Collapse seems to show up unevenly, like rain.
The uneven part seems obvious, but I don’t think we really internalize what that means. Uneven doesn’t just mean unfair (though it is). It means hard to recognize while it’s happening. Hard to agree on, easy to just argue away.
And rain falling unevenly doesn’t mean it isn’t raining.
Right now, it feels like we’re in that phase where the air is heavy but nothing has fully hit the ground yet. Some places are already soaked. Others are still dry enough to insist everything’s fine. Both experiences are real, which somehow makes it harder to talk about what’s happening at all.
Unevenness gets mistaken for randomness. Or for resilience. Or for proof that the system still works.
But rain isn’t random. It follows structure: pressure, temperature, terrain. It collects where it can and avoids places until it doesn’t. Collapse feels similar. Not dramatic or synchronized, just patterned in ways that only make sense afterward.
I keep coming back to collapse as withdrawal, not collapse as destruction.
Things don’t always break. Sometimes they’re just… discontinued. An industry decides it’s no longer viable. A product disappears. A service quietly degrades until it’s functionally gone. Not because it failed in some spectacular way, but because continuing it stopped making sense under the logic it lives inside.
For a while, you can route around that. Find substitutes. Pay more. Spend more time. Accept worse versions. It still feels like continuity, even as the effort required keeps creeping up.
That creeping is hard to point at, hard to chart, and hard to convince anyone else it’s worth worrying about
The moment it becomes noticeable—universally noticeable—is when the rain hits the ground (or when the shit hits the fan). When abstraction runs out. When something ordinary you relied on just isn’t there anymore, and there’s no real replacement waiting in the wings. When institutions explain why this is expected or temporary, but can’t explain how it’s supposed to resolve.
That’s when the argument about whether collapse is “really happening” tends to end. Not that everyone suddenly agrees, but because lived reality stops leaving room for doubt.
I don’t know whether we’ll see what people usually imagine as “the end of the world” in our lifetime. That framing feels almost beside the point. What feels more relevant is whether we’re already in a phase where recovery paths are narrowing—where capabilities and knowledge and care are thinning faster than they can be rebuilt.
If that’s true, then collapse isn’t a future event so much as a process we’re already inside of, unevenly, quietly, awkwardly.
Which makes the question less about predicting storms, and more about paying attention to the first drops. About noticing what’s being withdrawn. About deciding—individually, collectively, locally, imperfectly—what’s worth sheltering before the rain really starts to pool.