The economy of collapse

Are we preparing for the end or just profiting from it?

Hello, fellow voyagers🖖! Today’s edition is a dark musing on apocalypse biz and the strange economics of survival in a collapsing world.

Of all the visions I read about the future, none struck me as more cynical—or more eye-opening—than the idea of building an economy around collapse. Yet this is exactly the world depicted in Naomi Alderman’s climate fiction novel The Future.

Set in a not-so-distant future, the book imagines a society where looming collapse due to climate change is not just background noise—it’s content. Social media is flooded with influencers sharing tech survivalism hacks. Streaming platforms feature doomsday courses. Brands sell tactical gear and survival product lines by placing ads in articles about wildfires and hurricanes. The ultra-rich? They’re busy building secret bunkers, waiting for the algorithms to tell them when it’s finally time to retreat.

There’s something grotesque about a society that capitalizes on its own collapse—apocalypse biz. And yet, Alderman’s book asks a simple, sobering question:

Are we ready for the end of the world as we know it?

I know I’m not.

I will not die. It’s the world that will end.

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When I was five, the Chernobyl disaster happened. I remember that day vividly. My mother came home early from work, carrying a green gas mask. It stayed on our balcony for years. We never had to use it, we were at a safe distance from the nuclear site. But I always wondered what we would’ve done with one mask when there were four of us.

Since then, I’ve never faced another crisis requiring emergency supplies. Today, I write climate fiction and work in the energy industry, yet I don’t even have a blackout kit. But Alderman’s book brought to mind an old truth: It’s better to be safe than sorry. So how do we prepare for systemic collapse, when change is gradual, not sudden? When each crisis is regional, not global?

When complex planetary systems are at play over long periods of time, where will the next disaster come from? Will it be a flood, a wildfire, extreme heat, a hurricane, a tsunami, a drought or just a blackout?

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In the novel, one of the protagonists—a tech survivalist who monetizes a large following through survival courses and product reviews such as camping gear and clothing—prepared the following survival bag for herself:

• 16 packets of ramen

• A large bag of trail mix

• Bamba snacks

• 8 SurvivalGel pouches

• 12 sticks of beef jerky

• 6 packets of protein powder

• 28 squeeze packs of peanut and almond butter

• 90 multivitamin tablets

• One apple

• An anthology of English literature

• A language guide with the 1,000 most common words and basic grammar in 20 languages

• A book of crosswords

• A windup radio

• 8 pencils, 5 ballpoint pens, a children’s exercise book

There’s something tragic about this list. It’s detailed, carefully curated and completely inadequate. It begs the question: Why isn’t anyone in the book trying to fix the root problem instead? And then you read that those who caused the crisis and have the means to solve it, simply don’t care. The ultra-rich want to get rid of us all:

They think they can survive a global environmental breakdown. They think they’ll inherit the Earth after it’s done. They don’t want to do the things it’ll take to fix this. They don’t want us to think about it. And they can direct our attention where they want it to go.

This stayed with me because we are so distractible. And collapse is so slow, so abstract, until it’s not.

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After finishing the book, I started researching what collapse really looks like today and found mainly courses on how to survive in the wild. There’s 8 billion of us and there’s been a staggering 73% drop in wildlife populations since 1970 due to habitat loss and degradation. How exactly are we going to survive in the wild?

Then I looked up windup radios, all purpose knives and wear-and-tear resistant pants before I gave up.

As Alderman writes in her novel, ultimately survival in a collapsing world is not about having the right gear or skills. It’s about having the right mindset, working together and helping each other. Here’s what another protagonist from the book—a woman who grew up in a doomsday fundamentalist religion—writes in a forum:

Genesis, in particular, is a record of what it was like to survive the last ice age and to move from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Genesis is the last book we have of stories passed down by people who survived our most recent extinction events. It’ll tell you shit about canning and rifle maintenance. It’ll tell you what kind of society and what sort of values we’re gonna need to survive.

So it’s all about strangers, caring for the members of society who have nothing. Not thinking just about your own needs.

In other words, we don’t have many chances of survival if we don’t look out for each other. But do we still know how to do that? Like in the novel, today’s ultra-rich are busy building survival bunkers, gated utopias and defense technology. A painful reminder that the future depicted in the book is nearer than we might think.

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And yet, not all futures are dystopian. While some are building bunkers, others are building solutions. Last week I started researching the European Union market for carbon payments for a work-related project. It was a deep dive into carbon allowances and how the EU is regulating carbon emissions with the goal to become climate neutral by 2050. Thanks to the RepowerEU Plan, the EU reduced their dependency on Russian gas from 45% to 19% from 2022 to 2025 and plans to stop all imports by 2027. Meanwhile, in 2024 almost half of all electricity in the EU came from green sources.

Perhaps we won’t do apocalypse biz after all.

We are always in the process of catching up to the future. Only when we get there, it’s never what we imagined. Sometimes, just once in a while, it’s better.

Perhaps, like in The Future, we’re going somewhere with a million beautiful things.

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How about you?

• Do you ever think of collapse?

• Do you have an emergency kit?

• Do you know how to survive in the wild?

• What would you pack in your emergency bag?

• What would you miss the most?

I don’t think I’d be able to live without books and without journaling.

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📣 New There Is Hope season announcement

The fifth and last season of our climate fiction series There Is Hope will start dropping on May 25. Five new episodes will be released weekly.

Join me one last time on the Dust Road.

‘There Is Hope’ is a climate fiction mosaic novel about life on a planet devastated by climate change and the things that give people hope.

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🌱 If this story resonated with you…

The full novel There Is Hope is being serialized now and the final season drops in May. After June, it will go behind the paywall and will be available only to paid subscribers.

If you want to support independent climate fiction and help me build this world, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Your support makes all of this possible and means the world to me. All funds are used to cover the costs of the upcoming book, including a beautiful cover illustration. Thank you for being part of this journey!