The Stillness of Impending Change: Navigating Collapse and Clarity

A Dispatch, January 2025

Hello,

My previous post, How To Be Happy Amidst Collapse, was the furthest I had planned for this project. The concept was something I needed to get out for myself to aim for, an answer on whether the thing was possible in the first place - can you be happy amidst collapse?

And now there are 412 of you as of this writing and every day a couple more trickle in. I’ve wanted to do something in return for the kindness of your attention…but I was also trying to enjoy the moment.

This gap, between a collective decision and the fall.

Like when a Looney Tunes character runs off a cliff and hasn’t looked down yet.

Waiting on Autocracy

We are less than a week from Trump 2.0 and some unknown, but surely brief, time of normalcy before society gets weaker and somehow slightly worse. I am very confident that just due to the brazen, authoritarian and outright weird actions of the 2nd Trump presidency America is going to quickly shift for the shittier. It’s not that we’ll have a sort of immediate catastrophe, it’s just that we’ll have one of those global cultural awakenings to the “system” not being as resilient or impenetrable as we thought it was.

Before 2008 we didn’t really imagine that financial institutions could be as corrupt and callous to the general public without any real repercussions.

In 2019 we didn’t really imagine that the government could be this unbelievably inept at a time of national crises.

In 2025 I think Americans are going to learn yes, even American elections have consequences - for worse.

Americans are so used to strong institutions that the sentiment of “both parties are the same” really did have some ring of truth to it. American politics used to have a lot more centers of power, 2 parties, a somewhat independent judicial branch, business interests, labor interests, the career bureaucracy, etc. .

But on the eve of Trump 2.0 we’re seeing that multipolar power structure fade. The Republican party answers to Trump, the Supreme court is stacked in Trump’s favor and bestowed new legal insulation on the executive branch, Trump has already vowed to use his executive powers to fire most of the career bureaucrats that slowed down his worst impulses in his first term and, of course, oligarchs dining with him in Mar-a-Lago, donating to his presidential fund and doing him favors like removing censorship from social media platforms.

The next two years (at least) will be defined by the whims of Trump and the people around him. I don’t think American Democracy can survive that. Maybe the American economy can, but it’s democracy can’t.

Which I think is fine with most Americans. The vast majority voted for Trump or couldn’t be bothered to vote at all. We live all this - the bad food, the guns, the inequality, the horrible working conditions - because in some way we’re ok with it. The trade-off is worth it, the cheap consumer goods, the cheap energy, the cheap attention.

Like most people who opposed the clown authoritarian I’ve given up believing this MAGA fever can ever be broken by effort. Maybe it will break like Mccarthyism or Segregation on it’s own time, maybe it will perservere like Reaganism and be celebrated despite being responsible for most of the evil we see in the decades to come.

It doesn’t matter anyway.

It’s Already, Truly, Too Late For Human Global Civilization To Endure

In my first post I anticipated a cataclysmic event happening in 2024. I called this an “x” synonymous with the x’s you see marking notable catastrophes happening towards the end of an overpopulation graph.

Was I right? Depends on how you see things I guess. The election of Trump will be a catastrophe, but I’d say this heat would be the thing a scientist would put on his overshoot graph.

2024 was the first year the world breached the internationally recognized limit for global warming

It could read.

Or maybe

2024 was the year that even mainstream science had to concede it doesn’t know what the fuck is happening with the climate system, other than that it’s much more sensitive than we initially thought.

Remember this graph?

Now here’s the rest of it

The temperature of the oceans never went down. It stayed the same.

This is bad, because 2023 was an El Nino year - the ocean is usually slightly hotter during an El Nino phase and then cools down before the cycle restarts.

But we exited the El Nino year and…we’re staying at the same temperature.

So what does the next El Nino look like? This last one caused a huge step change in warming - the yellow and red lines are the last two years, all the blue lines are every year before 2023 and 2024.

Do we get another step change? Is the ocean just done absorbing heat? Sure seems like it for the last 2 years.

Surface temperature data follows this trend. Something changed in 2023 in the climate system and now it’s warming faster and more sensitive to our impact on it. That step change is making us out of step with even the worst-case climate models I saw in the late 2010’s.

Everything we were warned would happen in 2050 is happening now. We are now beyond 1.6 degrees celsius of warming, we are now seeing fires that are blocking out the sun on a regular basis, we are now experiencing new novel pandemics and we are now experiencing a dramatic drop in the quality of life for everyday Americans due to the rising cost of resources and energy.

The problem is we are also now locking in the positive feedback loops that cause runaway global warming and ecocide. I’m not sure when we crossed the point of climate change being a positive feedback cycle outside our control, but we’re certainly well past that point now.

It’s just math really, the energy imbalance in the climate system will work itself to equilibrium. We don’t know where that equilibrium is right now but it’s past 2 degrees celsius. The final number beyond that point is meaningless because you can’t feed and sustain 8 billion plus people on a planet that’s another half a degree hotter than this one for the next millennia.

You know this is true, because everything for the past thirty years society has been clearly decaying - and this imbalance between our insistence on infinite growth on a finite planet is why.

We just have the misfortune of being born around the peak of the parabola.

It’s All In The Gap Isn’t It? Between What’s Happening Out There And “Here”

Despite these two black-eyes barreling down the gun of time, I’ve been fairly mentally ok during this gap between November and late January. My small business has been doing well enough that I’m able to assume I will make what I need to make to afford my bills each week for the first time since I was laid off. I went to France with my girlfriend and we both are feeling comfortable with our aim to move to Paris in the near future. I succeeded in piloting some new habits and ending some vices. I especially enjoyed getting back in to reading for fun.

2024 was a very difficult year, but it’s brought a certainty to my opinions on what kind of animal we are as a whole and what we’ll do to ourselves. Now that I’m done hemming-and-hawing over “are we really going to drive ourselves right off the cliff?” it’s been a game of “ok, how do I just handle the fact we’re driving off a cliff?”.

I’m still settled on “think about it when we’re at the bottom of the cliff”. That seems to be what everyone else is doing. I love you authors who write in excruciating detail about exactly how fucked we are and how we need to fucking change, but we won’t change so I don’t see the relevance of knowing how fucked we are. I love you liberals who try to rah rah the half of the American population that hates Trump, but he has guns, all three branches of government and nuclear warheads now so if that’s not check mate I don’t know what is.

In the meantime, things that happen out there seem to have a somewhat indirect relationship to things that happen here. Yes they shape the context of here but something like my mood, my preparedness, my discipline and health (of myself and people I care about) seem to really shape the experience of here. I know that’s partially privilege, partially delayed cause and effect - but I also seem to only be able to impact things in my immediate vicinity so I don’t see the point in obsessing over things outside of it.

No matter how informed I am it doesn’t mean that we actually stop ecocide.

No matter how much I watch the political horse-race, it doesn’t actually change my votes or my willingness whether or not to volunteer my time.

But when I read about collapse it does put me in a place where I’m less capable to be an actor in society.

So I try not to. I listen to the Expanse audiobooks instead of political podcasts. I skip Crises Reports. I try to look at the workings of the American government as impartially as I would view the workings of any other ridiculous authoritarian less developed country like, say, Hungary.

Eventually the decay of out there will have profound impacts on here, like with COVID. Probably soon with the transfer of power next week. But eventually I and everyone I love is going to die so ecocide or not so it’s all a wash.

…is useful thing to believe. Whether or not it’s true.

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Thanks for reading this far. I hope you resonated with today’s article in some way. Unlike my previous post this was less a fully formed piece of art and moreso an open journal entry. Something like a personal conversation if you asked me what’s really been on my mind outside of music. I wrote this more to be an artifact of this particular time - this interesting gap between the 2024 election and Trump actually returning to power.

I really do believe the end of 2025 will seem so profoundly different than the beginning, and I want to write that down somewhere to reflect on in 12 months time.

Maybe I’ll be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. It would be so awesome if I’m wrong.

In the meantime, I’d like to write about other things. I have musician-centric articles drafted, but those will be released on a different newsletter because I know this audience is here for something else. I don’t really know what that something else is, but this was an always has been an open journal for me so you’ll keep getting that in some form or another I guess.

Thanks for reading and feel free to write back, it’s always interesting to hear from one of you.