A Season of Collapse: How Societies Unravel and What Creators Can Do Next
We’re getting a real-time education in societal collapse. Here’s what the end of systems can look like and why imagination and creative practice are not luxuries but tools for designing what comes next. If you’re wondering how to respond as reality becomes dystopia, consider this a field guide for creators, readers, and communities.
I wrote a timeline of collapse for my post-apocalyptic sci-fi series. It starts in 2059 with three Category 5 hurricanes and the dissolution of the U.S. Constitution.
It continues with massive crop failures. Immersive tech. Wealth divides solidifying into chasms.
I wrote that timeline a few years ago, thinking this is what could happen if we're not careful.
Now it's 2026 and we have front row seats to what seems like the real thing.
Yet the dismantling of systems we thought were stable, the violence wrapped in language of protection, the suppression of anyone who resists is not new.
It's built on the same oppression that's underpinned many republics, from modern to ancient.
The pattern is simply repeating.
So here's the question I keep sitting with: What is this pattern telling us about where we are? And what are we—artists, storytellers, anyone who imagines futures—being asked to do?
How Systems Collapse: Common End-Stage Patterns
This is what I learned writing collapse into fiction and what I’m seeing echoed in real time.
1. Collapse accelerates at the end.
Systems built on control, fear, and rigid hierarchy don’t unwind gently. When they start to fail, they speed up. They centralize power. They tighten rules. They punish dissent. What looks like strength is often panic wearing a uniform.
Think of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Crackdowns intensified even as the system was hollowing out. Or apartheid South Africa, where state violence escalated right up until it could no longer be sustained. The grip tightened—and the fall came faster.
This is sometimes referred to as extinction burst theory.
2. Repression gets reframed as protection.
End-stage systems rarely say, We are afraid. They say, We are keeping you safe.
Certain bodies become “problems.” Rights become “excesses.” Hard-won protections are stripped away in the name of order, morality, or stability.
This isn’t confidence. It’s thrashing. It’s what happens when a system senses it’s losing legitimacy and tries to force compliance instead.
3. Breakdown and emergence overlap.
Collapse isn’t just destruction—it’s a threshold. Death and birth happen at the same time, even if it doesn’t feel poetic from the inside.
The fear is real. The harm is real. But so is the fact that something else is already forming in the cracks—new values, new alliances, new ways of organizing life that no longer depend on the old scaffolding.
“Collapse isn’t just destruction—it’s a threshold. Death and birth happen at the same time.”
Navigating the In-Between: Imagining New Systems Before They Exist
When I wrote my sci-fi series, I started the story with what emerged after the collapse. Society was fundamentally different. It wasn’t because of new leadership or better policies, but a completely new organizing principle.
In my fictional world, it's called the Principle of One—the idea that all living things are connected, and that connection has to be written into law, into how we structure our lives, into how we treat each other and the planet.
But that didn't happen automatically. It required people to imagine it first. To vision a different way. To refuse the old logic even as everything collapsed around them.
This is where we are now.
We can't think our way out of systems built on separation while we're still shaped by them. We have to imagine our way out.
That's the work.
And that's why artists and storytellers matter so much in this moment.
“Art is how we practice futures before they arrive.”
Why Creators Matter in Times of Unraveling
Art is how we practice futures before they arrive.
When you read a story about a world organized around connection instead of control, you're not just consuming entertainment. You're rehearsing possibility. You're learning to think in patterns the old world doesn't recognize.
Imagination is how we create reality. When we imagine new structures, speak them out loud, write them into stories, paint them, sing them—we make them available. We give them form.
If we stay in the fear and outrage, in the illusion of them versus us, there's no way out except to begin another cycle. The same patterns, the same violence, the same collapse—just with different people in power.
But if we can re-imagine how to be in harmony together? If we can hold that truth even when it feels wobbly, imperfect, dim?
That's how something new gets born.
Practical Responses for Creators and Communities
So here we are, preparing for what’s to come, but still in the midst of a scary, violent collapse of current systems. We can’t fix it all.
But we CAN:
Witness and document what's happening in our communities
Protect people being harmed—with resources, presence, sanctuary
Resist injustice through our actions, voices, and choices
Trust ourselves
Take the next step based on empathy and solidarity, not fear
Trust something new is trying to be born—and participate in bringing it forward
The work isn't to have all the answers. The work is to keep imagining. To keep creating. To keep holding the pattern of connection even when everything around us is screaming separation.
Here's what I found writing my series: The people who survive collapse weren’t the ones who gripped hardest to the old ways. They were the ones who leaned into the possibility of whole new models of existence.
And right now? We need people who can imagine.
Imagining Connected Futures
I'm not going to tell you everything will be fine. I don't know if it will.
We're in a season of collapse, and I feel the terror of that in my bones.
Yet I try to remind myself that what's dying is the illusion that we live in isolation from one another, and from the larger web of living things.
The old systems pretend that separation is reality. It’s not. What happens to people at the margins doesn't stay at the margins. What happens to "those people" establishes the precedent for what can happen to anyone. Every injustice we allow, every harm we look away from—it all shapes the world we live in.
And the powerful? They're part of this web, too. The ones perpetuating harm, gripping to control, disconnected from their own humanity—they're part of the same illusion. Their fear becomes everyone's cage. Their liberation is bound up with ours.
We're all connected in this life, whether we see it or not.
So my question for you is…
What are you imagining right now? What future are you rehearsing with your creativity, your words, your actions?
Will we be courageous enough to steer toward a new vision of living together, based in care, and rooted in the truth of our connection?
Art isn't decoration. Imagination isn't escape.
They're how we birth what comes next.
A few questions tend to surface whenever we talk about collapse. Here’s where I land, at least right now.
Questions About Collapse (And What I Think)
1. Will the United States survive as we know it?
The U.S. does not survive this time period unchanged. Democracies evolve, fracture, reform, or collapse depending on how power responds to pressure. The more important question isn’t whether the current structure survives intact, but what principles will define whatever comes next.
[Read the blog I wrote about this question here →]
2. How can artists respond to societal collapse?
Artists don’t stop collapse, but they do shape what follows.
• Document truth. Record what power wants to erase.
• Imagine alternatives that break from the old logic of domination.
• Build community through story, joy, and conversation.
3. What is the ‘Principle of One’ in the Game of Paradise series?
The Principle of One in my sci-fi series is the understanding that all life is interconnected, and that connection must be written into law, culture, and daily practice. It replaces systems built on hierarchy and extraction with systems built on relationship and stewardship.
[Learn more about my series here →]
Want more like this?
If you like exploring the intersection of storytelling and what it means to imagine futures in a moment of collapse, join my newsletter. I write about AI, creativity, and the questions we're holding as old systems fall away and new ones try to emerge.
Explore the Game of Paradise series where these questions come to life:
The One Game | The One Exiled | The One Reborn (coming 2026)
Read the full collapse timeline I created for my series here.