I certainly agree that a sort of crack-up is coming
Also, I'm 100% in this camp:
I've been hearing about the impending collapse of everything for decades. The shit will never hit the fan.
Somewhere in the middle is the truth.
For 3 generations after WWII, most of the Western world has been pretty comfortable and well-off. Prosperity, wars not where we lived, and technological advancement. The baseline for "things cracking up" is simply disturbing the post-WWII stability. Clearly, that's happening and it's too far gone to stop or change.
However, this is going to be exactly like I've seen a dozen times across Africa: not SHTF, but The Crumbles. A slow descent into poorer living standards, higher costs for things not made near you, and worse outcomes overall.
Historically, we see a paragraph in a book. "SHTF from 1937-1940" and don't realize how looooooooooong that actually took.
Nigeria, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso (according to some), Zambia, Sierra Leone - all places that at one point enjoyed a really good standard of living. Things were getting better! The post-Colonial shackles were shed and it was OK! But then over time, one after another, a single leader showed up and threw things out of balance and corruption and exploitation were the name of the game. Force and power the only authorities. Burundi did this 10 years ago and guess what place is still a wreck? Burundi.
And this is our future. We are no better. And these kinds of changes are permanent. There is no going back because by the time you realize the old world is gone, everything else has changed too much. What has to happen is the generation that remembers the good times needs to grow old and leave power, trying to hold onto life they imagined as an 18-year old with a full head of hair and working member by telling kids what they can and can't do and stockpiling money they'll never spend. Just ask people in the Balkans how much they almost all
LOVED Tito, and how those were the good times. Sure, if you were Slavic between 1945 and 1990. A lot of people wouldn't agree with that, especially the Bosnians.
Per my Duty to Warn diary post, this part of the year is going to be bad. It's not done being bad yet. The summer will chill out a bit, and next fall also bad. Gird your loins, friends. The S is H-ing TF and since we're in the middle of it, we don't see it happening because it's in real time. It's possible that no one reading these words will ever, ever see a world again as good as we had it in 2012 or 2013. Recovery isn't an option when the forest has burned down. You can't rebuild 400-year old trees, you can only plant seeds as a gift to people you'll never meet.