Collapse awareness is just the beginning

How to adapt and live well inside it

We’re past the point of needing more evidence. The signs are no longer subtle: the seasons misbehaving, the endless bad news of headlines, the unease in your chest that never quite goes away. Collapse is not a future event. It’s a process we’re already inside.

Unfortunately, simply knowing this doesn’t change much.

Collapse awareness can feel like a rude awakening at first. A truth that cracks something open, often with panic or grief. For some, it brings a moral urgency; for others, a spiral into despair. Most people, though, find themselves pulled into one of three familiar traps: denial, where the enormity is too much to look at; overwhelm, where the nervous system floods and paralysis takes hold; or a slide back into business-as-usual, accompanied by a necessary apathy or hopeless resignation – the sense that nothing can really be done, so why try?

In each case, the deeper problem is the same: we’ve been offered no real alternative. No map. No vision for what it might look like to live well inside this reality.

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The Five Stages of Collapse Awareness

And if you’ve been on this path for a while, you may recognise something like the five stages of collapse awareness. These don't necessarily occur in any kind of order. They're more like recurring movements in a long, disorienting initiation.

• It often begins with shock or denial – the inability to take in the full weight of collapse. A numbing, a clinging to normality, a refusal to look.

• Then comes anger – directed outward at politicians, corporations, governments, systems, sometimes even loved ones. Often righteous, often lonely.

• From there, many people enter a phase of information hoarding – consuming books, documentaries, podcasts, scientific papers, doom scrolling. It can feel like action, and sometimes it is. But more often, it’s an attempt to find certainty in a world that’s slipping beyond comprehension. A way to avoid feeling the enormity by focusing on knowing more.

• Eventually, that flood of information gives way to grief and withdrawal – a heavy descent. Grief for the world, for our children, for the future we were promised. Withdrawal from systems, from responsibilities, sometimes even from relationships. This can look like depression or burnout, but it may also be a gestational phase – something new trying to take root.

• And finally, there is acceptance – not as resignation now, but as a softening into clarity. A readiness to live inside the truth without needing to escape it. To act, not because we’re sure it will change everything, but because it’s aligned with the values we want to carry forward.

But even then, the stages don’t stop. Collapse is not a single event but a living process. We return to grief. We return to fury. We get overwhelmed again.

The invitation isn’t to escape the cycle, but to deepen our capacity to move through it with presence and discernment.

These stages aren’t signs of failure – they’re signs of contact with the truth. But without support or vision, many people get stuck there, unable to imagine what comes next.

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The Threshold We Miss

And this is the threshold we so often miss. Collapse awareness is not the destination. It’s the beginning of something else – a deeper reckoning with how we live, love, and organise ourselves in a world that’s unravelling.

The harder work is what comes after. How do we live inside this unravelling? What kind of people do we need to become – not just to survive, but to reweave something worthwhile from the ruins?

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Psychological Flexibility as a Survival Skill

This is where psychological flexibility becomes a core survival skill. That is: to stay with what’s hard without shutting down; to hold conflicting truths without needing to resolve them; to act in alignment with our values even when there are no guarantees.

Psychological flexibility gives us a way of being that’s less about fixing and more about facing – together.

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From Individual Healing to Collective Resilience

Because collapse is not just ecological. It is social, political, and spiritual. It exposes the frayed edges of a culture that taught us to be self-sufficient, endlessly productive, and always optimistic. It reveals the emptiness of those ideals.

What we need now are not individuals who’ve "healed" themselves in isolation, but communities who are learning to stay in right relationship – with each other, with place, with grief, with possibility.

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Place, Relationship and the Slow Work of Renewal

Relational resilience offers a path forward that is both practical and deeply human. It asks: how can we tend to connection where we are, even if that place is temporary or uncertain? What relationships, skills, and rituals help us build forms of interdependence that don’t rely on permanence, but on presence?

This doesn’t mean romanticising the village or escaping into some off-grid fantasy. It means choosing to participate in the slow work of renewal – growing food, knowing your neighbours, sharing tools, learning the history of the land you live on, tending the invisible threads of care that capitalism taught us to ignore.

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Beyond Binaries: Living the Paradox

Collapse awareness often brings binaries: hope or despair, action or paralysis, fight or flight. But the truth is more nuanced than that.

Post-growth psychology invites us to mature beyond binaries – to embrace paradox as a teacher rather than a threat.
We can grieve and build.
We can acknowledge the scale of the crisis and still choose to act.
We can be afraid and courageous.

The world is not black or white – it’s compost, fermentation, process. Transformation doesn’t look like a clean line and a fresh start. It looks like mess, loss, re-rooting and regeneration.

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If There Is Life Beyond Collapse

I have to remind myself often: we’re not here to fix the world. We’re here to live well in it – truthfully, relationally, and in service to something greater than ourselves.

If there is to be life beyond collapse. It will be slower, smaller, and less certain – but also more connected, more grounded, more real. It’s not waiting for us on the other side of some heroic effort.

It’s already here, in fragments – in the garden bed you prepare, the community meal you cook, the uncomfortable conversation you stay present for.

This is where the work begins.

Let’s not mistake awareness for transformation. Knowing collapse is happening doesn’t make us resilient. What matters is how we respond – not once, but over and over again.

We need each other. Not in some sentimental sense, but in the most raw, practical way imaginable. We were never meant to face this alone.

So if you’re awake to collapse, good. But don’t stop there. Let that knowledge take root. Let it shape how you live, who you trust, what you build.

And we arrive at this threshold from different places. For some, collapse has long been lived reality. For others, it’s a disillusionment just beginning to take shape. Wherever we begin, the work is collective.

Collapse awareness is just the beginning.

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Further Reading

If this piece resonated, here are a few places to deepen your thinking, feeling, and action:

• "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells – a stark but necessary confrontation with the scale of collapse. Start here only if you're ready to face the facts without sugar-coating.

• “Active Hope" by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone – a gentle but powerful guide for moving from despair to meaningful action, grounded in deep ecology and systems thinking.

• "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom" by Martin Hägglund – a philosophical argument for why our finite, fragile lives matter, and how we might rebuild meaning beyond capitalism.

• "Radical Help" by Hilary Cottam – a real-world exploration of how we can reimagine care, community, and public services in the age of social breakdown.

• "Coming Back to Life" by Joanna Macy & Molly Brown – for those wanting practices, not just ideas. A practical resource for building resilience through group work and systems-based reconnection.

• "The End of the World As We Know It" by Jonathan Menon (Substack) – critical, collapse-aware essays that don’t flinch but also don’t paralyse.

• "The Deep Adaptation Forum" – a diverse global network of people exploring what it means to live meaningfully in the face of societal collapse.

And, of course, everything I write here is part of this ongoing conversation.
If you’d like more posts like this – reflective, practical, sometimes spiritual – consider subscribing.

We are not alone. And we don’t have to pretend that this is normal.