Panic and Fear in the Age of Collapse, or Where to Go From Here

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi! How’s everyone? If you’re stressed, I don’t blame you, but take a breath, because we’re going to talk…about all of it.

First, many thanks for all your messages about Havens. It’s been overwhelming, the response. Next week, as I said, after a little time to think about how to structure it, I’m going to start replying to you one by one, and we’re going to see together if we can make this work. For those who asked, you can email me at umairhaque at gmail dot com.

Why are so many people panicked these days? Do you feel that—the giant pulsing wave of panic crashing through the world? On one level, the answer’s obvious—things seem to be imploding around us. Wait, maybe my kids won’t be able to get…vaccines? But on another level, the answer’s less obvious. People are panicking because they didn’t anticipate this level of collapse. 

We’re going to continue our discussion today. On a world that’s crashing down around us. Where it’s going next. Finding our Havens. 

In the last essay, I discussed a principle: minimize risk, and maximize agency. These are principles for a lot of things, by the way, life, business, relationships, more. So how do you do that?

Let’s talk about another principle. This one, I’ll call going from a reactive orientation to an anticipative one. Sounds simple, yet it’s anything but. Think again about the millions in panic. Didn’t anticipate.See how that relates to the anxiety, stress, and fear that we’re all feeling these days? In fact, those are the chief enemies of your very own agency, which comes from anticipating well. 

Reaction vs Anticipation

Most of us are trapped in a reactive orientation. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way. It’s an overwhelming time. History is being made all around us, and emphatically not in a good way. Headline after headline is more shocking and disturbing than the last.

It throws you off balance. It leaves you struggling for breath. It does it to me, too.

And yet.

Let’s think about how much trouble reactive mindsets and attitudes have gotten people and even institutions in lately. Can you think of examples? I can think of plenty.

• The Democrats reacted, but didn’t anticipate well, and they lost the election catastrophically.
• Entire industries have been reacting, not anticipating. The luxury and beauty industries are being hammered because they didn’t anticipate the economic mess we’re in now, but simply reacted, hoping to sell stuff to China forever.
• As a civilization, we’re now reacting to mega-scale climate change, reeling from it.

I could go on. In fact, let’s do the obvious one, to make a point. People who didn’t listen to me are reacting in panic and despair, versus having anticipated all this.

See the point there? A reactive mindset is not going to be your friend in an age of collapse. Too many things are breaking too fast, being broken at the hands of bad faith actors, for reacting to work very well.

And when reacting doesn’t work, what happens? We come to the final reaction of a kind of impotence, which is panic and despair. Oh my God, why didn’t I see this coming? Why didn’t I plan for it? Why didn’t I act while there was still time? 

So.

Don’t Panic—Listen to the Message in Your Panic

Don’’t panic. But don’t not panic, either. It’s about something deeper than that, mastering this age.

That’s what I want you to take away from this first of all. 

Instead, understand your panic.

Your panic is telling you something.

It’s telling you that a reactive mindset is no longer good enough. 

And that’s a message that’s brutal, perhaps, difficult, because it necessitates a kind of change, but the alternative is…more panic. So think about it with me. In yesterday’s now bygone era, still, a reactive mindset wasn’t great, but it could get you by, and if you were lucky, you could even prosper. 

That was because the world was stable.

Surprises and discontinuities were few and far between. You had plenty of time to react to them, and by and large, the stability of the world was premised on you merely reacting. Merely, as in, react this way, get this job, buy this thing, prove yourself this way, react, to price signals, social pressures, status signals, by climbing ladders and following pathways.

None of that works anymore, does it? 

In today’s world, if you just react…and react…pretty soon, you end up in one of two places. The first is perpetual panic, and the second is worse, which is the kind of radicalization that results from it, as a kind of shoddy defense mechanism against it. You learn to simply obey, which is where this authoritarian impulse stems from, in the end, and that dulls and destroys your vitality, freedom, and life, not to mention society.

So now we are all challenged.

To overcome this reactive orientation and mindset. It won’t work anymore. Those who are still going to be slaves to it will soon enough become victims of it. The next few years are going to be incredibly difficult, and the question is who will make it and who won’t. On the list of those who are least likely to are those who limit themselves to reactive orientations, or are limited, by various forms of deprivation.

But you, probably, still have a choice.

Now let me make that choice clearer.

The Art of Anticipation

You are now challenged to master the art of anticipation.

Really master it.

Every day, like millions upon millions of others, you ask yourself: what’s coming next? What’s going to happen?

But most people don’t really mean these questions. They ask from a place of fear, based in panic, and so they say the words, but they stop thinking right then and there.

The real trick of this age is going to be anticipation. That means not just stopping at the question, and then going blank, numb, or cold with panic, but heeding the message in the panic.

Now. An anticipatory mindset or orientation. What do I mean by that? That you sit around…pondering doom? That you just assume the worst? That you sort of throw your hands up in the air and give up? No, these are the childish criticisms people make who want to stay trapped in reactive mindsets, because it’s easier that way, and you shouldn’t join them.

Let’s anticipate together, because this is a skill, like many others, that’s best learned by doing.

What are the effects of, for example, sky-high tariffs and massive cuts at the largest employer in society (aka, government) going to be?

It’s OK if you don’t know economics. You don’t have to. We’re just anticipating. What does your gut say? Most people’s gut would probably say: that’s a pretty bad idea. That’s precisely why they need so much sort of intimidation to accept them. 

Now think back. Are there periods in history where we saw something similar? Sure there are. In fact, in the 1930s, this is more or less exactly what happened. And what was the effect of that? I shouldn’t have to tell you: a Great Depression.

See that? We just anticipated together.

This is what I mean by the art of anticipation. It’s not a science, really, though certainly, it has elements of social science, and it’ll help if you follow along with the stats, which is why I always take pains to point them out to you. But it’s an art in the sense that it’s about intuition, interpretation, expression, history, literature, ideas, all this and more.

Where Maximizing Agency Comes From

Now. What does anticipation give us?

Again, let’s clarify. In the example above, were we just…pondering doom? Resigning ourselves to fate? Giving up and saying, forget it, it’s all over?

No, we concluded something pretty crucial, if you ask me. We discovered a conclusion together that should help inform your choices and decisions. And maybe even point you to Havens.

That conclusion was that some pretty nasty stuff is going to go down economically. And of course, we could keep anticipating. We could say: well, what’s that going to do to society? To politics? To culture? But now we’re going beyond the point, which is shifting orientations and mindsets.

Let me try to distill that, in case it’s getting a bit complex.

• Reactive orientations ask questions in panic, but don’t answer them.
• Anticipative orientations answer the questions as best they can, so they can plan, take action, change, make choices, act.

Nobody gets it right all the time. The point isn’t that we anticipate perfectly. But it is that we don’t just sit around trapped in the vicious cycle of reactivity, which ends in panic. This is why, and I want to stress this, so many people are panicked right now. 

They didn’t anticipate any of this, though they should have. And worse, they’re still not hearing the message in their panic, which is to change their mindsets and orientations, right now, this instant, in a deep, profound, abiding, way, so that they can act. 

Now. Let me link that back to the last principle. 

Minimize risk, and maximize agency.

Now do you see where agency begins to come from? From this art of anticipation. If we don’t do it, if we end up trapped in reactivity, what happens? We panic. And panic always tells us one message above all others: we are losing our agency.

That is what panic means.

The challenge then is to reclaim what agency you can, and to do that, you must shift towards anticipation. So many people reject that—they’ll call it doomscrolling or scaremongering or what have you—precisely because they are defending their failed mindset, and in effect, saying, no, you should just panic with me. That’s all I can do, so it’s all you can do, too. Reject that. From the very premise. You should panic as the result of a failed mindset and orientation, and that’s OK, it happens to all of us, but then you must heed the message in it, too, and not join those who refuse to change.

Agency comes from anticipation, not reaction.

That is how we minimize risk and maximize agency, by changing our mindsets in this radical way–and it is radical. We did one example, and that was already pretty scary, right? So this isn’t easy, which is why people get worked up about it, and reject it, because they can’t handle the fear. But that very fear is what leaves them trapped in panic.

So.

Journeying Through the Heart of Your Fear About a Collapsing World

That brings us to a corollary. 

Think about this…not unemotionally…but with emotional accuracy.

That is how we don’t panic as we anticipate.

You can’t save everybody, and you can’t even save everything, quite possibly, of yours. Not in an age like this. Who escaped the 1930s unscathed? You’d have had to be very, very lucky indeed. 

So anticipating well requires more than a bit of letting go. It’s OK to let things go. Maybe you are going to have to change now in such radical ways that you will have a different life completely. Different country, city, friends, relationships, career, profession. Doesn’t matter, the point is that there is going to be letting go anytime there is change. And so this fear should never hold us back.

Now we can uncloud our minds and begin to anticipate much more clearly. How do we do that? Think back to my example. To anticipate well, we do three things.

• We think in terms of chains of consequences. If we know that the global economy is going to be badly hit, then what are the consequences for politics, society, culture, careers, relationships, life?
• We don’t assign probabilities, because we are just anticipating. We don’t sort of say, well, this could never happen. LOL—how many people did that, as a form of denial, and are in panic and shock today? 
• We consider all the possibilities, and look backwards to look forwards.

That one requires a bit of explanation. 

All the possibilities. When we anticipate, we never rule anything out. How did I predict American collapse? One answer is: I looked at the data, using my theory of well-being, which came from my graduate work with some of the world’s brightest academics, etcetera. But the better answer is: I didn’t rule it out. You see, when I made this prediction, it’s not that the data wasn’t convincing—it was. It was that people weren’t ready to accept the possibility. For their own reasons, personal ones, whether hubris, exceptionalism, sunk costs, whatever. 

So. We never rule out a possibility when we’re anticipating. We weed them out as we go, sure, but at the beginning? Every possibility should be considered. And that applies, as we’re going to discuss, to Havens-level thinking. Don’t rule anything out. Don’t limit yourself. You are going to have to be creative, determined, and focused like never before to find your Havens, in a collapsing world. Ruling possibilities out before having thought them through is a recipe to join those sinking with the ship.

Now. How do we weed out possibilities from this set that’s now in our minds, as we anticipate? The best way, I think, is to look backwards to look forwards. We look to history, for example. Has this happened before? Then it’ll probably play out just the same way again. Because of course societies, like any forms, follow certain principles and rules.

So as we anticipate, we look backwards, and reason forwards. If it happened like this, it’ll probably happen like that. Not in a naive way. Not in a clouded one. Hey, we’re going to win this election just because it happened a few times before—The Democrats’ mistake. I mean look back in a deeper and more thoughtful way. How have similar periods unfolded in history?

And even then, in those times, where and what were the Havens? How did people survive, even prosper, to a degree? What avenues did they seek? What careers and professions? What choices did they make, as hard as they must have been at the time, not to sink with the ship?

Three Messages

So. All that’s anticipation versus reaction. It goes deep. And I want to emphasize a few messages for you.

• Don’t panic. But don’t not panic, either. Just listen to the message in your panic. That is how we genuinely master panic. Not by denying it, bottling it up, trying to manage it away—it just gets worse, because the message is to change, because you are losing your agency.
• The loss of agency comes from a reactive mindset. That’s OK in a stable world, where limited agency gets you by, but not in this unstable, implosive one. Now, those who don’t reclaim their agency are going to find themselves continually stunned by the upsets, calamities, disasters that make up everyday life.
• Mastering anticipation is the only way—the only way—we reclaim our agency. Not going to the gym, not reading books, not making friends. Those things may help us cope.

But we’re not seeking coping mechanisms. Not anymore. If that’s all you’re looking for now, I can all but guarantee you’re going to sink with the ship.

Now we’re looking for mechanisms of mastery. Of transformation.

And all those come from anticipation, which gives us the power to do more than just react, stunned, panicked, overwhelmed, to a world imploding around us. And yet to anticipate well, we must journey deep into the beating, broken heart of our own fear. We must contemplate it like a wounded child, and hold it in our hands. As we do, we overcome our own shortcomings, and we’re able to look into what’s next. But if we run away, telling ourselves, I can’t hold that fear, it frightens me too much—we will only ever be limited to react.

That’s a lot. Take some time with it. Think it over. 

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