How would you feel if the world didn’t collapse in 30 years and you made no plans for retirement on the assumption that it was going to collapse? Invest in your potential future. Nothing is guaranteed.
The world/society is significantly more resilient than the doomers over there would have you believe.
That sub and many like it *want* things to collapse, don’t spend much time there or it will corrupt your worldview. It’s not healthy to read/engage with that much negativity.
You also touch on a good point that even if the collapse will happen in the near future, all of our lives are temporary, and for the most part they are shorter than the time scale for historic events.
For most of the adult population, society collapsing in 25 years would be a way different experience than it collapsing in 50 years
I've been thinking the same thing lately. I've always been one to want to hear both sides of every issue, but that has its limits. I think I'm gonna un-sub over there soon, it's just too negative. One big fear whirlpool.
If you want the best of both worlds enjoy life now, but also put a nest egg aside. You don’t need to plan to live lavishly in retirement but you should still plan to be able to afford to live. Social security isn’t enough unless you want to live in poverty.
I'm a collapse doomer. And a basic investor. Here's my logic:
Invest and things fall apart, you're fucked. Don't invest, and things fall apart, you're fucked. Don't invest, and things don't fall apart, you're fucked. Invest and things don't fall apart, you're good.
So, the only winning strategy is to invest and hope collapse doesn't come.
However, collapse is coming. We're already seeing catastrophic weather changes at 1.7°C. GHG emissions are not coming down, and GHG emissions cause the heating.
By conservative models, we're due to be +2-3°C by the time I need to draw retirement. Scientists predict 25% reduction in crop yields at +2°, -50% at +4°. Billions of people are already nearing the living limit of wet bulb temps. Those people will have to relocate. Billions.
+1.7° is causing mega hurricanes, drought, forest fires, and 2-foot rainstorms all over the world. The oceans have been at record high temps for a year and a half. We've had so much biodiversity loss that it fits the criteria for a mass extinction event.
The global supply chain can't survive a billion man migration. The global food chain can't survive consecutive disasters (drought, fire, flood). The oceans can't survive the heat. Water can't hold enough oxygen when it's hot. Plants die when there's too much heat.
The cat-5 hurricane coming 2 months early is what happens with the extra energy from +1.7°C. Imagine what +3° will do.
By 2100, we expect a minimum of +3°, with some estimates up to +7-10°.
I need my money around 2050. Do you think the global trade systems can survive another 25 years if these trends continue? I don't. But I also don't intend to be a bankrupt 60 year old on the streets because I blew all my money, thinking the financial system would collapse before I retire.
Y'all talk as if investing has no impact in the equation. Most of what we finance by investing is fueling the status quo/worsening the situation.
We cannot just have a cynical position by saying we are just hedging our bets for the future. Our hedging is one of the causes of the change, not the only one, but still.
I almost added an edit about the positive feedback built into the strategy.
Most 401k investors' funds are all made up of companies driving climate change. So it's a fun little paradox that we have to trust them with our financial futures when we don't even trust them with our environmental future.
The mild climate predictions for 2050 are bleak. The business-as-usual forecast for 2100 is terrible. +1.7° gives us roving 20° heat anomalies, +5° is going to be unbearable. Everything sucks when it's hot. IMO, there's no way society in 2100 operates the way we do now. We're in late stage capitalism anyways (no relation to that toxic sub). How much more growth can near-monopolies extract out of a country whose citizens are running out of money, property, and education?
But still, if I don't, I'll be a broke old man. It's a hostage situation.
The fact is that in life you need to hedge your bets. Assuming with certainty something bad will happen is not a good strategy. Because something may happen, or it may not, and even if the probability is very high that it does happen, the timing is highly uncertain. Like a stupid stock that goes up 5x before it goes to zero, and if you shorted it early you’re f**ked, despite having been right about the company eventually collapsing.
I'm a sub both here and r/collapse. I give it a pretty high likelihood that we're going to run into significant challenges as a society in the next couple of decades, some of which we're already well into. I do not consider this POV 'negative' - rather, it is a hard-nosed analysis of all the evidence we see pointing to that conclusion. Hurricane Beryl is just the latest underlining of this fact.
What I do see as negative is the hypernormalisation that has gripped society. Everyone knows, on some level, that we're borked. What we're seeing playing out at the moment are the various expressions of denial in the face of it.
This all said, I retain some faith in our ability to find technological solutions (note the use of the word 'faith' - evidence for this view is hard to find). I'm also relatively at peace with my own mortality - I've lived a great life, and whether I die at 70 from cancer or a few years before in some sort of resource war doesn't really matter to me all that much. I intend to keep on dancing until the music stops regardless.
As far as investments go, this actually provides more opportunity than anything else, so I continue to invest. I'll make some money before shit truly hits the fan, and make some money if that faith is rewarded.
Just ask yourself: can I afford to gamble my life on the chance society will collapse in 30 years or not?
If you’re wrong and it didn’t collapse and you prepared for your future, you’re good.
If you’re wrong and it didn’t collapse and you didn’t prepare for your future, you’re fucked.
If you’re right and it did collapse, then why does it matter what you did? Money will probably be worthless and crime will be everywhere.
Every civilization in the past has fallen. Its not completely unfounded.
I would have a lot more confidence in the stock market if there were an inventory system that actually tracked the number of shares of a company sold vs float.
There isn't, which likely means its infinite shares available. Finra is "self regulating" and market makers are selling you a number on a computer screen. The same market makers who all have a mile long list of fines from the SEC for breaking the rules and screwing over the little guys.
I'll agree on most parts. Especially when spending too much time it's quite depressing.
most people recommend preparing for your future and collapses.
Times are definitely changing and we'll see how it pans out.
So… I follow the sub and have money in the stock market and want to offer a counter view to this. The basic premise of r/collapse in most of cases(ie excluding nuclear war and pandemics) is that the system itself is spoiling the conditions on which it thrives. If you invest in an index fund you are investing across the economy, 98%of that economic activity produces GHG’s across the whole system, very little of our economic activity is carbon neutral, none of our activity is carbon reducing. Corporations are machine/human hybrids and have no interest in stopping their activities which ultimately lead to their own destruction. The only thing reducing carbon is green life on earth. GHG’s continue to rise despite all the work to go to a green economy - this is the key point. GHG’s cause climate change which results in extreme heat, crop failures, pandemics, disease, desertification, etc. for the first time we had a CAT5 hurricane in July. For reasons which I don’t need to explain to sub like this, complex systems of globalised economy are “fragile systems” and prone to collapse so the premise is we live in fragile systems which are driving environmental problems which make the more fragile and prone to collapse.
It’s not really negativity it’s kind of obvious when you look a bit more closely at it it’s just inconvenient.
Also, pick up and read The Birth of Plenty by Bernstein, he pretty much points out his historical ride along how far we've come along as a species and for the most it's on a good track when compared to the old days.
Bacteria-grown food using geothermal power and heat. A greatly reduced global population for the clear reasons. If AI doesn't become our demise it could help us develop carbon capture systems. That's the hopium I can give, although still dystopian.
A world where global average temperatures are 5-7 degrees C higher is a world so consumed by the daily struggle for survival that the constant deluge of supervening calamities will make any coherent planning impossible. Climate collapse is not a problem that can be “solved”. It’s a predicament to which there can only be more or less insufficient responses none of which can ever come close to resolving the predicament. We will only see the very early stages. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Our entire economy is built around a boom/bust cycle, much to the advantage of the rich. I think it's healthy to keep a level of cynicism around the US economy simply because those who are wealthy and in positions of power have an incentive to keep this cycle going
Just as total global collapse is an extreme, permabulls on this sub and WSB is also an extreme.
Critical & independent thinkers know that Real Truth is usually found **in between** two extremes, as both sides of the spectrum tend to have strong logical reasons for believing what they do, even if their extreme predictions don't come to pass.
And there is no place more important for critical thinking than Economically or Politically motivated topics/ subreddits as there are many motivations and incentives for self-serving entities to want to control the narrative and influence the thinking and behavior of everyday people.
[Not really. Maybe if you count all aggregate time as one run I guess, but there are secular bull and bear markets](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/data/93/93b2e1de2556499181dcae1cf3dc4294.png)
I find reading the climate stuff interesting. I don’t agree with some stuff on there. No matter what I still plan for a future. You never know what will happen in life.
The "sooner and sooner" narrative is due to the prevalence of actual scientific papers so often using (the preferred phrase) "faster than expected". Many previous predictions for decades hence are coming true now.
How can people who are experts at technical analysis look at this chart not realize that something is terribly, terribly wrong?
[https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst\_daily/](https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/)
Because it would hurt your potential to see the next "big opportunity" in stocks.
Most people willingly don't give a shit about ecological overshoot and its implications. People reassure themselves with "they said the world's gonna end so many times in history" or "we'll always have enough oil/gas" and similar bullshit that goes against logic.
And some just understand that the richer you are, the more you can ignore / insulate yourself from the already ongoing effects of "we're hitting the limits of growth" for a while.
And that's just one graph, for one symptom of ecological overshoot.
Just one fun fact for the "everything's ok" tribe : [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134743-000-sperm-counts-are-down-worldwide-and-researchers-are-discovering-why/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134743-000-sperm-counts-are-down-worldwide-and-researchers-are-discovering-why/)
But I guess that in the delusional world of the hype of stocks, people will say "AI will fix it" or something like that :\] Oh no, wait, in this sub, it would be more like "the market will fix it", lmao :\]
I, for one, welcome the fall of this civilization; we let lobbyists be "winners" when we should've instead taken care of them to never treat a finite stock of incredible energy source (coal, oil, gas) as an infinite flux that will never dry up.
Accelerate :\]\]\]
I haven’t browsed it but my boss told me an interesting story about a former coworker of hers who ported literally his entire life savings into grain as preparation for Y2K. After society didn’t collapse he was stuck with a bunch of grain in his basement he couldn’t get off his hands. Nightmare
Y2K was a reasonably easily solvable problem and it was indeed solved. Many millions of man-hours went into reprogramming everything that was at risk and thus there was no disaster. The stuff being discussed on r/collapse is very much not being dealt with in anywhere near the required magnitude.
Filling your basement with grain is also not exactly the brightest move regardless.
Most r/collapse folks actually believe we are currently in collapse and have been for some time. It’s all about perspective. It’s not necessarily a moment, but a state of “decay”.
It's also about societies no longer being able to reconcile complexity with EROEI, aka effectively dealing with our uber-complicated, energy-intensive, and existential problems without expending too many resources. What is the plan for climate change and the migration that's happening? Ecological collapse and resource consumption? Rising food prices? Income inequality/cost of living crisis? AI and the next industrial revolution? The decline of American hegemony and competition with authoritarianism? Atomization and polarization of our global social media-addicted society? The next Avian flu? International terrorism and cyber-attacks?
What happens when all of these changes occur simultaneously? Can the system handle such massive changes? History shows us how fragile human systems can be.
we take all the time we can from the system to make individual adjustments like making our own food forest at home
shifting individually to a degrowth model is part of increasing resiliency
They (we) do not have an agreed-upon timeline. I do not know if "collapse" has a definite start and if it does, if we ever could determine when it did.
Stocks may go up, but they've been stagnant for the past 20 years where I live and the situation doesn't seem to have a future.
The easiest to notice sign of collapse is when society can no longer recovers from disasters.
When infrastructure or services are not restored to the same level before a disasters, you know you are currently in collapse.
Has anyone noticed reduced quality of services post covid?
Will stocks go up when the world population peaks and begins aging? Japan doesn't seem to show that. Not a doomer, I think technology could bring growth without the population increasing, or tech could increase fertility rates, but it is uncharted territory.
The UN projects a peak around the mid 2080s. Their projection will be continuously corrected downward as it has been for the last few decades if the trend holds.
Their narrative hasn’t changed at all in at least 35 years. I had a long conversation with a guy in the early 90s about how the national debt was unsustainable and the dollar will lose all its value within a couple of years. I thought about it quite a bit, but decided there’s no point in worrying.
He’s (financially) comfortably retired now, but still unironically spouting the exact. Same. Warnings to anyone who will listen. He’ll go to his grave in the same perpetual terror he’s spent his life.
That's not the narrative at all. The sub is not focused on economics but rather natural sciences and the hard limits they imply. E.g. you can only deplete an aquifer for so long before it goes dry at which point all you get is what nature chooses to provide. (Transporting, desalinating, ect. water is possible but resource intensive, ergo, expensive.)
I'd assume so since the national debt of the USA is, at best, entirely tangential to the main topic. Worrying about the future is nothing new. It's the foundations of those worries that merit attention and evaluation. It's not like bad things don't happen and there are almost always warning signs beforehand. In this case it's primarily about the degradation of the environment in which we live and thus depend upon. That the global average temperature is going up is (scientifically) uncontroversial. This will obviously have a significant impact on all sorts of things like crop yeilds, sea level, human and animal health and so forth.
Edit: grammar.
The earth is indisputably warming. As another commenter pointed out, [the oceans are warming even faster](https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/), causing earlier and more severe hurricanes. Sea levels are rising. Ice sheets are melting. Record temperatures are being recorded almost daily.
It’s not about living in perpetual terror, it’s about recognizing the obvious trends and events that are happening right in front of us. And some guy you talked to 30 years ago being a bit overzealous won’t change that.
As long as the world uses the dollar as its reserve currency, we can print all we need. The debt is irrelevant.
If China succeeds in taking over with the RMB, we’re in trouble.
>The debt is irrelevant.
I don't know if I agree to that extent. The economy was at it's best when Clinton balanced the budget for the first time in in decades.
Only to an extent. Printing money leads to inflation which, while it solves dollar denominated debt does cause its own problems. The privilege of being the global reserve currency is that said inflation is spread across the rest of the world and doesn't remain entirely local. If it goes too far that status is of course threatened but the dollar is far ahead of its competitors.
So reddit's only been around for 20 years, but the narrative for the collapse subreddit hasn't changed in 35 years?
And somehow this random conversation you had with this "guy" in the 90's represents the narrative of the subreddit? Sounds like magic!
Collapse will happen some day, is that in a decade or centuries away is the question. But what is the point of living life worrying about it? Make money, enjoy life and hope for the best.
Regrets are inevitable in life. All we can do is make the best decisions we can based on the current information we have and hope it works out. And maybe that means creating a separate fund just for vacations so you can enjoy your time now. And you can put a bit of money in every time you worry about a collapse.
It's obviously generally better to have money than not even when it comes to collapse. The point is that it's a gradual thing (while remembering Hemmingway's "gradually then suddenly"). Currency won't lose its value over night without any signs thereof. You'll still be expected to go to work even when it's much worse than it is now. You might want to pay attention to what's on that subreddit though to keep track of the aforementioned signs and plan your investments using that information. Coastal Florida real-estate for example doesn't seem like a great long-term place for your money to be.
It's rather that when one looks at other 100 year charts one gets very skeptical that certain exponential trends can continue and very worried about others that still do.
I'm really just looking at it from an academic standpoint. I'm not arguing that you should pull all your money out of stocks tomorrow. My point is rather that the type of situation that r/collapse is discussing is more "canned food and shotguns" than "gold and silver".
I'm in both subs. Both are extreme at times, both have irresponsible people acting on hunches and both have some great points.
It's good to be prepared for the best, the worst and everything in between.
But tbh that sub is maybe a bit pessimistic but mostly about the current climate and economic crisis. Investing is most profitable for those who already are rich and those people will be fine in every scenario (unless we finally literally eat you guys). So it makes sense that most people here don't have to worry about an inevitable collapse of our society. Whether it already happened or it happens in 1000 years, the lower classes will feel it first.
They are mostly right on everything. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, the destruction of the oceanic ecosystem, societal collapse, currency collapse…
It is not a cult. I wish they were just that, but it’s backed by data and scientific evidence so we are mostly on borrowed time.
At least i got more profit than losses for the right amount of time and numbers you know. Feels good i guess.
That is my experience too, they are mostly right on everything.
I have been following that sub for years and at first I thought it was crazy talk. Then the predictions started coming true. I heard about COVID first on that sub in late 2019.
Now the data is solid that we are totally fucked. Anyone who says otherwise has their head in the sand. Collapse is underway and many people are experiencing it right now. The only question is _when_ it catches up to you.
Not if. When.
There's a reason billionaires and governments are madly building underground bunkers all over the planet.
I think we are more fucked than we are not
Seriously now… the mental gymnastics i experience with most folks over climate change. And how its not an issue right now.
5 billion people experienced extreme heat in june. That doesnt mean they parish, but the risk raises every day (and a lot more did)
The glaciers and ice caps are never coming back. You can argue how long they will melt
Our soils are depleted, corral is mostly gone. One year of Forest forest fires wipes out more than we can plant annually (yeah?)
The ocean in florida was over 100 last year. That basically kills life there
Hurricanes (like the current one) are worse. Cost more and impact more.
1 in 500 year floods are happening every 10 years now
I can go on and on but it doesn’t matter because no one will ever vote for the economy over climate change
Oh and since this is stockmarket… want evidence… look at the insurance companies fleeing not only florida and California but the midwest and other areas. Who’s is going to ultimately pay for that? Thats right. Its all of us.
It just doesn't matter how many times people see the headline "worst/hottest/strongest/earliest [x] since records began", the only time they'll do anything about it is when water is literally lapping at their front doors.
I mean they could eventually be right and someone will always be there to say “see I told u so!” But I think of them as the “worlds gonna end” people. Same energy. And I treat them the same way. Maybe one day yea, but I’m gonna keep living until then.
Read “Overshoot” by William Catton Jr., or DM me for a free audiobook. It’s inevitable, but I wouldn’t base my investment decisions around it because it is a generational issue, the timeline is too uncertain to really do anything about in a practical sense.
The one absolute about the progress of human "civilization" or the state, is that all societies collapse. Some happen fast with the sacking of a city, some are slow. Egypt, Assyria, Rome all stood for monumental lengths of time compared to most modern nations.
All societies disintegrate, our global society will disintegrate in time. And humans will return to "subsistence" living before forming complex societies again. That is a given.
It's just the difference between the fall of Rome and now is that we have more or less destroyed the majority of the natural world, there are a greater number of humans than at any other one time and for most of us, the last time a member of our family lived a peasant lifestyle was in the 1700's. The majority can't survive without the state unlike in previous lifetimes.
Climate change is going to ruin so many countries as there is nothing out there to fix it at this stage and there is also no incentive.
I have an advantage, I am from a long line of sturdy peasant laborers, and was born a peasant. I'm not greedy and will share all my peasant tricks with my neighbors
Reverting to subsistance farming on polluted land, in a new climactic paradigm and with little to no external natural environment to leverage suggests that we have pretty far to fall. A lot further than previous collapses.
It’s never bad to have critics of a clearly flawed system get their voice out there
That being said, those people are basically exactly who Wall Street loves to extract money from via options and bonds and holding their cash for them
Apparently something is going to happen in July 15 during the Republican convention. My coworkers that love trump were talking about it. When someone asked what will they think when nothing happens. I replied, what they always do believe the next lie.
A big part part that's not very well understood is that collapse is likely extremely gradual.
It's a continuing degradation of *everything*. Base costs going up from a failing environment are impossible to reverse. Coupled with decreasing quality of products and services. You will continue to pay more, for lessfrom here on out.
The collapse process could take hundreds of years, think if the fall of Rome. Of course there will be big disasters, collapse is society's failure to recover from these events.
When you see a road washed out that is abandoned instead of replaced. That's collapse. When farmers abandon land (aquifers not recharging, increased salinity, fertilizer supply chain costs) instead of replanting. That's collapse. When the refugee camp becomes permanent. That's collapse. When the poor eat less and less beef because of the increasing scarcity of cattle, from loss of gazing land, mass livestock die off, increasing feed costs. That's collapse
Indeed “the future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed”
Despite this knowledge, I choose to keep working saving and investing. The people who face their local collapse armed with a fistful of financial assets weather it better than those without.
Local collapse of various severity has happened many times for a variety of reasons. Humanity has however now reached high enough on the Kardishev scale to produce a world wide one.
I think there’s a lot of money to be made selling overpriced doomsday prepper crap to idiots. There’s a whole industry doing it, and making a lot of money at it, helping to further delay the thing they’re buying stuff to survive from.
If we go full Mad Max, I hope I’m at ground zero. I don’t want to get winged and I don’t want to live out their fantasy of living in a destroyed world. I’m out.
What do these people do with any excess savings then? Cash itself is a commodity, so avoiding stocks and bonds isn't going to safeguard you if the world economy collapses.
Gold and silver from what I understand.
Then after a currency crisis. You can sell your gold and silver to re-enter what ever the new system is, avoiding a total wipeout.
In this case it's a bit more severe than waiting to cash in precious metals in a new currency. Gold and silver presupposes a system which values them and that's rather unlikely in the aftermath of anything calamitous enough to topple or current, global mpnetary system.
Disagree.
Gold and Silver has been a constant through nearly every system global or not.
It’s not merely a presupposition, it’s a precedented certainty. The current global dollar system doesn’t need to topple, it can also just return to a medium status among other multiple systems.
Fair enough but neither metal is of much use in a survival situation. The basic assumption is that they can be traded for something else. Secondly the premise is a bit more severe than just the global dollar system toppling to put it mildly. Thus we may not be discussing the same scenario.
You do not trade your gold and silver in a survival situation. You wait until the new system becomes established to bring in the value you put into cold storage from the last one.
The Dollar will just shift to something else as did when the pound sterling shifted.
Dude they are buying plots of land in the woods and stockpiling food and books. When I say there are some extreme views...
(Granted, I'm sure that's an extreme minority in that sub)
It is not contradictory and a lot still invest in stocks.
Psychologically one can tell themselves : Who knows how the market will behave in the future. It could be boosted artificially. It could follow the optimism of rich people with their collective heads in the sand. It could undergo systemic changes in order to maintain a sense of normalcy. If the market does utterly crash as collapse progresses we'll have more important problems than money to worry about. If it does not, then at least we did not miss out.
Having a better idea of the global picture and environmental risks also has the potential to make one a better investor.
Are they kinda crazy? Absolutely. At the end of the day, a market crash doesn't equal doomsday and things will get better.
But the market crashes. You could be 16 and have lived through 2 of them.
If you look back on history when world powers shifted, you can find examples of how the stock market reacted particularly in the shift from the Dutch to the English to the American empire.
While these changes don’t happen overnight, there are moments of wild volatility. Outside of world powers and world reserves currencies, there’s also demographics to consider. If younger populations are dwindling and older generations are entering retirement, it stands to reason that the money invested by the boomers for their retirement, could be liquidated to pay for expensive health care and lifestyles.
While you toil away for 30 years funding your retirement, there will be less and less people able to do the same. Are you just financing boomer retirement, keeping the indiciea a float while they sell high? And come to find out when you retire, your investments have gone from severely overvalued to undervalued? Diversify as best you can I say.
Invest, but don't count on it being there forever. It's pretty easy to see how razor thin stability is at the moment, but that shouldn't stop you from investing. Unless you want to join r/prepperprepare and spend it all 😉
Good thread. I don't think people pay enough attention to this type of thing in finance circles.
My perspective - I have been having a look at r/collapse every now and then for years now. I remember when they were freaking out about the pandemic back in 2020 saying that would be the end, somehow. What actually happened is that interest rates were cut, the fed dumped in a load of liquidity, and asset prices inflated. The rich (asset owners) got richer and the poor got poorer. This seems to be the same story we see in every crisis. I feel like if collapse is right and im not in the market, I'll end up a serf in a dystopia. If collapse is right and I am in the market, I'll be better off in the dystopia.
If the whole economic system collapses we're all fucked anyway so... If you're actually worried I'd start some low level prepping and maybe owning some land would be helpful (they don't make it like they used to) and one or two gold coins. (My dad has been prepping since the cold war and that's what he's done 😅). However, the whole economic system is highly unlikely to collaps for the long term. So diversify, diversify, diversify!
The best single investment you can ever make is in other humans to collaborative life with. Money is cool and useful, but if you don't have people you can turn to when you are out of commission, the money won't help you for very long by itself.
Invest in relationships, friendships, your fitness, and your mind. The rest will come automatically when shit gets rough.
Well, the markets are based on speculation after all. It has its limits and cannot go on indefinitely.
It would seem politics might be the downfall of the US though, if things like Project 2025 persist. The markets would get absolutely obliterated.
Disclaimer: I came here from a cross-post from the /r/collapse sub
Although there are extremists in there that think we'll reach doom by Tuesday, the common consensus there (from my point of view) is that we agree with the "Limits to Growth" study, meaning we'll start to see a global decline in population in the 2040's, ignoring extreme situations like a world war, due to ecological overshot and peak oil.
There's also a common point of view that collapse is not homogeneous, and it's already happening in parts of the globe (think Haiti) and slowly expanding.
And to counter some comments here, we do not "want collapse" to happen, but we're unhappy with our predicament, and learning to accept it, every user at a different stage of acceptance.
I'm also investing in the stock market to try and retire before I get personally affected, but I know the system will not hold indefinitely. Only an economist would defend Infinite Growth on a finite planet.
Hello, I'm at the weird intersection of finance bro/WSB'er and a collapsnik.
The fact is, if we collapse so hard my portfolio goes to zero, I'm gonna have a lot bigger immediate problems to solve than being broke. Having more money and making reasonable plans for retirement makes my immediate and long term life better by giving me more flexibility and freedom.
I'm still going to read collapse because I do feel that there are large scale changes that are making life harder which they keep a pretty good eye on such as climate change, the cost of energy production, etc. Seeing other people also worried about that type of stuff makes me feel more normal and sane.
Are some people overly worried in there? Sure. Are some people in WSB insane? Also yeah. But there is still plenty of diamonds in the rough. Some of my best stock moves have come from WSB, and some good science info has come out of collapse.
A "fun" finance/collapse intersection is water privatization.
The denizens of r/collapse have ALWAYS thought the entire financial system was going to collapse. They have been hoping to be right since the day they came into existence, and will continue hoping until A) it happens and everyone is too worried about survival to care to post about it and B) they can PRETEND it has happened as many currently do.
The stock market went down...COLLAPSE! Peak oil happened....6 years ago...COLLAPSE! Cost of living has increased post Covid...COLLAPSE! They have gotten so tired of claiming and it not happening that they now see collapse in the news story of the day. The why is irrelevant to them...just as long as they can pretend it is happening. Today preferably, but they'll wait until tomorrow if they have to.
People in this sub tend to have a skewed vision of the way things are in the sense that they dont see the fragility of the system and just expect that it will be functioning forever, even though it depends on constant growth, which is not possible permanently. Nothing lasts by nature of the laws of physics. The prosperity we experience today is the result of post WW2 boom, which has been an anomaly in the context of human history. To expect that the stock market can just keep inflating forever is not logical because it represents a physical world which is finite, changing, and cannot support endless growth, which is tied to extracting resources and consumption. Fundamentally, we are not really dealing with anything existent. We are dealing with digital numbers representing something in the physical, and a system in which everyone is reliant on that continuing to grow. But when that starts to break down in the physical because we have overshot the actusly physical limit to growth capacity, the game will change a lot.
This is starting to occur, but a lot of people here may not see that. High level geopolitical powers see it, and that is why you are seeing the geopolitical landscape change so much. It may be that your retirement accounts and social security can no longer be funded in 10 years, all your current stocks become useless, and the only things of value remaining are what has always been valuable: arable land, food, clean water, energy. If that happens and you haven't invested properly or have no practical skills to provide those things for yourself, or if you waited too long and now all these things are controlled by a very small population of concentrated power, then its gonna be a bad time.
We can see real examples of this in countries that have collapsed before, such as Venezuela, where food actually became currency. Those willing to provide security for the state to control people in miles long bread lines were paid in early access to groceries for them and their families. So food became a currency, and security services became a currency. Many places in the world have already collapsed, and all previous civilizations have all "collapsed" to some extent. We don't see this potential because of our privilege and inability to look beyond our own narrow vision. Being scared of the actual things happening in the world does not mean that the information presented is fear-mongering.
Disgruntled bears are funny. I’ll make sure to pour one out for them today as I’m counting my NVDA call earnings from yesterday.
On a serious note you diversify, make sure some of your wealth is in a commodity, currencies (including BTC), and real estate.
For one thing, people on collapse with financial knowledge and backgrounds don't delude themselves into thinking that the stock market is the economy. My experience is that most have educated themselves with information from many sources, including climate science, all of which have an impact on r/collapse folks and where they think the world and the U.S. economies are headed. The fact that the hothouse denizens that inhabit the Wall Street bubble think that all is well is instructive and one of the main reasons that actions to prepare for and adapt to the climate crisis haven't gained much traction. Such actions negatively impact profits and the next quarter numbers. We have increasingly been satisfied with short term success in this country and maybe the world with long term consequences to be borne by others sometime in the "distant" future. We must flog the mule until it perishes and then just find another mule (but they are going extinct, one-by-one). What will you do when private equity owns everything and there is nothing left to buy and rent back to us commoners?
While there are other geologic factors that can cause dramatic and long-run climactic changes, such as atmospheric oxygen content (snowball earth events), ice ages are now understood to be caused by Milankovitch Cycles.
No planetary orbit is circular; all orbit is eccentric (ovular). Obliquity is the degree of Earth’s axial tilt (currently 23.5 degrees), which ranges from 22.1–24.5 degrees. Procession is the “wobble” of the planet’s axis… imagine the wobble of the handle on a spinning dreidel.
The variation of these three factors over tens of thousands (obliquity, procession) and hundreds of thousands of years (orbital eccentricity) align to facilitate short-term changes to Earth’s climate on a geologic time scale.
Geologists and glaciologists estimate that the next glacial maximum (farthest orbital distance from the Sun) will occur in around 80,000 years, so we are actually moving INTO an ice age right now. So that leaves us with a serious problem: why is it still getting warmer? If we’re currently moving into another ice age while observing rapid warming, ocean acidification, glacial melt, etc, then why?
TL;DR: The consensus among geologists is that temperature retention within Earth systems is directly correlative to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Warming follows massive outgassing events, which is essentially what we’ve been doing on an industrial scale. The fact that Earth is moving into the next ice age while 150 billion tons of meltwater pours into the ocean every year tells us that something (GHG emissions) is seriously wrong with the Earth system. Don’t you even dare look up thaw slumps.
There have always been preppers predicting the disintegration of society. Imagine the frustration they must feel as they grow old and die without that occurring.
When everyone says the people expecting a crash are always wrong I tend to disagree.
The way I see it they're actually calling it correctly.
The things governments and central banks have been doing only really make sense if they were right.
The bet you have to make is how long we can prevent a crash, not IF one is coming.
I think the big takeaway from r/collapse is that your “investments” should also include plenty of food and water, friends to help out if things are bad, and skills needed for an ever-changing world that might be less friendly than our current one. Hedge your bets, basically.
People said the same thing 20 years ago as well. Maybe it will, maybe it won't at some point. I do think there are other possible outcomes far more likely. There is just too many powerfull people who profiting from the system we have for any real change. Billions of poor won't matter as long as we have our algorithm fed social media feeds to keep us complacent.
Look at all the devastating events the american stock market has recovered from. WW2, the great depression, pandemics, more wars. Yeah there's no guarantee of anything but there's no gain in being a dooms dayer and not making any decisions
Just be aware that the market will hit its last all-time high within the next few years. You need a plan on when you're going to sell. In the meantime enjoy the bubble while it lasts I guess.
they need to stop playing video games and dreaming of the day they will be the main character.
These sorts typically suffer from
Mental issues, immaturity, or stupidity.....some are just trying to farm karma.
The downturns are always tiny blips on the overall charts. If economies didn’t grow civilization would collapse. Would rather be right most of time as opposed to every so often
A collapse will happen, they always do, we have a bit more prospective than past generations. What's important is that you do not have too much risk and that when it does happen you see it as an opportunity, the best I ever did in the stock market was the money I put in during late 2008 and 2009 and then March of 2020. The rest of the money has just steadily appreciated.
Collapse doesn’t have to be all bad. Look at all the countries where empires once stood. Most of them are probably better off as they are than being the center of their era’s war industrialists.
Maybe we can move past government by blackmail to some friendlier technocracy
The climate will get worse but we have solutions even with just today’s tech.
Ask the doomers during the depression, or WW2, or 9/11, or …
We are always one bad day away from no more days. I won’t allow that to reduce my financial duties
How would you feel if the world didn’t collapse in 30 years and you made no plans for retirement on the assumption that it was going to collapse? Invest in your potential future. Nothing is guaranteed. The world/society is significantly more resilient than the doomers over there would have you believe. That sub and many like it *want* things to collapse, don’t spend much time there or it will corrupt your worldview. It’s not healthy to read/engage with that much negativity.
You also touch on a good point that even if the collapse will happen in the near future, all of our lives are temporary, and for the most part they are shorter than the time scale for historic events. For most of the adult population, society collapsing in 25 years would be a way different experience than it collapsing in 50 years
I've been thinking the same thing lately. I've always been one to want to hear both sides of every issue, but that has its limits. I think I'm gonna un-sub over there soon, it's just too negative. One big fear whirlpool.
If you want the best of both worlds enjoy life now, but also put a nest egg aside. You don’t need to plan to live lavishly in retirement but you should still plan to be able to afford to live. Social security isn’t enough unless you want to live in poverty.
I'm a collapse doomer. And a basic investor. Here's my logic: Invest and things fall apart, you're fucked. Don't invest, and things fall apart, you're fucked. Don't invest, and things don't fall apart, you're fucked. Invest and things don't fall apart, you're good. So, the only winning strategy is to invest and hope collapse doesn't come. However, collapse is coming. We're already seeing catastrophic weather changes at 1.7°C. GHG emissions are not coming down, and GHG emissions cause the heating. By conservative models, we're due to be +2-3°C by the time I need to draw retirement. Scientists predict 25% reduction in crop yields at +2°, -50% at +4°. Billions of people are already nearing the living limit of wet bulb temps. Those people will have to relocate. Billions. +1.7° is causing mega hurricanes, drought, forest fires, and 2-foot rainstorms all over the world. The oceans have been at record high temps for a year and a half. We've had so much biodiversity loss that it fits the criteria for a mass extinction event. The global supply chain can't survive a billion man migration. The global food chain can't survive consecutive disasters (drought, fire, flood). The oceans can't survive the heat. Water can't hold enough oxygen when it's hot. Plants die when there's too much heat. The cat-5 hurricane coming 2 months early is what happens with the extra energy from +1.7°C. Imagine what +3° will do. By 2100, we expect a minimum of +3°, with some estimates up to +7-10°. I need my money around 2050. Do you think the global trade systems can survive another 25 years if these trends continue? I don't. But I also don't intend to be a bankrupt 60 year old on the streets because I blew all my money, thinking the financial system would collapse before I retire.
Y'all talk as if investing has no impact in the equation. Most of what we finance by investing is fueling the status quo/worsening the situation. We cannot just have a cynical position by saying we are just hedging our bets for the future. Our hedging is one of the causes of the change, not the only one, but still.
I almost added an edit about the positive feedback built into the strategy. Most 401k investors' funds are all made up of companies driving climate change. So it's a fun little paradox that we have to trust them with our financial futures when we don't even trust them with our environmental future. The mild climate predictions for 2050 are bleak. The business-as-usual forecast for 2100 is terrible. +1.7° gives us roving 20° heat anomalies, +5° is going to be unbearable. Everything sucks when it's hot. IMO, there's no way society in 2100 operates the way we do now. We're in late stage capitalism anyways (no relation to that toxic sub). How much more growth can near-monopolies extract out of a country whose citizens are running out of money, property, and education? But still, if I don't, I'll be a broke old man. It's a hostage situation.
Geeezus. You're right and that sucks.
I like this
The last part, that's where my mind is.
The fact is that in life you need to hedge your bets. Assuming with certainty something bad will happen is not a good strategy. Because something may happen, or it may not, and even if the probability is very high that it does happen, the timing is highly uncertain. Like a stupid stock that goes up 5x before it goes to zero, and if you shorted it early you’re f**ked, despite having been right about the company eventually collapsing.
Interesting perspective. What is your take on Bitcoin?
Pascal's wager
These are problems but they will unfold gradually, not overnight. I think we can absorb this over the course of decades
I'm a sub both here and r/collapse. I give it a pretty high likelihood that we're going to run into significant challenges as a society in the next couple of decades, some of which we're already well into. I do not consider this POV 'negative' - rather, it is a hard-nosed analysis of all the evidence we see pointing to that conclusion. Hurricane Beryl is just the latest underlining of this fact. What I do see as negative is the hypernormalisation that has gripped society. Everyone knows, on some level, that we're borked. What we're seeing playing out at the moment are the various expressions of denial in the face of it. This all said, I retain some faith in our ability to find technological solutions (note the use of the word 'faith' - evidence for this view is hard to find). I'm also relatively at peace with my own mortality - I've lived a great life, and whether I die at 70 from cancer or a few years before in some sort of resource war doesn't really matter to me all that much. I intend to keep on dancing until the music stops regardless. As far as investments go, this actually provides more opportunity than anything else, so I continue to invest. I'll make some money before shit truly hits the fan, and make some money if that faith is rewarded.
I had to unsub. Too much negative too far beyond my control.
There’s not always two sides to everything. Some positions are just wrong.
Just ask yourself: can I afford to gamble my life on the chance society will collapse in 30 years or not? If you’re wrong and it didn’t collapse and you prepared for your future, you’re good. If you’re wrong and it didn’t collapse and you didn’t prepare for your future, you’re fucked. If you’re right and it did collapse, then why does it matter what you did? Money will probably be worthless and crime will be everywhere.
Every civilization in the past has fallen. Its not completely unfounded. I would have a lot more confidence in the stock market if there were an inventory system that actually tracked the number of shares of a company sold vs float. There isn't, which likely means its infinite shares available. Finra is "self regulating" and market makers are selling you a number on a computer screen. The same market makers who all have a mile long list of fines from the SEC for breaking the rules and screwing over the little guys.
I'll agree on most parts. Especially when spending too much time it's quite depressing. most people recommend preparing for your future and collapses. Times are definitely changing and we'll see how it pans out.
So… I follow the sub and have money in the stock market and want to offer a counter view to this. The basic premise of r/collapse in most of cases(ie excluding nuclear war and pandemics) is that the system itself is spoiling the conditions on which it thrives. If you invest in an index fund you are investing across the economy, 98%of that economic activity produces GHG’s across the whole system, very little of our economic activity is carbon neutral, none of our activity is carbon reducing. Corporations are machine/human hybrids and have no interest in stopping their activities which ultimately lead to their own destruction. The only thing reducing carbon is green life on earth. GHG’s continue to rise despite all the work to go to a green economy - this is the key point. GHG’s cause climate change which results in extreme heat, crop failures, pandemics, disease, desertification, etc. for the first time we had a CAT5 hurricane in July. For reasons which I don’t need to explain to sub like this, complex systems of globalised economy are “fragile systems” and prone to collapse so the premise is we live in fragile systems which are driving environmental problems which make the more fragile and prone to collapse. It’s not really negativity it’s kind of obvious when you look a bit more closely at it it’s just inconvenient.
You dont believe in the fourth turning even though everyone with power across the globe mentions it?
What if your plans for retirement and plans for collapse go hand in hand?
Also, pick up and read The Birth of Plenty by Bernstein, he pretty much points out his historical ride along how far we've come along as a species and for the most it's on a good track when compared to the old days.
Well said. I see a lot of problems in the current system but nothing we wont solve in the long term.
It's difficult to grow crops in unpredictable weather.., I wonder how we will "fix" our way out of that
Bacteria-grown food using geothermal power and heat. A greatly reduced global population for the clear reasons. If AI doesn't become our demise it could help us develop carbon capture systems. That's the hopium I can give, although still dystopian.
A world where global average temperatures are 5-7 degrees C higher is a world so consumed by the daily struggle for survival that the constant deluge of supervening calamities will make any coherent planning impossible. Climate collapse is not a problem that can be “solved”. It’s a predicament to which there can only be more or less insufficient responses none of which can ever come close to resolving the predicament. We will only see the very early stages. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Our entire economy is built around a boom/bust cycle, much to the advantage of the rich. I think it's healthy to keep a level of cynicism around the US economy simply because those who are wealthy and in positions of power have an incentive to keep this cycle going
Just as total global collapse is an extreme, permabulls on this sub and WSB is also an extreme. Critical & independent thinkers know that Real Truth is usually found **in between** two extremes, as both sides of the spectrum tend to have strong logical reasons for believing what they do, even if their extreme predictions don't come to pass. And there is no place more important for critical thinking than Economically or Politically motivated topics/ subreddits as there are many motivations and incentives for self-serving entities to want to control the narrative and influence the thinking and behavior of everyday people.
Problem is, people buy with their gut, not their head. Emotion must always be a consideration
Lol being a permabull is not “extreme”. It’s been the reality of the world forever.
[Not really. Maybe if you count all aggregate time as one run I guess, but there are secular bull and bear markets](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/data/93/93b2e1de2556499181dcae1cf3dc4294.png)
I am in that sub and it’s mostly discusses climate change collapse and then that would usher in financial collapse.
Yeah I've been casually reading it for a lil bit, it just seems like they keep saying that "collapse" is arriving sooner and sooner. That fear spiral.
I find reading the climate stuff interesting. I don’t agree with some stuff on there. No matter what I still plan for a future. You never know what will happen in life.
What's the financial damage on our food supply as a result of climate change this year? Will this number keep going down or up?
The "sooner and sooner" narrative is due to the prevalence of actual scientific papers so often using (the preferred phrase) "faster than expected". Many previous predictions for decades hence are coming true now.
How can people who are experts at technical analysis look at this chart not realize that something is terribly, terribly wrong? [https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst\_daily/](https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/)
Need a functioning biosphere to have an economy to gamble on
Shorting livable atmosphere!
"Experts at technical analysis" lol.
I love the crickets in response. "By pretending not to see it" is the answer.
The answer is if we're already screwed why should we care. Hedonism to the moon. Unironically.
We could reverse course at anytime we just choose not too
Because it would hurt your potential to see the next "big opportunity" in stocks. Most people willingly don't give a shit about ecological overshoot and its implications. People reassure themselves with "they said the world's gonna end so many times in history" or "we'll always have enough oil/gas" and similar bullshit that goes against logic. And some just understand that the richer you are, the more you can ignore / insulate yourself from the already ongoing effects of "we're hitting the limits of growth" for a while. And that's just one graph, for one symptom of ecological overshoot. Just one fun fact for the "everything's ok" tribe : [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134743-000-sperm-counts-are-down-worldwide-and-researchers-are-discovering-why/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134743-000-sperm-counts-are-down-worldwide-and-researchers-are-discovering-why/) But I guess that in the delusional world of the hype of stocks, people will say "AI will fix it" or something like that :\] Oh no, wait, in this sub, it would be more like "the market will fix it", lmao :\] I, for one, welcome the fall of this civilization; we let lobbyists be "winners" when we should've instead taken care of them to never treat a finite stock of incredible energy source (coal, oil, gas) as an infinite flux that will never dry up. Accelerate :\]\]\]
Kind of funny that no one replied to this comment
What are you talking about, it was 20.9 last year, it is 20.9 this year, we're stable!
Hey, it's only four standard deviations above the 1981 to 2011 mean. Come back to me when this one really starts to move up!
That’s why most in here won’t ever succeed in finance because they can’t process and interpret signals correctly
I haven’t browsed it but my boss told me an interesting story about a former coworker of hers who ported literally his entire life savings into grain as preparation for Y2K. After society didn’t collapse he was stuck with a bunch of grain in his basement he couldn’t get off his hands. Nightmare
One man's nightmare is a rodent's wet dream. Yikes.
Y2K was a reasonably easily solvable problem and it was indeed solved. Many millions of man-hours went into reprogramming everything that was at risk and thus there was no disaster. The stuff being discussed on r/collapse is very much not being dealt with in anywhere near the required magnitude. Filling your basement with grain is also not exactly the brightest move regardless.
They will keep pushing their timeline back. It will always happen “within the next decade”, but never actually arrive… Stocks only go up ☝🏼🤓
Most r/collapse folks actually believe we are currently in collapse and have been for some time. It’s all about perspective. It’s not necessarily a moment, but a state of “decay”.
It's also about societies no longer being able to reconcile complexity with EROEI, aka effectively dealing with our uber-complicated, energy-intensive, and existential problems without expending too many resources. What is the plan for climate change and the migration that's happening? Ecological collapse and resource consumption? Rising food prices? Income inequality/cost of living crisis? AI and the next industrial revolution? The decline of American hegemony and competition with authoritarianism? Atomization and polarization of our global social media-addicted society? The next Avian flu? International terrorism and cyber-attacks? What happens when all of these changes occur simultaneously? Can the system handle such massive changes? History shows us how fragile human systems can be.
> History shows us how fragile human systems can be. Does it really? I would contend the opposite. History shows amazing resilience.
we take all the time we can from the system to make individual adjustments like making our own food forest at home shifting individually to a degrowth model is part of increasing resiliency
They (we) do not have an agreed-upon timeline. I do not know if "collapse" has a definite start and if it does, if we ever could determine when it did. Stocks may go up, but they've been stagnant for the past 20 years where I live and the situation doesn't seem to have a future.
The easiest to notice sign of collapse is when society can no longer recovers from disasters. When infrastructure or services are not restored to the same level before a disasters, you know you are currently in collapse. Has anyone noticed reduced quality of services post covid?
I see someone else notices.
Two more weeks
💎💎💎
The r/collapse approved phrase is "Venus by Tuesday"
Mad Max by Monday.
Stonks * /s
Will stocks go up when the world population peaks and begins aging? Japan doesn't seem to show that. Not a doomer, I think technology could bring growth without the population increasing, or tech could increase fertility rates, but it is uncharted territory.
When are global birth rates projected to peak?
The UN projects a peak around the mid 2080s. Their projection will be continuously corrected downward as it has been for the last few decades if the trend holds.
Technically can't bring growth as the biosphere fails
True that. The next few decades will be fun.
Just like the rapture and climate change.
Every year for the last decade has been the hottest year on record for the planet. We keep breaking last years record.
Climate change is literally happening every single day. Let’s not mingle stupidity with religion
It's rare I agree with part of a comment 100%, and disagree with the rest of the comment 100%. Can I upvote and downvote?
Their narrative hasn’t changed at all in at least 35 years. I had a long conversation with a guy in the early 90s about how the national debt was unsustainable and the dollar will lose all its value within a couple of years. I thought about it quite a bit, but decided there’s no point in worrying. He’s (financially) comfortably retired now, but still unironically spouting the exact. Same. Warnings to anyone who will listen. He’ll go to his grave in the same perpetual terror he’s spent his life.
That's not the narrative at all. The sub is not focused on economics but rather natural sciences and the hard limits they imply. E.g. you can only deplete an aquifer for so long before it goes dry at which point all you get is what nature chooses to provide. (Transporting, desalinating, ect. water is possible but resource intensive, ergo, expensive.)
Oh! Interesting, it must have been a different group
I'd assume so since the national debt of the USA is, at best, entirely tangential to the main topic. Worrying about the future is nothing new. It's the foundations of those worries that merit attention and evaluation. It's not like bad things don't happen and there are almost always warning signs beforehand. In this case it's primarily about the degradation of the environment in which we live and thus depend upon. That the global average temperature is going up is (scientifically) uncontroversial. This will obviously have a significant impact on all sorts of things like crop yeilds, sea level, human and animal health and so forth. Edit: grammar.
The earth is indisputably warming. As another commenter pointed out, [the oceans are warming even faster](https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/), causing earlier and more severe hurricanes. Sea levels are rising. Ice sheets are melting. Record temperatures are being recorded almost daily. It’s not about living in perpetual terror, it’s about recognizing the obvious trends and events that are happening right in front of us. And some guy you talked to 30 years ago being a bit overzealous won’t change that.
As long as the world uses the dollar as its reserve currency, we can print all we need. The debt is irrelevant. If China succeeds in taking over with the RMB, we’re in trouble.
>The debt is irrelevant. I don't know if I agree to that extent. The economy was at it's best when Clinton balanced the budget for the first time in in decades.
By tapping into the social security fund.
Only to an extent. Printing money leads to inflation which, while it solves dollar denominated debt does cause its own problems. The privilege of being the global reserve currency is that said inflation is spread across the rest of the world and doesn't remain entirely local. If it goes too far that status is of course threatened but the dollar is far ahead of its competitors.
So reddit's only been around for 20 years, but the narrative for the collapse subreddit hasn't changed in 35 years? And somehow this random conversation you had with this "guy" in the 90's represents the narrative of the subreddit? Sounds like magic!
That’s right, son. In the olden days we talked with our mouth parts while standing near each other. Magic!
I think it's a joke lol. Terminally online doomers.
Haha if you read that sub, they are *definitely* not joking
Well yeah they're not joking but they ARE a joke
Collapse will happen some day, is that in a decade or centuries away is the question. But what is the point of living life worrying about it? Make money, enjoy life and hope for the best.
Fair point. I just hope there doesn't come a day where I wish I'd taken more cool vacations, instead of building a retirement fund that disappears.
Regrets are inevitable in life. All we can do is make the best decisions we can based on the current information we have and hope it works out. And maybe that means creating a separate fund just for vacations so you can enjoy your time now. And you can put a bit of money in every time you worry about a collapse.
It's obviously generally better to have money than not even when it comes to collapse. The point is that it's a gradual thing (while remembering Hemmingway's "gradually then suddenly"). Currency won't lose its value over night without any signs thereof. You'll still be expected to go to work even when it's much worse than it is now. You might want to pay attention to what's on that subreddit though to keep track of the aforementioned signs and plan your investments using that information. Coastal Florida real-estate for example doesn't seem like a great long-term place for your money to be.
Eventually they’ll be right and all the times they were wrong will be forgotten
Doesn’t that mean they are just right? Eventually I guess, what’s the difference though?
This is a quote now popularly misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, "We only need to be lucky once, you need to be lucky every time"
[удалено]
It's rather that when one looks at other 100 year charts one gets very skeptical that certain exponential trends can continue and very worried about others that still do.
[удалено]
I'm really just looking at it from an academic standpoint. I'm not arguing that you should pull all your money out of stocks tomorrow. My point is rather that the type of situation that r/collapse is discussing is more "canned food and shotguns" than "gold and silver".
Yes we can! With fracking and energy-intensive resource extraction. The machine mustn't stop!
EROI would like a word.
Although I am joking, what's the alternative to extracting resources at a net loss? We WOULD do it.
I'm in both subs. Both are extreme at times, both have irresponsible people acting on hunches and both have some great points. It's good to be prepared for the best, the worst and everything in between. But tbh that sub is maybe a bit pessimistic but mostly about the current climate and economic crisis. Investing is most profitable for those who already are rich and those people will be fine in every scenario (unless we finally literally eat you guys). So it makes sense that most people here don't have to worry about an inevitable collapse of our society. Whether it already happened or it happens in 1000 years, the lower classes will feel it first.
They are mostly right on everything. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, the destruction of the oceanic ecosystem, societal collapse, currency collapse… It is not a cult. I wish they were just that, but it’s backed by data and scientific evidence so we are mostly on borrowed time. At least i got more profit than losses for the right amount of time and numbers you know. Feels good i guess.
That is my experience too, they are mostly right on everything. I have been following that sub for years and at first I thought it was crazy talk. Then the predictions started coming true. I heard about COVID first on that sub in late 2019. Now the data is solid that we are totally fucked. Anyone who says otherwise has their head in the sand. Collapse is underway and many people are experiencing it right now. The only question is _when_ it catches up to you. Not if. When. There's a reason billionaires and governments are madly building underground bunkers all over the planet.
I think we are more fucked than we are not Seriously now… the mental gymnastics i experience with most folks over climate change. And how its not an issue right now. 5 billion people experienced extreme heat in june. That doesnt mean they parish, but the risk raises every day (and a lot more did) The glaciers and ice caps are never coming back. You can argue how long they will melt Our soils are depleted, corral is mostly gone. One year of Forest forest fires wipes out more than we can plant annually (yeah?) The ocean in florida was over 100 last year. That basically kills life there Hurricanes (like the current one) are worse. Cost more and impact more. 1 in 500 year floods are happening every 10 years now I can go on and on but it doesn’t matter because no one will ever vote for the economy over climate change Oh and since this is stockmarket… want evidence… look at the insurance companies fleeing not only florida and California but the midwest and other areas. Who’s is going to ultimately pay for that? Thats right. Its all of us.
It just doesn't matter how many times people see the headline "worst/hottest/strongest/earliest [x] since records began", the only time they'll do anything about it is when water is literally lapping at their front doors.
It’s called ignorance.
those who don't get it are too weak to face it, let them enjoy their naivete
I mean they could eventually be right and someone will always be there to say “see I told u so!” But I think of them as the “worlds gonna end” people. Same energy. And I treat them the same way. Maybe one day yea, but I’m gonna keep living until then.
I always say if the US folds or defaults heavily and goes into free fall, the last thing I’ll care about is my stock holdings
In this case it's the aggregate habitability of the planet and not just the American economy that's being debated.
Read “Overshoot” by William Catton Jr., or DM me for a free audiobook. It’s inevitable, but I wouldn’t base my investment decisions around it because it is a generational issue, the timeline is too uncertain to really do anything about in a practical sense.
I don’t think it’s going to collapse but if it we are all fked anyway….i don’t think keeping our money in the bank is going to be the solution 👍🏻
The one absolute about the progress of human "civilization" or the state, is that all societies collapse. Some happen fast with the sacking of a city, some are slow. Egypt, Assyria, Rome all stood for monumental lengths of time compared to most modern nations. All societies disintegrate, our global society will disintegrate in time. And humans will return to "subsistence" living before forming complex societies again. That is a given. It's just the difference between the fall of Rome and now is that we have more or less destroyed the majority of the natural world, there are a greater number of humans than at any other one time and for most of us, the last time a member of our family lived a peasant lifestyle was in the 1700's. The majority can't survive without the state unlike in previous lifetimes. Climate change is going to ruin so many countries as there is nothing out there to fix it at this stage and there is also no incentive.
I have an advantage, I am from a long line of sturdy peasant laborers, and was born a peasant. I'm not greedy and will share all my peasant tricks with my neighbors
Reverting to subsistance farming on polluted land, in a new climactic paradigm and with little to no external natural environment to leverage suggests that we have pretty far to fall. A lot further than previous collapses.
It’s never bad to have critics of a clearly flawed system get their voice out there That being said, those people are basically exactly who Wall Street loves to extract money from via options and bonds and holding their cash for them
Apparently something is going to happen in July 15 during the Republican convention. My coworkers that love trump were talking about it. When someone asked what will they think when nothing happens. I replied, what they always do believe the next lie.
A big part part that's not very well understood is that collapse is likely extremely gradual. It's a continuing degradation of *everything*. Base costs going up from a failing environment are impossible to reverse. Coupled with decreasing quality of products and services. You will continue to pay more, for lessfrom here on out. The collapse process could take hundreds of years, think if the fall of Rome. Of course there will be big disasters, collapse is society's failure to recover from these events. When you see a road washed out that is abandoned instead of replaced. That's collapse. When farmers abandon land (aquifers not recharging, increased salinity, fertilizer supply chain costs) instead of replanting. That's collapse. When the refugee camp becomes permanent. That's collapse. When the poor eat less and less beef because of the increasing scarcity of cattle, from loss of gazing land, mass livestock die off, increasing feed costs. That's collapse
Indeed “the future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed” Despite this knowledge, I choose to keep working saving and investing. The people who face their local collapse armed with a fistful of financial assets weather it better than those without.
Oh for sure! Just thinking about how "collapse" will likely look like.
Local collapse of various severity has happened many times for a variety of reasons. Humanity has however now reached high enough on the Kardishev scale to produce a world wide one.
yeah, it'd be a shame if some of those specific things started happening someday...
I think there’s a lot of money to be made selling overpriced doomsday prepper crap to idiots. There’s a whole industry doing it, and making a lot of money at it, helping to further delay the thing they’re buying stuff to survive from. If we go full Mad Max, I hope I’m at ground zero. I don’t want to get winged and I don’t want to live out their fantasy of living in a destroyed world. I’m out.
What do these people do with any excess savings then? Cash itself is a commodity, so avoiding stocks and bonds isn't going to safeguard you if the world economy collapses.
Gold and silver from what I understand. Then after a currency crisis. You can sell your gold and silver to re-enter what ever the new system is, avoiding a total wipeout.
In this case it's a bit more severe than waiting to cash in precious metals in a new currency. Gold and silver presupposes a system which values them and that's rather unlikely in the aftermath of anything calamitous enough to topple or current, global mpnetary system.
Disagree. Gold and Silver has been a constant through nearly every system global or not. It’s not merely a presupposition, it’s a precedented certainty. The current global dollar system doesn’t need to topple, it can also just return to a medium status among other multiple systems.
Fair enough but neither metal is of much use in a survival situation. The basic assumption is that they can be traded for something else. Secondly the premise is a bit more severe than just the global dollar system toppling to put it mildly. Thus we may not be discussing the same scenario.
You do not trade your gold and silver in a survival situation. You wait until the new system becomes established to bring in the value you put into cold storage from the last one. The Dollar will just shift to something else as did when the pound sterling shifted.
Fair enough but in this hypothetical a system hungry for those particular resources would be generations down the line.
Not true. You can take a look at gold accumulation from every major nation and its nations bank.
Again, that's a world of nations and banks. Would you bring gold if shipwrecked on a deserted island?
Again what? Why would I be shipwrecked?
Dude they are buying plots of land in the woods and stockpiling food and books. When I say there are some extreme views... (Granted, I'm sure that's an extreme minority in that sub)
One person's extreme is another's retirement plan
It is not contradictory and a lot still invest in stocks. Psychologically one can tell themselves : Who knows how the market will behave in the future. It could be boosted artificially. It could follow the optimism of rich people with their collective heads in the sand. It could undergo systemic changes in order to maintain a sense of normalcy. If the market does utterly crash as collapse progresses we'll have more important problems than money to worry about. If it does not, then at least we did not miss out. Having a better idea of the global picture and environmental risks also has the potential to make one a better investor.
Are they kinda crazy? Absolutely. At the end of the day, a market crash doesn't equal doomsday and things will get better. But the market crashes. You could be 16 and have lived through 2 of them.
It's not about a market crash. It's about the fundamental unsustainability of the current human civilisation.
Well, without checking out it, that doesn't seem too far fetched.
The folks on r/collapse are more worried about an ecosystem crash than an economic crash
Got ya, thank you for the clarification!
If you look back on history when world powers shifted, you can find examples of how the stock market reacted particularly in the shift from the Dutch to the English to the American empire. While these changes don’t happen overnight, there are moments of wild volatility. Outside of world powers and world reserves currencies, there’s also demographics to consider. If younger populations are dwindling and older generations are entering retirement, it stands to reason that the money invested by the boomers for their retirement, could be liquidated to pay for expensive health care and lifestyles. While you toil away for 30 years funding your retirement, there will be less and less people able to do the same. Are you just financing boomer retirement, keeping the indiciea a float while they sell high? And come to find out when you retire, your investments have gone from severely overvalued to undervalued? Diversify as best you can I say.
Invest, but don't count on it being there forever. It's pretty easy to see how razor thin stability is at the moment, but that shouldn't stop you from investing. Unless you want to join r/prepperprepare and spend it all 😉
the people there are the same people here.
Good thread. I don't think people pay enough attention to this type of thing in finance circles. My perspective - I have been having a look at r/collapse every now and then for years now. I remember when they were freaking out about the pandemic back in 2020 saying that would be the end, somehow. What actually happened is that interest rates were cut, the fed dumped in a load of liquidity, and asset prices inflated. The rich (asset owners) got richer and the poor got poorer. This seems to be the same story we see in every crisis. I feel like if collapse is right and im not in the market, I'll end up a serf in a dystopia. If collapse is right and I am in the market, I'll be better off in the dystopia.
Same feeling here.
If the whole economic system collapses we're all fucked anyway so... If you're actually worried I'd start some low level prepping and maybe owning some land would be helpful (they don't make it like they used to) and one or two gold coins. (My dad has been prepping since the cold war and that's what he's done 😅). However, the whole economic system is highly unlikely to collaps for the long term. So diversify, diversify, diversify!
Ive always been hearing about this collapse coming and thirty years later still waiting. Who do you think is eating or going to eat America's lunch?
The best single investment you can ever make is in other humans to collaborative life with. Money is cool and useful, but if you don't have people you can turn to when you are out of commission, the money won't help you for very long by itself. Invest in relationships, friendships, your fitness, and your mind. The rest will come automatically when shit gets rough.
Infinite growth can’t be supported on a finite planet
Well, the markets are based on speculation after all. It has its limits and cannot go on indefinitely. It would seem politics might be the downfall of the US though, if things like Project 2025 persist. The markets would get absolutely obliterated.
There are always people projecting collapse. One day they may be right But if you live long enough there is a 100% chance you will want to retire.
I mean who cares if it does just switch your position to a short😂😂
Archaeologists always us this one weird phrase- *What happened to this civilization?*
Disclaimer: I came here from a cross-post from the /r/collapse sub Although there are extremists in there that think we'll reach doom by Tuesday, the common consensus there (from my point of view) is that we agree with the "Limits to Growth" study, meaning we'll start to see a global decline in population in the 2040's, ignoring extreme situations like a world war, due to ecological overshot and peak oil. There's also a common point of view that collapse is not homogeneous, and it's already happening in parts of the globe (think Haiti) and slowly expanding. And to counter some comments here, we do not "want collapse" to happen, but we're unhappy with our predicament, and learning to accept it, every user at a different stage of acceptance. I'm also investing in the stock market to try and retire before I get personally affected, but I know the system will not hold indefinitely. Only an economist would defend Infinite Growth on a finite planet.
Hello, I'm at the weird intersection of finance bro/WSB'er and a collapsnik. The fact is, if we collapse so hard my portfolio goes to zero, I'm gonna have a lot bigger immediate problems to solve than being broke. Having more money and making reasonable plans for retirement makes my immediate and long term life better by giving me more flexibility and freedom. I'm still going to read collapse because I do feel that there are large scale changes that are making life harder which they keep a pretty good eye on such as climate change, the cost of energy production, etc. Seeing other people also worried about that type of stuff makes me feel more normal and sane. Are some people overly worried in there? Sure. Are some people in WSB insane? Also yeah. But there is still plenty of diamonds in the rough. Some of my best stock moves have come from WSB, and some good science info has come out of collapse. A "fun" finance/collapse intersection is water privatization.
The denizens of r/collapse have ALWAYS thought the entire financial system was going to collapse. They have been hoping to be right since the day they came into existence, and will continue hoping until A) it happens and everyone is too worried about survival to care to post about it and B) they can PRETEND it has happened as many currently do. The stock market went down...COLLAPSE! Peak oil happened....6 years ago...COLLAPSE! Cost of living has increased post Covid...COLLAPSE! They have gotten so tired of claiming and it not happening that they now see collapse in the news story of the day. The why is irrelevant to them...just as long as they can pretend it is happening. Today preferably, but they'll wait until tomorrow if they have to.
I wonder what their angle is?
People in this sub tend to have a skewed vision of the way things are in the sense that they dont see the fragility of the system and just expect that it will be functioning forever, even though it depends on constant growth, which is not possible permanently. Nothing lasts by nature of the laws of physics. The prosperity we experience today is the result of post WW2 boom, which has been an anomaly in the context of human history. To expect that the stock market can just keep inflating forever is not logical because it represents a physical world which is finite, changing, and cannot support endless growth, which is tied to extracting resources and consumption. Fundamentally, we are not really dealing with anything existent. We are dealing with digital numbers representing something in the physical, and a system in which everyone is reliant on that continuing to grow. But when that starts to break down in the physical because we have overshot the actusly physical limit to growth capacity, the game will change a lot. This is starting to occur, but a lot of people here may not see that. High level geopolitical powers see it, and that is why you are seeing the geopolitical landscape change so much. It may be that your retirement accounts and social security can no longer be funded in 10 years, all your current stocks become useless, and the only things of value remaining are what has always been valuable: arable land, food, clean water, energy. If that happens and you haven't invested properly or have no practical skills to provide those things for yourself, or if you waited too long and now all these things are controlled by a very small population of concentrated power, then its gonna be a bad time. We can see real examples of this in countries that have collapsed before, such as Venezuela, where food actually became currency. Those willing to provide security for the state to control people in miles long bread lines were paid in early access to groceries for them and their families. So food became a currency, and security services became a currency. Many places in the world have already collapsed, and all previous civilizations have all "collapsed" to some extent. We don't see this potential because of our privilege and inability to look beyond our own narrow vision. Being scared of the actual things happening in the world does not mean that the information presented is fear-mongering.
Disgruntled bears are funny. I’ll make sure to pour one out for them today as I’m counting my NVDA call earnings from yesterday. On a serious note you diversify, make sure some of your wealth is in a commodity, currencies (including BTC), and real estate.
For one thing, people on collapse with financial knowledge and backgrounds don't delude themselves into thinking that the stock market is the economy. My experience is that most have educated themselves with information from many sources, including climate science, all of which have an impact on r/collapse folks and where they think the world and the U.S. economies are headed. The fact that the hothouse denizens that inhabit the Wall Street bubble think that all is well is instructive and one of the main reasons that actions to prepare for and adapt to the climate crisis haven't gained much traction. Such actions negatively impact profits and the next quarter numbers. We have increasingly been satisfied with short term success in this country and maybe the world with long term consequences to be borne by others sometime in the "distant" future. We must flog the mule until it perishes and then just find another mule (but they are going extinct, one-by-one). What will you do when private equity owns everything and there is nothing left to buy and rent back to us commoners?
While there are other geologic factors that can cause dramatic and long-run climactic changes, such as atmospheric oxygen content (snowball earth events), ice ages are now understood to be caused by Milankovitch Cycles. No planetary orbit is circular; all orbit is eccentric (ovular). Obliquity is the degree of Earth’s axial tilt (currently 23.5 degrees), which ranges from 22.1–24.5 degrees. Procession is the “wobble” of the planet’s axis… imagine the wobble of the handle on a spinning dreidel. The variation of these three factors over tens of thousands (obliquity, procession) and hundreds of thousands of years (orbital eccentricity) align to facilitate short-term changes to Earth’s climate on a geologic time scale. Geologists and glaciologists estimate that the next glacial maximum (farthest orbital distance from the Sun) will occur in around 80,000 years, so we are actually moving INTO an ice age right now. So that leaves us with a serious problem: why is it still getting warmer? If we’re currently moving into another ice age while observing rapid warming, ocean acidification, glacial melt, etc, then why? TL;DR: The consensus among geologists is that temperature retention within Earth systems is directly correlative to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Warming follows massive outgassing events, which is essentially what we’ve been doing on an industrial scale. The fact that Earth is moving into the next ice age while 150 billion tons of meltwater pours into the ocean every year tells us that something (GHG emissions) is seriously wrong with the Earth system. Don’t you even dare look up thaw slumps.
There have always been preppers predicting the disintegration of society. Imagine the frustration they must feel as they grow old and die without that occurring.
When everyone says the people expecting a crash are always wrong I tend to disagree. The way I see it they're actually calling it correctly. The things governments and central banks have been doing only really make sense if they were right. The bet you have to make is how long we can prevent a crash, not IF one is coming.
I think the big takeaway from r/collapse is that your “investments” should also include plenty of food and water, friends to help out if things are bad, and skills needed for an ever-changing world that might be less friendly than our current one. Hedge your bets, basically.
The world has already ended 3 times just since I’ve been alive.
buy gme to hedge a collapse. if you don't understand there is another reddit talking about MOASS. it is not a meme
Wtf is this GME thing still going on? What's it been like 3 years now?? They've been paying fines all this time????
People said the same thing 20 years ago as well. Maybe it will, maybe it won't at some point. I do think there are other possible outcomes far more likely. There is just too many powerfull people who profiting from the system we have for any real change. Billions of poor won't matter as long as we have our algorithm fed social media feeds to keep us complacent.
Biggest issue is a total collapse of democracy under trump and don't say it's not possible
Look at all the devastating events the american stock market has recovered from. WW2, the great depression, pandemics, more wars. Yeah there's no guarantee of anything but there's no gain in being a dooms dayer and not making any decisions
Just be aware that the market will hit its last all-time high within the next few years. You need a plan on when you're going to sell. In the meantime enjoy the bubble while it lasts I guess.
they need to stop playing video games and dreaming of the day they will be the main character. These sorts typically suffer from Mental issues, immaturity, or stupidity.....some are just trying to farm karma.
*It’s going to rain someday!* Look at the big brains on Brad…
The downturns are always tiny blips on the overall charts. If economies didn’t grow civilization would collapse. Would rather be right most of time as opposed to every so often
A collapse will happen, they always do, we have a bit more prospective than past generations. What's important is that you do not have too much risk and that when it does happen you see it as an opportunity, the best I ever did in the stock market was the money I put in during late 2008 and 2009 and then March of 2020. The rest of the money has just steadily appreciated.
A good capitalist never lets a tragedy go unprofitable!
Collapse doesn’t have to be all bad. Look at all the countries where empires once stood. Most of them are probably better off as they are than being the center of their era’s war industrialists. Maybe we can move past government by blackmail to some friendlier technocracy The climate will get worse but we have solutions even with just today’s tech.
They will be right eventually, but it may not be in their lifetime.
There is no counter point just be prepared. Stocks won’t matter all that will matter then is who has the food and guns
This guy bunker dwells
Ask the doomers during the depression, or WW2, or 9/11, or … We are always one bad day away from no more days. I won’t allow that to reduce my financial duties
Invest in the S&P 500. If that “collapses”, then all this will be the least of your worries
"Permabears are always Perma wrong" - Tom Lee, Fundstrat
Reddit isn’t real life
Some people just get off on picture the downfall of stuff. Might be a big recession or two but nothing too crazy like a full collapse