The Collapse Curve, or How to Think About The Rest of Your Your Life
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? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a hug from little Snowy. Apologies for being away for a few days, I was away on a much-needed break as we begin sessions in earnest over the next few days and weeks (as always, just email me if you want to book one.)
Today we’re going to discuss…
You. Your life. And three little guiding principles. what I’m going to call FFC, or Freedom From Collapse. What I call The Collapse Curve. And what the rest of this decade will look like.
Along the way, we’re going to chat about the economy, how to orient your career, or professional life, in an age like this, and just how bad things are going to get, and what you should be doing about it.
We’ve been talking a lot about renegotiating your relationship with the world. How we’re all frightened these days, of the ways the world is collapsing around us. How all that’s overintellectualized, but the challenge before us all is taking action. So we don’t Sink With the Ship. Looking around these days, I’m sure I scarcely have to give you examples of what that means.
Let me give it to you straight.
The Implosion of the 2020s
Over the rest of this decade, a lot of people are going to wake up, and find that their lives are over.
Professionally. Financially. Economically. And with all the knock on effects that has. Relationships lost, confidence battered, self-belief gone, direction eviscerated.
Nobody should go through what a lot of people are going to go through now, which is losing something very close to everything. But a lot of people are indeed going to go through that, and many of them, sadly, have chosen it themselves, actively, making poor choices for their very own economies and societies, not to mention lives.
This is where we are in the world.
I don’t want you to be among these people.
We can’t really speak in the old language anymore, and I can’t say: “I want your life to flourish.” Words like that feel wrong now, don’t they? Who’s flourishing these days, as cities burn and societies implode? Maybe megalomaniacs and lunatics, but not anyone much sane or thoughtful or decent.
But I do want your life to go well. To be something like normal, and that’s got sort of a timeless meaning. Happiness, relationships, income, ownership, and so forth and so on.
A fine distinction, maybe, but let me explain why I draw it, coming back to the next five years, and just how many people are going to lose a very great deal.
We know what the effects of, for example, protectionist economies are. They are going to be what they always are. Scores of bankruptcies, because of course plenty of businesses won’t be able to afford to pay tariffs, and that’ll mean plenty of unemployment.
The job market’s already badly broken, and that’s only to get much, much worse. The boardrooms of the world, too many of them, have a cockamamie plan to replace jobs with AI, and it’s a cockamamie plan for many reasons, not least of all that it’s just not going to work in many industries—did you enjoy seeing Coke’s AI Christmas ad? Really want to chat with an AI bot? Estee Lauder, LOL, which sells cosmetics, wants to rebuild it’s beleaguered business on AI…good luck with that, girls love chatting about makeup to bots. That’s sarcasm, because you can’t fight this tidal wave of folly, really.
For many reasons, a lot of people are going to lose it all. I haven’t got to climate change yet, and it feels ugly to write about that in a moment where LA’s burning. The insurance market there was in crisis, and now it’s going to be broken.
Just like the job market.
Just like the economy, whose gains now go mostly to the ultra rich.
Just like our systems, social contracts, societies, futures.
In this context, people are about to find out, the hard way, what tough times really mean. Times have been lean and ugly and a struggle. But now we are poised to enter something much, much worse. Qualitatively different. Upward mobility’s been eviscerated, because good jobs are hard to get—but what do you when there just aren’t any, many, certainly not enough for anything remotely close to even a semblance of a stable not-even middle just slowly gently declining class? What happens then?
We know this story. It’s the story of many before us in history, and also the story of some right now. Britain chose this path, ultra-protectionism, hyper-nationalism, incompetent leadership, spite, rage, etc. The consequences? Britain’s economy is, as I predicted way back when, now permanently shrinking. Incomes and wages are shockingly low. There is no future left for it. Its people are in the process above, of losing everything. The despair and distress are on every face, in every street.
But it’s too late.
So what do you do about all this?
You understand it, and stay ahead of the collapse curve.
The Collapse Curve
This is a concept we’ll discuss more in future essays, but for now, a little introduction.
Think of Britain. A decade ago, it embraced a certain mania for protectionism, nativism, ugliness, a sort of hysteria of ugliness. That’s the front of the curve, if you want. Today? Like I said, it’s seeing the consequences. Let me make them plainer for you. Britain has no major global players left. A couple of fossil fuel dinosaurs, an aging marketing behemoth, maybe a bank or two in distress, and that’s it. So of course this economy can’t provide decent jobs or incomes.
It took a decade for all this to happen.
That’s the collapse curve.
Now think of where your society, or town, or region, or whatever, maybe even just your life is, on the curve. Brits have no future—they’re done. Too late, game over. America’s just now embracing the curve. How long will it take for these consequences to set in? Canada seems to be on the cusp, in some ways. Europe’s sort of paralyzed.
The point isn’t that the timing’s always the same, though examples from history, recent and older, point to a timeline of about a decade or so. It can happen faster, and it can also happen more slowly. Some nations get locked into a cycle that never ends.
But. The point isn’t to intellectualize it.
It is to outrun it.
All of that brings me back to you.
Three Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Collapse Curve
There are three hard questions you must be thinking about right now. They go like this.
- Will my career continue to exist? For a lot of people, the answer is no, and that’s hard to hear, but it must be faced, or else you will be among those who lose it all, because they’re trapped in and by and under the collapse curve.
- What will protectionist economies and implosive technologies like AI do to my profession? Will it continue to exist? Careers and professions are different. A career is a set of jobs, titles, roles, in institutions, and a profession is what you’re trained to do. A lot of careers will be wiped out, and that’s already happening, tech, marketing, logistics, etc, and so will a lot of professions.
- What can I do to stay ahead of the collapse curve?
Now, those are professional questions, but you can also think about your relationships, finances, accomplishments, home, city, town, country, whatever, doesn’t matter, in the same way.
Let me put that for you more simply. We are now entering an era which will see extinction level events for things. More and more things.
Including, for example, careers and professions. Many simply won’t exist anymore. We discussed a few already, from tech to marketing and so on. Bang—gone. But there are many more. In a world turning heavily protectionist, how many middle management roles are there really going to be, where people sort of move stuff from one country to another? A lot less, obviously. How many sales roles are going to exist, as just trading stuff becomes that much harder? Far fewer, obviously.
Meanwhile, sure, there are going to be new professions and careers. But will they be worth doing? How does being a…tariff-collector…sound to you? Sort of historically ominous, no? Go ahead and chuckle if you know your history, and say a hello to the Sheriff of Nottingham, I guess.
So what are going to go extinct are a lot of interesting and flexible and challenging careers and professions as our economies begin to close and shut down to modernity. And what are going to arise in their places are weirdly neofeudal ones, like tariff-collector, and you can see where that sort of line of history leads.
The point I want to teach you is very simple.
You must stay ahead of the collapse curve.
Denial is not your friend. You have to face it if your career and profession is going to extinct, as we enter into what feels a whole lot like a new Dark Age, or at least a much darker one.
You can’t go on pretending. Everyone is at some level of risk now. My lovely wife the doctor—how long is it until techno-dorks want everyone to see an AI chatbot instead? And I think we can all guess how that’ll impact healthcare in society. The Collapse Curve is here for us all.
What do you about it? Stay ahead of it. Assess the risks carefully.
The extinction level risks you now face. Career, home, finances, economies, societies.
These are real.
This isn’t a game, it isn’t a joke, it’s not some dumbass New York Times op-ed, this is your life.
How Not to Get Buried by The Collapse Curve
So what do you do about it all?
Let me sketch you now a very different portrait of the economy.
“Careers” as we know them, or used to think of them, are going extinct. They just don’t exist anymore. Loyalty, from a large institution? Good luck with that. Upward mobility? Stability? Some kind of vaguely enlightened social contract between employer and employee? Don’t make either of us laugh. Those things are long gone.
The economy is now in a period of severe, intense transformation.
And in it, a new way is arising. A new set of careers or professions, though I don’t like those words for all this, because I don’t think they quite fit.
In this new way, we can become microcreative. Think of the “creator economy,” which means large numbers of people are now beginning to make livings by sort of…being themselves. Sometimes, being hyper-idealized versions of themselves, like influencers. Sometimes, by sharing their lives and knowledge, like “granfluencers.” Sometimes, by just discussing stuff, like many podcasters.
As the old institutions and systems break down, this is an avenue that many will pursue. I’m not really just saying “amass a following online”—not at all. What I’m saying is very, very different.
I’m saying that now it’s time to sort of do your own thing. This is the right moment.
That “thing” can be many, many things. It can be starting a business. It could be opening an agency. It could forming your own consultancy. It could be just being yourself online and seeing where that leads. Doesn’t matter.
Think again of the context I’ve been trying to teach you.
Old systems and institutions are so broken they cannot now provide for people. Hence, “good” jobs are growing harder and harder to get. Yet meanwhile, that’s not because people have stopped wanting the stuff of decent lives. It’s just because large institutions and organizations have decided not to provide it. That’s where microcreativity comes in, and why it’s becoming such a big deal.
We’re spending so much time on microcreativity precisely because we’re learning that people can provide what large institutions can, often better. Whether it’s style or knowledge or insight or discussion. Again, doesn’t matter—the context is what does.
And that context is that in an age of collapse, doing your own thing is one of the best ways forward, to keep you ahead of the collapse curve. Not buried under it. Because collapse means that large institutions and systems and organizations are broken, and can’t provide anymore. That leaves an opening for smaller-scale agents who can, and increasingly, that’s just people. Who can say, hey, here’s how to take care of your health, money, style, life, whatever, doesn’t matter. Increasingly, it’s going to be smaller scale businesses, as big ones are hit incredibly hard by protectionist economics.
Let me come back to AI for a moment. We all know it’s not going to work. Good luck replacing your accounting team with a delusional AI bot, LOL. Enjoy being the next Enron. What’s really going to happen is that it’s going to take large institutions some time to figure this out, and when they do, they’ll need to hire tons of contractors and smaller scale organizations and agencies again, fast, to do real work again. So be one.
That lesson is more general. The world is now suffocated by risk. Risk of all kinds, from climate risk to political risk to financial risk. Yesterday’s large systems and institutions can’t bear this risk anymore. Smaller scale agents and organizations are nimbler, faster, and more adaptive. The future will belong to them.
If you get all that, and it’s a lot, and it’s kind of abstract, so we’ll talk about it more, just let yourself sort of feel it for a moment, then you can begin to grasp why I say: this is the time to do your own thing.
Your own thing.
That’s scary, for a lot of people, it’s hard, and it’s unfamiliar.
That’s OK.
The Very First Goal You Should Pursue Now
You’re not doing it for the fame, power, glory, or even the money. You’re doing it to stay ahead of the collapse curve.
What does your own thing really give you?
You see, I haven’t used the word “entrepreneurship,” thought that’s a way to approach all this, for a reason. If I use that word, you’ll think it’s about the money.
But it’s not. It’s not even about the other big reason people start their own ventures, which involves a kind of ego, restlessness, inability to fit within the confines of large systems.
This is about freedom.
And a very certain kind of freedom. Freedom from collapse.
What your own thing gives you, done right, is a set of powers that somebody else’s thing doesn’t. It gives you mobility—you can take it with you. It gives you autonomy—nobody’s interfering with you. It gives you security—maybe not that of a steady paycheck, but nobody has that anymore, not for long, certainly not for decades, instead, you get a kind of higher order security, which is that it’s yours. And it gives you a certain confidence to move in a new way in a world that’s imploding. You aren’t dependent, but independent, to the degree that’s healthy, anyways.
This is the Very First Goal that you should pursue right now.
The rest of it is elusive because it doesn’t exist anymore. There is no form of financial security in the old way, as we just discussed—just doesn’t exist, unless you’re one of a very, very lucky few. There’s no such thing as upward mobility just through working hard. There’s no point to really obeying the rules and hoping the world is moral or just to give you some minor-league reward of a normal life. When entire careers go extinct like that now—poof—what’s left?
The Very First Goal you should pursue now is FFC, or Freedom From Collapse.
It’s not something any of us will ever have absolutely. None of us. Will ever be wealthy or powerful to, I don’t know, build our own entire healthcare systems. That’s a fiction, an omnipotence fantasy.
But what we can have is an amount of FFC that lets us live relatively normal lives again. If we’re wise enough to deploy our skills and talents with the right orientation, to be microcreative, to do our own things, to be ourselves, and become leaders in our own rights, then we can still have some amount of Freedom From Collapse. That also means, by the way, not enmeshing ourselves in collapse, but setting boundaries against it.
But if we trap ourselves in careers that are going extinct, refuse to acknowledge the peril we’re in, pooh-pooh the certain effects of catastrophically poor choices, won’t learn from history, and can’t stand on our own, leading those around to us better, more positive, more prosperous ways—then of course we too will take a greater and greater risk of Sinking With the Ship.
We’ll discuss more about all this in coming days. That’s a lot to chew on for now. I wanted to give you some guiding principles. Like I said, many, many people are now going to lose it all. I don’t want you to be among them.
Lots of love,
Umair (and Snowy!!)
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