We're in the last 50 years of industrial civilization. Anyone who spends enough time with systems thinking and looking at the big picture of industrial society

We're in the last 50 years of industrial civilization. Anyone who spends enough time with systems thinking and looking at the big picture of industrial society inevitably comes to the same conclusion. I was a "doomer" back when everything seemed fine. Nothing since 2019 has surprised me at all. Things will continue to break down at a faster rate and more severely. However, one of my earliest realizations upon waking up to this was that as things become more obvious, people's denial will be not chipped away but rather strengthened. The collapse of industrial civilization (and the non-zero possibility of species extinction) isn't just scary for most people, it deeply cuts into existential crisis territory. The vast majority of our strategies of copping with existence and our deep rooted fear of our inevitable death is a system of meaning largely created around our hopes in the future of society. As society collapse we are forced to start confronting things that terrify us, and the natural psychological reaction is often to just double down on not seeing it. There are already so many things that we've normalized that would be shocking to someone from 2012: Global pandemic, land war with Russia, lake Mead on track to stop water flowing through the Hoover dam in 10 years, crop failures, supply chain crises, etc. In a very literal sense "everything is falling apart". We have destroyed vast portions of the biosphere, we're seriously looking at ecosystem devastating ocean acidification, most of us will live to see a blue ocean event. But people will be unlikely to ever recognize this, rather they will continue to double down on "this is fine" and the associates madness and extreme cognitive dissonance required to maintain this illusion.