Everyone Daydreams About Collapse. Few Understand It (opens in new tab)

I'm glad i lived when i did. It wasn't nirvana or anything, but it was probably the best it will be, or close to it. Seems pretty clear that the financial divide is going to come like a freight train, and over night it will devastate. I might be lucky enough to be dead by the time it comes.

Just starting my sixth decade on this rock and I don’t have any children, thank goodness. I lucked out in not having descendants that could curse my name for their existence. But I have a few hundred acres of difficult-to-find and easy-to-defend land in one of the remote valleys of British Columbia’s interior cascade mountain range, which should continue to receive reasonable amounts of rain despite a drying planet.

I’m working to turn it into a forest garden. Something my niece and nephew can retreat to when I’m gone and the shite really hits the fan. Sure, I’ll try to build pressurized gravity-fed water systems and solar-power systems into it, maybe even a business-like venture that could supply the local population to build a stronger and more resilient community. But I fully expect 80+% of everything to irretrievably break within a decade or five once replacement parts cease to be made.

They may finish their lives like First Nations people used to, in half-buried huts with no power or moving water or effective healthcare or creature comforts, breathing in wood smoke from open fires and resorting to hunting and defending with bow and arrow. But at least they’ll have a chance of living if we’ve all made the right decisions in setting up that land and maintaining it well.

It’s better than nothing. Which is more than what almost everyone else will have.

And in a pathetically selfish way, I’m glad I’m old. While I might live long enough to see the initial innings of collapse - which might be apocalyptically horrible in of itself, enough to cause my own demise - barring some truly miraculous life-extension technologies I am not likely to live long enough to see billions perish from starvation and lethally high wet bulb temperatures.