There’s just no way of knowing.
But, Bak’s work did prove that the odds of a major avalanche occurring increase with the number of grains added to the pile. More pointedly, as each sand grain was added, the pile would begin to accumulate larger areas of steepness, which he termed “fingers of instability.” The more of these fingers of instability, the greater the chance that the next grain would trigger a collapse, and the greater the chance the collapse would be a large one.
The complex economic and resource-based systems we rely on operate similarly. They will resist change until a final stress, a final grain of sand falls, and then they rather suddenly and dramatically will shift to a brand new state. The relationship Bak observed has been found to exist throughout nature: in the sun’s activity, in the movement of current through a resistor, and in the flow of rivers, to name just a few.
Take our financial markets as another example. If stock prices have been growing much faster than earnings and the underlying economy (which has been the case since 2009), and if the market has not experienced a correction of 10% or more for an extended period of time (as of this writing, the U.S. stock market has not dropped more than 10% for nearly 1,000 consecutive trading days—the 3rd longest such stretch in its history), then we can express confidence that the next correction will arrive sooner, and be greater, than historically average.
And when you add in all of the other potential risk factors we look at (exponential resource depletion, exponential credit growth, exponential population growth, etc.), we are able to draw similar conclusions that large systemic shocks are highly likely to materialize within the next few decades. Quite possibly sooner.
Not that we predict that one night we’ll go to bed and wake up living in a Hunger Games-style dystopia. Rather, as is common with natural systems, we expect to see a series of smaller shocks and failures manifesting over time. In totality, the sum impact of these will be enormous. But the individual insults themselves likely won’t feel transformative as they occur, though we’re careful to add that local mileage may vary (meaning: different localities and populations will feel each impact with different intensities). We visualize this progression as akin to a bowling ball falling down a staircase. Each sudden jolt is then followed by a period of stability, albeit at a lower state. Things normalize, and then—Thunk! —the ball drops again.
James Howard