Belonging and Collapse

“In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.” ― Octavia Butler

I’ve just returned from some much needed time off after spending a month in Thailand. All over the country you often hear the phrase “same same but different”, an idiom associated with the country to communicate the paradox of similarities and differences being both noteworthy and unimportant. Although it’s been two years and so many changes have occurred in the world, we find ourselves in same same but different conditions. COVID is still with us and there are new emerging diseases posing epidemic-level threats. There’s open conversation about annexing Greenland and Panama and talk about World War III. Any student of history is screaming from the rooftops about the eerily similar parallels between today and the events of one century ago — same same but different.

If you’ve ever created scenarios using strategic foresight, you might be familiar with four archetypes: growth, constraint, transformation, and collapse. These archetypes are used to understand the shape of change over the time horizon. Collapse captures many of the most common dynamics of human behavior. Change is uncomfortable; it erodes certainty and prompts a loss of control, both of which we crave as humans. By waiting until the bitter end, the drive for survival that kicks in which allows us to push through the discomfort of uncertainty. When I used to teach these archetypes, most people were most terrified of collapse. I will admit collapse is not the best branding for cultivating a sense of possibility and hope. Although we all want to rise like the phoenix, none of us wants to burn.

We can spend time arguing about whether or not we are living in the collapse scenario that climate scientists, social scientists and historians described years ago. As I’m writing here for the first time in two years, one half of the United States is burning, the other half will soon freeze in a massive polar vortex, and the entire country stands at the precipice at the largest challenge to its democratic experiment since the civil rights era.

Some of the last forecasts and scenarios that I wrote before leaving Institute for the Future explored how our collective trauma responses to the acute phase of the COVID pandemic might color the next decade. If you’re familiar with the science of trauma, you may have learned that when faced with a threat we will react in one of the following ways: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. We can see fight in the rise of authoritarianism and rage-based politics; flight in the rise of doomscrolling and even the mass movement of TikTok refugees to RedBook; freeze in “quiet quitting” and “bed rotting”; and fawn in the growing hypernormalization, or commitment to the illusion that everything is fine and normal even when there is shared knowledge that the systems and beliefs that constitute reality are broken.

There’s no shame in these reactions. They are meant to get us through the acute danger so that we can get to a place where we can use our prefrontal cortex to be more intentional and think longer-term. Unfortunately, the acute phase of danger is ongoing as more and more threats emerge and cascade upon each other. This leaves us stuck in our acute response where we become more fearful, disconnected, and distrustful.

The key to making it through collapse relies on intentional action. By understanding how we arrived at collapse, we can take steps to build more resilient, sustainable systems. One good place to start is learning from all of our histories —  resources, traditions, rituals, and cosmologies that our ancestors leaned on when they lived thorugh collapse. We can see how we doubled down on interdependence and mutuality so that all of us could be cared for. We can understand the pivotal role of joy to prepare ourselves for the world that has not come into being yet. Even though the threats ahead of us are not exactly the same, we do have a rich trove of wisdom that can sustain hope and trust that we can emerge from collapse stronger than before.