This morning I woke up to scenes of interminable lines snaking through the country’s largest airports while ICE agents loitered in the corners, scrolling on their phones. An AI video in the style of the Lego movie, made by Iran, threatened to bomb oil production infrastructure across the Middle East while Trump gripped a crying little girl and snarled at his phone. And news that $1Billion of US taxpayer money will be used to pay a French developer to NOT build energy-generating wind farms off the East Coast, and instead develop liquefied natural gas infrastructure in red states. I sat staring for a moment. Then I opened my laptop.

I need to pay my taxes, renew my apartment lease, and make plans to visit my parents. But I am unsure how much gas will be, whether borders will be shut down, whether the government will threaten violence when I go to vote, or if there will be another economic collapse forcing me to stockpile beans to survive on.  The mundane and the catastrophic have collapsed into the same to-do list.

I have completely lost my ability to plan for my future. Some days, I want to sell all my possessions and live abroad. Other days, I want to stay and fight, buy a farmhouse, live off the land, and outlast the bastards. And sometimes, I am just frozen trying to understand how a third of my country would kill another third while the last third watched. 

I have always been a planner, an overthinker. In job interviews I describe my thoroughness as both an asset and a weakness. I produce excellent work, but I can sometimes get stuck spiraling around ideas, searching for the best solution. It has always been manageable. My thinking loops were tempered by a steady motivation to act and by a belief that what I produced mattered, and could help me achieve my goals in life.

Since the pandemic, that belief has come apart.

The compounding crises of recent years have crippled my ability to manage my anxiety. Everything now feels existential. I can no longer reason my way through things. I can't make sense of what's happening today, much less orient myself toward personal goals or a coherent future. I find myself frozen, unable to move forward or build anything at all. I can't imagine the future anymore. It feels like it has simply collapsed. And it's not just me.

Conversations with friends now open with half-joking references to collapse or apocalypse. Beneath the humor is something more serious. People are surviving the present moment, but they are no longer planning their lives. Online, I see expressions of existential grief that would seem disproportionate if they weren't simply describing current events.  One devastation rolls in right after the previous day’s destruction. In response, people seem to split into two camps: some turn away entirely, staying uninformed inside their personal bubble. Others try to stay informed and cope, cycling through strategies that range from semi - constructive to completely self-destructive.

We are living through an inflection point where the systems that allow us to make sense of reality and orient ourselves toward the future are beginning to destabilize. People with power are manipulating technology and civic institutions in ways that feel increasingly adversarial to the public. The result is not just political or social instability, but psychological disorientation at scale.

Constant attacks on women’s sovereignty, rampant lawlessness, obvious corruption, needless destruction of life across the globe, open criminality, violence, and an endless barrage of amoral behavior, and never ending degrading language are collapsing our future and killing our society. Across domains, there is a pattern of behavior that signals a disregard for life, stability, and shared reality.

Taken together, this does not feel like random disorder. It feels coordinated, or at the very least, systemically enabled. It is shaping how we think, how we feel, and what we believe is possible. It is a kind of mass behavioral experiment unfolding in real time. A steady erosion of the conditions that allow people to imagine a future and act within it.

In this article, I’m going to explore what it means for a society to lose its sense of the future, how that collapse happens, and what it takes to reclaim agency when the path forward is no longer clear.

‍

The Loss of a Future You Can Act Toward

In my professional life, I am a marketing strategist in early stage startups. To be successful in that work, I first need to articulate a clear goal state for a company over a given period of time, assess the tools at hand, and build a plan that bridges the gap between where the organization is now and where it needs to go.

Early stage tech, compared to more mature organizations in other sectors, has a high degree of uncertainty and instability, so organizations have to be nimble and resilient. But no matter how well you plan, you cannot build infinite resilience. There is always a threshold where the shocks become too large, too fast, or too compounding, and the system destabilizes to a point where it can no longer adapt or recover. At that point, the shock leads to collapse.

Right now, our society is undergoing rapid and compounding shocks, and the systems we use to manage our lives are attempting to adapt, but many are approaching that threshold. There is simply too much instability and uncertainty to plan against in any coherent way.

Human beings plan their lives by imagining the future. This sounds almost too obvious to say out loud, but nearly every meaningful decision we make depends on it. We project ourselves forward in time and ask some version of the same question: what happens if I do this? That question only works if the future feels at least somewhat stable. 

Careers assume that effort today will translate into opportunity later. Education assumes that knowledge will retain value. Relationships assume continuity. Having children assumes a world worth bringing them into. Buying a house assumes a future you can inhabit. Starting a business assumes there will be customers, systems, and a society intact enough to support it. All of these decisions are built on a shared premise that the future exists and that we can move toward it.

We rarely think about this directly because, for most of modern life, it has been implicitly available. You didn’t need absolute certainty, you just needed enough belief in the future to act. But when that belief in a coherent future starts to break down, something more fundamental than anxiety sets in. Action itself becomes difficult.

In ​Man’s Search for Meaning​, Viktor Frankl observed that even in the most extreme conditions imaginable, people did not survive on strength alone. They survived on orientation toward the future. Prisoners in concentration camps who believed there was something waiting for them, someone to return to, or a task to complete were more likely to endure. Those who lost that sense of future-directed meaning deteriorated quickly, both psychologically and physically. Hope, in this context, gave them structure. It allowed them to locate themselves in time and move toward something beyond the present moment. Without that orientation, their internal management and planning system collapses. Everything starts to feel meaningless.

A similar pattern shows up in Martin Seligman’s research on ​learned helplessness​. Seligman demonstrated that when people perceive outcomes as uncontrollable, they eventually stop trying to influence them. Even when conditions change and control becomes possible again, the behavior does not immediately return because the expectation of powerlessness lingers. It is not actual lack of control that creates paralysis, but the perception of it. When people believe their actions don’t meaningfully shape the future, motivation shuts down and effort stops making sense.

What all of this points to is a simple but underappreciated fact: human motivation is not just about desire or discipline, it is about temporal orientation. We act because we believe our actions connect to something ahead of us. When it feels like nothing we do will matter, or when the future itself feels uncontrollable or chaotic, our brains cannot generate a plan we believe in strongly enough to act on. Our behavior begins to change, and with enough destabilization, we eventually freeze.

When the future feels unstable, incoherent, or doomed, the brain adapts by narrowing its scope. Planning gives way to short-term thinking. Long-term goals feel abstract or irrelevant, and attention contracts. Energy is redirected toward immediate safety, immediate relief, and immediate survival. 

You see this in the way people delay major life decisions, stop investing in long-term goals, or hesitate to commit, build, and expand. You also see it in subtler patterns, in the way people scroll instead of act, consume instead of create, and wait instead of move. From the outside, this can look like laziness or lack of discipline, but from the inside it feels like being cut off from the future entirely. I describe it as “existing in a void space.”

This is the condition many people are moving into. It is not a dramatic or visible collapse, but a slow and almost imperceptible loss of the ability to imagine a stable future and act toward it. Once that ability begins to erode, everything built on top of it begins to erode with it.

You may not realize it, but you have seen it yourself many times. What is the point of working a full-time job if it does not pay your bills? What is the point of sacrificing time and energy if you will never have enough to buy a house? What is the point of a college degree if AI is going to take your job? Why would I want to have children if the climate crisis is going to upend our civilization? Why follow the rules when the powerful can break them without consequence? 

At a certain point, these questions stop being philosophical and start shaping behavior. When enough people reach that point, the future does not just feel uncertain, it stops functioning as something we can act toward at all.

‍

‍

The Engineering of Collapse

The crises our global society is facing are real. There is no question about that. At the same time, we are living in a moment where political and business leadership are actively using technology to exacerbate the perception of threat for personal gain. They have built information systems that are now ubiquitous, optimized to surface the most divisive and emotionally activating content engineered to keep us hooked and scrolling.

The attention economy and surveillance capitalism are reshaping how we perceive reality, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few, and in the process destabilizing the broader social fabric. They are a powerful accelerant and a primary mechanism enabling the attempted fascist takeover of the United States.

Algorithms amplify outrage, fear, and conflict because those emotions hold attention longer. The result is continuous, ambient exposure to crisis framing around real events: the climate catastrophe, authoritarian politics, economic collapse narratives, AI-driven job displacement, and a relentless stream of violent and disturbing imagery from wars. This is not occasional exposure. It is continuous, ambient, and inescapable. The effect on our psyche is gradual but profound.

Our sense of the future begins to erode. We freeze or disengage entirely. We live in a heightened state of anxiety that narrows our attention and limits our ability to think clearly or act with intention. Over time, it makes us unable to resist the people and forces weaponizing this technology against us. 

“Flood the Zone” is not only a strategy of information overload. It is a strategy that overwhelms cognitive capacity, fragments attention, and creates a persistent sense of instability. It is a strategy meant to paralyze the opposition and clear the way for authoritarian takeover of our public spaces. Humans evolved to detect danger in specific, time-bound contexts. The modern internet overloads that system. For most of human history, threat appeared occasionally and required a response. Now it arrives constantly, every few minutes, in the form of a notification. 

In ​Amusing Ourselves to Death​, Neil Postman warned that entertainment-driven media systems transform serious issues into emotional spectacle. Complex realities are flattened into emotionally charged fragments designed to capture attention rather than support understanding. The result goes beyond distraction. It reshapes perception. It starts to distort how reality is perceived. The spectacle replaces thoughtful discourse.

If you are wondering why the federal government produces ridiculous AI slop videos of real wars with video game aesthetics, or why there needs to be a UFC fight on White House grounds for the 4th of July, this is your answer. It is not stupidity or incompetence. It is a strategy to overwhelm you, disgust you, train you to believe that your actions can’t meaningfully change anything, and finally to force you to disengage. 

Once you begin to see the mechanism at work, it becomes harder for it to operate invisibly. The systems shaping perception are powerful, but they are not total. You have more power than they would like you to believe. You still have agency, and the future is not fixed. It is still being shaped, in part, by what people choose to pay attention to, engage with, and build. Understanding this is the first crack in the spell.

‍

Reclaiming the Future

I had a conversation with a friend recently that has been sitting with me. We were talking about the future, or whatever you want to call this increasingly unstable projection of reality that we’re all trying to orient ourselves toward.  We landed on a simple idea. Almost obvious. But strangely clarifying.

There are, at any given moment, at least two possible outcomes unfolding in parallel. One where things deteriorate, where the worst projections materialize and the systems we rely on break down in ways we can’t recover from. And another where, despite everything, something holds, and there is still enough coherence left to build a good life, to create meaning, to move forward in some direction that resembles progress.

The problem is, we don’t know which one we’re living in. We don’t get to know in advance how the future will unfold. So the real question becomes: how do you behave inside that uncertainty? How do you make the best decisions for yourself now, not knowing what will happen tomorrow?

There's an old philosophical idea that touches something similar, ​Pascal's Wager​. Blaise Pascal argued that when the stakes are asymmetrical and the outcome is uncertain, the rational move isn't to wait for certainty, it's to act in the way that preserves the best possible outcome for you. He was making an argument for belief in God, but generalized, it's a framework for behaving wisely when you don't know what's coming.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a similar argument in his book, ​Antifragile​. In any decision containing high uncertainty, position yourself so your downside is limited but your upside remains open. You don't need to predict the future. What matters is not closing off your possibilities and choices while you still have a chance to keep them open.

This is not hopium. It's strategy under uncertainty.

Think about what the asymmetry actually looks like here. If we experience the full Nazification of the United States, or enter World War III, or trigger a deep economic depression, or suffer mass climate devastation, our lives as we know them will pretty much end. Our plans are destroyed anyway. Anything we had planned won’t matter. But if those worst outcomes somehow don’t happen, we will have to carry on into the future.  We will still have to have a life.

On the other hand, the downside of believing for example, that the matriarchy is rising, or that you could build your own business, or in my case write an esoteric newsletter that people would actually be interested in and want to read, is pretty small. Perhaps disaster will occur and planning wouldn’t have mattered anyway, but if disaster doesn’t occur, you’ll have been doing meaningful things and moving toward something worth having. The planning itself keeps you intact for the fight.

What this means is that planning for your personal best outcome, what you desire most, and what will bring you a life worth living is your best path to achieving those things no matter what actually unfolds. If the worst happens, your plans are destroyed anyway. But if we avoid the worst, your plans remain intact. And in the meantime, acting toward a vision you believe in is itself a form of resistance.

If you assume the worst outcome is inevitable, your behavior starts to collapse in on itself. Your anxiety spikes. You doomscroll. You stop investing in anything that requires time or effort. You begin to withdraw from your own life before anything has actually happened.. You are obeying in advance. You are letting the bastards win before the fight takes place.

If the worst does happen, then that restraint didn’t protect you. It didn’t change the outcome. It only shaped how you lived in the time leading up to it. But if it doesn’t happen, if there is still a future available to you, and you have already decided that there isn’t, then you’ve done something far more consequential. You’ve removed yourself from a future that you might have been able to participate in. You’ve closed off your own options and taken yourself out of the game.

Frankl showed that survival in the most extreme conditions depended on maintaining some orientation toward the future. Not because that future was guaranteed, but because losing it internally led to collapse before anything external did.

What I’m starting to understand is that fighting fascism or technofeudalism isn’t optimism.  It’s not about pretending things are fine or looking away from what’s happening. It’s refusing to accept their version of reality, and refusing to accept your own powerlessness in advance. Don’t collapse your own agency. If you’re going to go down, go down fighting for the most beautiful life you could have imagined, for yourself and for all of us. 

‍

The Counterspell

The future may be unstable, chaotic, and nothing like we expected. But it is not determined. Today, you are here. You are a powerful creator. You are stronger than you think. You are capable of more than you think and you can do something now to help bring us forward to a better shared future than the dystopian mass casualty event they are threatening us all with. 

The counterspell to the frozen hopelessness is to articulate your vision for your life and your community and believe in it enough to work toward realizing it.  To plan as if your plans matter. Because they do, until they don't, and you won't know which it is until after the fact. 

Go full delulu and live in such a way that brings your best possible outcome closer to reality every day, even if it is fantastical or unfathomable. 

Do you have a clear vision for your future life? Do you know what you want? Most people haven't taken the time to go deep and clarify that, even for themselves. 

If you need more clarity, you can achieve it by journaling, creating a vision board, writing a vision document, or writing affirmations. Imagining in as much specificity as possible what you want to happen in your life is a spiritual shield to the passive absorption of negative narratives being aimed at you. 

Imagining, in as much specificity as possible, what you want to happen in your life is an act of resistance. It keeps your future alive inside you even when the external world is doing everything it can to collapse it.

Once you have clarity on what you want, work backward from where you want to be to where you are now. Identify the steps to get you from here to there. Name who you need to become to live the life that you want. As much as possible write these things down, center them in your life in visible areas. Make your goals unavoidable. 

When you feel the overwhelm, that sense of helplessness and hopelessness creeps back in, try to zoom out and notice what information triggered it. Be suspicious of content in your feed that encourages helplessness. Posts that proclaim, “we’re cooked” are pushing a narrative. Protect yourself as much as possible so you can focus your energy on your vision.

Reality is more elastic than we are taught to believe. It tends to give us what we move toward, what we invest in, what we insist is possible.  If we can collectively embrace our power in shaping what comes next, we become free to create what we actually want. Not the dark and limited dystopia we've been told to accept.

The future is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we are building — right now, today, with what we choose to pay attention to and what we choose to do with our time. You are here. You are a powerful creator. You are stronger than you think. Don't give up before the fight.

‍

‍

P.S. I realized in writing this article that I have a lot of structured resources I’ve created for me to use in constructing my own vision and goals for my life. I'm building out some free practical tools for you to get clarity on your vision and goals — a vision journaling course and a few other things. They're not ready yet, but they're coming. If you want to be the first to know when they are, send me an email and I'll make sure you hear about it.

‍