I haven’t forgotten my initial starting point: Why I feel terrible for the younger generations (Millennials and Gen Z) — very sad, very sorry, and very scared for them. It is just a lot to unpack. And it hurts.
The short answer is that we are lurching toward a prolonged planetary catastrophe that is only just starting to hit, destined to drastically reshape the lives of young people who have not been educated or prepared for what’s coming. If anything, they have been profoundly mis-educated so they lack comprehensive understanding or the capacity to respond creatively, at scale.
As I explored last time, our attention has been captured by mediated distractions, our brains hijacked by an onslaught of hypnotic nonsense. What we need, first, is calm—non-hysteric—systems thinking. Systems thinking is a skill that can be cultivated.
What many of us notice now (little things — like people eating at outside tables at restaurants in New York City in late January, or Europe running out of olive oil, or massive droughts across Europe that will severely impact next year’s harvests) are just the first ripples before we start feel the bigger shockwaves. The shockwaves will hit just a bit of time — a few years, at most a decade — before we encounter the actual blast. As a species, we’ve already wasted the precious few decades when science knew what was coming and post-industrial civilization could have acted preemptively. Instead, we got Reaganomics, MTV, Netflix, Instagram, subprime mortgages, and The Kardashians.
We needed to make substantive, severe changes throughout our economic, political, and industrial systems before it became too late to avert catastrophe. We didn’t do any of it. And so we will face the consequences.
Of course, we can go back and review all of the reasons we didn’t make those seismic shifts in time. I find it instructive to do this. A main factor is human psychology—our amazing ability to delude ourselves, to focus on our immediate comforts over long-term survivability for our descendants. Let’s not forget massive systemic inertia, coupled with blind faith in technological progress.
As meltdown becomes impossible to ignore, I hope the establishment pundits and political functionaries, liberal and conservative, who downplayed the severity of the biospheric crisis over decades due to self-interest and careerism will be publicly shamed and forced out of their power positions so that younger, more honest people can take their place. But I realize this is unlikely. It’s not how things work in our profoundly short-sighted, unjust society, where people are rewarded for maintaining the status quo.
Take Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman: Krugman just wrote “Our Economy Isn’t ‘Goldilocks.’ It’s Better,” a typical editorial for The New York Times, where he argues that the US economy is going great, looking at the data on high job creation and low inflation. Obviously, Krugman is shilling for Joe Biden, concerned that Trump will win the election. I agree this would be disastrous. But the deeper problem is that our whole model of economic and industrial growth is beyond disastrous, and cannot continue. Somehow, Krugman forgets to mention that!
I am sure some of you are aware of the original Limits to Growth report (1972)? As Honest Sorcerer puts it in their excellent essay, 2025: A Civilizational Tipping Point: “The authors were tracking the many interconnections between five key factors: non renewable natural resources, persistent pollution, population, food production and industrial output, and established various scenarios. One of them was World3, or Business As Usual (BAU).” We’ve continued to follow the BAU model, missing the various off-ramps we might have taken to a different system. And in fact, their model was shockingly accurate.
Last year, The Club of Rome published, “Recalibrations of Limits to Growth: An Update of the World3 Model.” Essentially, we are just at the point where everything peaks before going into precipitous, permanent, decline. Here is a chart explaining our immediate situation:
Do we see evidence in the world around us that this timeline — notice that according to the solid lines of Recalibration23 we are just at the point where food and industrial production start to sink rapidly — is coming to pass?
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