How Everything Collapsed at Once: Self, Climate, Empire, Civilization
A Thermodynamic Analysis of Civilizational Breakdown
Random thought: Should I write a book? I feel like it’s naturally going there. Not to have my name known. But because it might serve as a map for what comes after. Names are not important. Not where we are now. Either way, let’s start the article.
Something unprecedented is happening.
It’s not one crisis. It’s not one war. It’s not one broken system.
It’s not even “climate change,” or “geopolitics,” or “the mental health epidemic.”
What we are living through is synchronized collapse of coherence across every level of human and planetary systems at the same time. The self-model, the climate system, the global economic architecture, the colonial order, the information ecosystem, the biosphere, governance, meaning-making, social trust, energy flows, and even our nervous systems. All falling in parallel. Not randomly, but mechanistically, as a single integrated event.
For centuries, humanity imagined itself as separate domains:
“nature” vs “human”
“self” vs “world”
“economy” vs “ecology”
“politics” vs “psychology”
“individual” vs “system”
“personal collapse” vs “civilizational collapse”
BUT this separation was always an illusion.
EVERY domain was always part of one interconnected, energy-dependent feedback system.
And now that system, from your neurons to the jet stream, is collapsing in phase. This is not a policrisis, this is not metaphor. It’s thermodynamics. (yes, everything comes down to thermodynamics, again.)
Let’s begin.
Why Everything Is Failing at Once
Civilizations don’t collapse because of “bad people,” or “politics,” or “poor leadership.”
They collapse because the underlying energy-information architecture can no longer hold the complexity it created.
A simple rule runs through biology, physics, and civilization:
Systems grow until the energy cost of maintaining themselves exceeds the energy coming in. Then they collapse.
This is not moral.
This is not ideological.
This is entropy.
The Self-Model Collapsed First
Before global systems fell apart, the individual architecture did.
The modern human self-model, the idea of “I” as an isolated, stable, rational unit, was always a fiction, held together by social roles, predictable environment, institutional stability, slow information flows, community coherence, and cultural containers. Those stabilizers evaporated in one generation.
What replaced them? Infinite information, infinite contradiction, infinite comparison, infinite stimuli, shredded attention, algorithmic pressure, collapsing social trust, economic precarity, climate anxiety, and body dysregulation. Your nervous system was built for a small band of humans in a stable ecosystem. Instead, it woke up inside a globalized, hyperconnected superorganism running on fossil fuel intensity and algorithmic extraction. Yay!
The self-model couldn’t hold.
It fractured.
It dissolved.
This wasn’t personal failure.
It was structural.
And here is the evidence:
Global anxiety and mental health disorders have reached historic highs, with anxiety disorders affecting nearly 275 million people worldwide in 2024, representing about 3,5% of the global population.
62% of people in a 31-country survey reported stress that impacted daily life, with Gen Z women reporting the highest rates of depression and anxiety.
There is a documented epidemic of nervous system dysregulation, with 43% of the world’s population affected by neurological conditions in 2021, making these the top contributor to global disease burden.
Alright, now let’s talk about the Climate. Cause it’s not “environmental”, it’s Civilizational Physics.
Climate Collapse Isn’t “Environmental”
Climate breakdown is not a separate domain.
It is the thermodynamic bill for a civilization running on stored ancient sunlight (fossil fuels) burned in a single geological instant.
The Earth system is reconfiguring itself because we injected 250 years of entropy into the atmosphere and ocean
What we call extreme heat, megafires, water scarcity, crop failure, and ecosystem die-off are not “climate problems.”
They are systemic coherence failures.
The biosphere is losing its ability to regulate itself.
Just like the self-model.
Just like institutions.
Collapse is fractal.
The Evidence:
2024 saw devastating climate events worldwide: record-breaking heatwaves in South and Southeast Asia, deadly floods in Brazil and Kenya, wildfires in Canada, and unprecedented rainfall in the UAE, resulting in thousands of deaths, displacement, and severe economic and environmental impacts.
The ten most expensive climate disasters in 2024 each caused over $4 billion in damage, with the US bearing the brunt of financial losses.
Empire Is Collapse Because Its Energy Base Collapsed
Every empire that ever existed was an energy-gradient machine:
Rome (grain, slaves, silver)
Britain (coal, colonies)
The U.S. (oil, global dollar dynamics)
Once the energy surplus falls, hegemony collapses.
Europe isn’t rich because it’s “advanced.”
Europe is rich because it extracted resourced from the Global South for 500 years, then used financial systems to continue extraction without ships or flags.
Israel is also not a “mistake.”
Israel is the last active Western-backed settler-colonial project, and it preserved because it functions as a strategic outpost that secures Western access, influence, and leverage in the Middle East, particularly over energy routes, chokepoints, and fossil-fuel markets.
BUT empire is cracking.
Not because it became immoral, it was always immoral.
But because the energy that sustained it is vanishing.
Civilizational entropy.
The evidence:
The 2023-2024 Egyptian financial crisis nearly led to a sovereign default, only averted by massive foreign investment and multilateral aid, showing the fragility of even large nation-states when energy and currency flows falter.
Zimbabwe’s 2024 currency collapse and repeated monetary resets illustrate how energy and resource mismanagement translate directly into systemic breakdown.
Information Broke the Human Nervous System
The human brain evolved to track 150 people, one landscape, one set of threats, one shared reality.
Instead it now tracks billions of signals, disinformation, propaganda, curated identities, algorithmic behavioral manipulation, collapsing meaning, moral overload, and permanent vigilance.
The result?
A species-wide loss of epistemic coherence.
We no longer share a reality.
This is not a social problem.
This is a neurological overload event.
What Collapsed Was the Illusion of Separation
Everything you were taught, politically, psychologically, spiritually, was based on one false assumption:
that systems are separate.
that humans stand apart from society.
that nations stand apart from one another.
In reality:
the climate is the economy
the economy is energy
energy is geoplolitics
geopolitics is trauma
trauma is identity
identity is narrative
narrative is neural circuitry
neural circuitry is ecology
ecology is climate
climate is everything
It’s one system.
It always was.
The collapse is simply the moment the illusion failed.
This is not ZEN, this is not just seeing through the illusion of self. This is not enlightenment. This is not becoming a Buddha. This is not becoming empty. This is not infinite peace or escaping suffering. This is waking up to the truth. The self model is empty of a rigid self model, but…. and I say but, because this is important. It’s part of the whole process. A node in the process that has lived in contraction in a traumatized nervous system for centuries finally waking up to what it actually always has been.
So What Comes Next?
Collapse is not the end.
Collapse is the release phase of a global adaptive cycle.
Ever complex system goes through four phases:
Growth
Conservation (rigidity, fragility)
Release (collapse)
Reorganization (new coherence)
We are deep in phase 3.
Phase 4 is coming.
It won’t be clean.
It won’t be painless.
But it is happening.
A new coherence pattern is emerging under the rubble:
distributed networks
local resillience
post-growth economics
regenerative agriculture
polycentric governance
somatic trauma repair
collective nervous system literacy
indigenous knowledge revival
decentralization of pwer
ecological alignment
ecological alignment
This is not naive optimism.
This is systems science.
After release comes reorganization.
The evidence:
Polycentric networks, city alliances, regional blocs, and non-state coalitions are rising as centralized nation-state governance falters. Transition Towns, indigenous-led land stewardship, and local resilience movements are gaining momentum.
Regenerative communities Witchcliffe Ecovillage in Australia, new local energy communities in Spain, and Battle Solar Town in the UK are pioneering distributed, resilient, ecologically aligned models.
Economic experiements include local currencies, cooperatives, circular economy models, and post-growth pilot projects.
Governance is shifting to participatory budgeting, pan-national issue networks, and citizen assemblies.
If You See Through the Illusion
I will tell you why you are here. Not because you are special. Not because you carry some unique badge that says: I have woken up, I am different.
Because you are one of the nodes that can track reality without collapsing.
Because your system doesn’t cling to illusion.
Because your self-model already cracked, and instead of dissolving into chaos, it reorganized into clarity.
Because you see the pattern before most people admit it exists.
Because every collapse needs witnesses who can:
name what’s happening
map the mechanics
stay regulated enough to see
refuse the lies
trace the lines of power
hold coherence
and tell the truth when the official story disintegrates
This essay, and everything that follows, is for those people.
I hope to reach more nodes. But I trust it will. Not for fame, not for identity boosting, not for amount of followers.
This is for the ones who feel collapse in their bones
not as fear,
but as recognition.
This is the first chapter.
The root.
The foundation.
The frame that makes every subsequent piece coherent.
What the New Attractor Is Becoming: A Glimpse
We have been talking about collapse, now lets talk about the new attractor. The new attractor, the next stable pattern of civilization, is not a return to the oldl world, nor a utopian fantasy. it is a distributed, interdependent, embodied, and resilient civilization, emerging from the compost of the old order.
Let me explain…
Instead of one hegemonic power or a few central institutions, the future is polycentric: networks of communities, cities, and regions, interconnected but not rigidly controlled. Distributed energy (solar microgrids, local renewables), decentralized currencies, and peer-to-peer information webs are already replacing brittle, centralized systems.
Decentralization is paired with a new embrace of interdependence. The COVID-19 pandemic and climate shocks revealed no one is an island. The new coherence will emphasize mutual reliance, knowledge-sharing, and coordination in managing commons (atmosphere, oceans, biodiversity). Regenerative agriculture, circular economies, and indigenous knowledge systems are taking root, restoring what was depleted.
Somehow, I am suddenly reminded of the amazing book by Charles Eisenstein. I personally have never read the book, but it popped up in the field, and I find that it aligns perfectly with what I am talking about:
The new attractor values nervous system health, relational coherence, and embodied intelligence over abstract ideology. Practices for nervous system regulation, and trauma repair are spreading, from breathwork and HRV tracking to collective rituals, somatic therapies, and attention-hygiene disciplines.
Communities are learning to process grief, anxiety, and collapse together, not as pathology, but as the signal of transition.
Resilience, not efficiency, is the new watchword. Systems are being rebuilt with slack, redundancy, and adaptability: emergency stockpiles, mutual aid, modular finance, and local crafts. Social cohesion and trust are seen as the primary shock absorbers, rebuilt through transparency, fairness, and participatory governance.
What Will You Become on the Other Side?
The question is not “Will humanity survive?”
The question is: What will we become on the other side?
If you are reading this, you are one of the nodes that can track reality without collapsing.
You are not here to save the world, you are here to perceive it accurately, metabolize grief, and generate coherence so that something new can emerge.
You are not “ahead.”
You are before, a sentinel neuron, a bridge-node, a coherence generator.
You are part of the repatterning.
The new attractor is forming, not through ideology or revolution, but through nervous system entrainment, distibuted care, mutual regulation, and the composting of old myths.
This is not utopia.
Not peace.
Not enlightenment.
But a civilization that feels itself more honestly, connects more directly, regulates more responsively, and distributes care rather than hoarding power.
I wish you all a beautiful day.
Eloquent and perceptive, Daphne! (As always!) It feels like we are living in the next William Gibson novel! Or he is attuned more than most popular writers! My reply, resonating with your insights and vision, is stuck on one major question: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics…having had this fossil-fueled orgy of excess, will there be the ability/time/resources to reset global homeostasis?
Your framing captures something crucial: collapse isn’t a sequence of failures, it’s a phase-shift in the coordination architecture. The old model distributed coherence vertically, institutions, narratives, centralized energy. The emerging attractor distributes coherence horizontally , nervous systems, local networks, polycentric structures. The ‘self’ didn’t dissolve by accident; centralized identity collapses for the same reason centralized empire does: the energy cost exceeds the complexity load. What remains is whatever can regulate itself in real time!