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 way we breathlessly grasp for grand disruptions. Remember the fevered excitement bubbling beneath the doomsday prophesies of 2012? Or the way eyes light up amidst predictions that AI will make humans obsolete? There's an undercurrent of giddy nihilism lurking within the latter fantasy: the singularity, that fever dream of technology transcending all limits, either becoming our benevolent overlord or wiping us out entirely. A manifested yearning for a monumental shift, a disruption on a cosmic scale, transhumanism, a rendering of our everyday problems irrelevant. Our lives feel too insignificant, too predictable, and an apocalyptic reboot — no matter how terrifying — holds the promise of shaking things up. The technophiles are either bored or unhappy with the status quo. Understandable, in some ways.

Collapse and monumental disruptions aren’t solely the realm of fantasists, anti-capitalists, or the depressed, however. Deep down, even intellectuals and rationalists crave that jolt of change, an obliteration of the boring, comfortable routine they meticulously and so very uselessly carve out for themselves. The light of the this-is-how-you-are-supposed-to-live-your-life doctrine casts terrifying shadows.

A slaughterhouse of ecstasy

Let's be honest, utopias have a stale veneer. The great empires we tell tales of — built on conquest, slavery, exploitation, and boundless violence — excite the masses far more readily than the promise of peaceful Solarpunk-esque abundance. The reason is bone-deep and brutal: we don't thrive on comfort and stability. We yearn, perversely, for struggle; for that flicker of adrenaline in the fight for survival. Bloodlust is not an anomaly in human nature — it's our essence. Albert Camus would see the irony; a universe utterly indifferent to our existence, and a race whose meaning is instinctively found through destructive conflict. Conquest is our way of dealing with the absurdity, and still we never feel free.

Every war has its flag-waving cheerleaders, not limited to the greedy madmen at the top. It's that insidious buzz coursing through entire populations as the battle drums begin their thunderous rhythm. We pretend it's righteous anger, noble patriotism — all masking the deeper truth: the chaos breaks the dullness, the disillusionment, the apathy. It makes us feel alive in a way no paycheck, no office affair, no exotic holiday ever could. It’s us against them! We are right, they are wrong. It must always be this way. War is peace.

Take the Great Wars. It wasn't just evil mustachioed men that sent millions into the meat grinder. That excitement, that electricity coursing through entire nations right before the slaughter began — it wasn’t all manufactured. No, it tapped into something primal. We don't crave endless stability, the same gray routine day after day. We want thunder to shake the rafters, something, anything to disrupt the tedium of the everyday. There was no reason, none at all, for World War I. Geopolitics is a game and an excuse. Borders aren’t even real.

Right now, they're pumping us full of fear and hate again, preparing the perfect tinderbox. Europe rattles its sabers, adding to the always rattling American and Russian ones, politicians lusting for battlefield glory like it's some heroic saga and not industrial butchery. Your liberal-conservative neighbor who scoffed at ‘alarmist conspiracy theories’ last year now buys into the righteous war narrative, arguing for ever-increasing defense budgets. Reason gets cast aside in that primal rush — there's the enemy, there's us, and Goddammit, don't we all feel more alive now that there's an Other to vanquish?

And you, too, are just waiting for that one headline in the morning that says, “World at war,” aren’t you? It’s dread, yes, but it’s also excitement.

A strange kind of hope

It's no coincidence that those who despise the rotten system the most are also the ones whispering the harshest (yet still mostly silent) prayers for its downfall. For ‘neurodivergent’ misfits, those rejected by the cogs of capitalist progress, every rule enforced feels like a suffocating tether. But it's not merely a desire to smash what oppresses; it's the hope that from the ashes we may craft a reality in which rigid societal expectations aren't a metaphorical death sentence for those who cannot wear the mask of normalcy. Of course, we yearn, on some hidden level, for the moment when the whole damn thing goes up in flames — when the rules become as meaningless as the roles we've been forced to play.

Yet craving upheaval isn't about rejoicing in senseless death — though those in charge won't shed too many tears as long as it fills their pockets. The planet wheezes as it's torn apart for profit. Every ancient tree razed, every ecosystem contaminated to satiate boundless appetites. Horror masquerading as progress. David Graeber once said there's a madness to how those in power would rather let the whole world burn than give up even a sliver of their ill-gotten gains.

No, there's a strange kind of hope in collapse. Hope for a less exploitative future, a chance to forge something gentler from the wreckage. Yet equally likely, humanity is doomed to replay its worst instincts, echoing old empires over and over on increasingly scorched soil. The communists tried and failed so very spectacularly. No one wanted their utopia. No one wanted to be free. In the end, not even they themselves.

This isn't a plea for inaction — do not accept a poisoned world in which the only growth celebrated is found in the pockets of billionaires for even a moment! Amidst the manufactured outrage, the war dances, and the desperate lies, we cannot pretend that somewhere — for some of us — lies a flicker of anticipation for that grand unraveling. It signifies not indifference to suffering but rather the burning remnants of defiance in a world determined to smother any possibility of feeling alive.

It won't be peaceful. It won't be pleasant. And still, amidst the dread, there's the undeniable pulse of something untamed. Change so monumental that, for once, we will not be allowed the luxury of simply looking away. Apathy in its dying breaths.

Antonio Melonio

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More essays to fuel your passion:

Violence Is Our Way: The Great Delusion of Civilization

The Black-and-White Washing of Geopolitics: It’s Us Against the World

Perhaps the Collapse of Society Would Not Be Such a Bad Thing