When Stability Feels Like Suffocation

The psychology of craving societal collapse and embracing the insanity of radical change.

Photo by Blue Ox Studio

They call it morbid, this quiet confession roiling inside so many of us: the desire to see it all undone.

I speak of the fantasized unraveling of industrial society. Not as calculated cruelty, but as a form of desperate release. Such longing casts you as a villain, of course. It is taboo to wish for collapse, no matter how inevitable it feels, no matter the destruction at hand, no matter how many dead. They never cared for human lives, so why should they now about non-human ones? Ecosystems are too abstract to love. We are no animals. CO₂ and mass extinctions and melting glaciers and terrifying statistics are just the imaginary ramblings of demented scientists. Let the optimists cling to their (occasionally) well-meaning visions of smooth, endless progress; those of us drowning in the muck of the everyday are the minority, still.

The obliteration of the boring

We see it mirrored in the wa…