What We're Not Talking About
It doesn’t matter whether you lean left, right, or somewhere in between; what’s happening right now isn’t just political. The rising tension around immigration, the social division happening beyond the country you’re reading this from, I guess. It’s all part of something much bigger. We’ll keep pointing fingers while the ground beneath all of us erodes, unfortunately.
I read Blip by Chris Clugston, a sobering book that lays out a simple but devastating argument: industrial civilization as we know it is a 300-year anomaly, made possible entirely by our access to cheap, nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs) like fossil fuels, metals, and minerals. These resources built the modern world. As we know it, they're being depleted faster than they can be economically or technologically replaced.
I actually came across this book through a source shared in an off-grid startup I invested in two years ago. Back then during COVID times, I skimmed it. But reading it now, alongside the headlines, it lands differently. The diagrams/graphs in this book are the bloody truth, y’all. I’d argue this is the book that everyone must read.
As NNRs run dry or become too expensive to extract, economies slow. Jobs disappear. Prices rise. Nations get nervous. And in times of contraction, societies often react the way biology teaches us to: they defend. They restrict. They protect what they believe is theirs, often at the expense of others.
Whether you support immigration enforcement or not, the real question isn’t should we deport people. It’s easy to get emotional about these stories. Zoom out, and the patterns become clearer. As Clugston argues, we’re entering the final stages of a system built on a finite base. Scarcity always leads to protectionism, and when governments no longer have abundance to offer, they try to maintain stability by tightening control.
Scapegoating people is politically easier than confronting the terrifying truth: the lifestyle we’ve built over the past few centuries is fundamentally unsustainable. Honestly, even submitting this post probably made the world 0.0001% worse. Thanks, but no thanks, servers.
To be clear, this isn’t about party lines. I lean centrist and, in some ways, conservative, valuing stability and personal responsibility. But the real issue here is human systems. The failure of capitalism, as it currently operates, is undeniable. It takes nuance to avoid jumping to conclusions about someone else’s point of view, and we need more of that if we’re going to move forward. It’s not that borders don’t matter (Wow… they got a good purpose) but if we’re honest about what’s happening, we’ll stop pretending that policy tweaks can fix a collapsing foundation. The reality is that when the systems that once guaranteed your paycheck and purpose begin to fail, we’re looking at more than just inconvenience. We’ll stop arguing over trivial things like rising grocery bills (to those that did, again, I have a patio garden, loot my shit because at least it’s good for your health.) and start having the harder conversations about life on Earth, and how we adapt to the world as it changes.
To the video game/anime fans reading this, perhaps you get me. If not… here’s a summary of some of my favorites:
Final Fantasy VII, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Akira all explore, in different ways, the cost of unchecked progress, be it environmental exploitation, technological overreach, or societal collapse. These stories are more than just fiction…. yeah they’re diabolical warnings. They remind us that when we treat resources, systems, and even ourselves as expendable, we end up facing the inevitable consequences. The characters in these stories don’t just battle external enemies; they confront themselves—their failures, their creations, their inability to understand the larger system they are part of. Much like the world we live in now, they’re struggling to understand their role in the unraveling of a system they didn’t fully comprehend.
To add another significant parallel here: Carl Jung wrote about the collective unconscious, the layer of the psyche we all share, full of inherited patterns and archetypes that shape our deepest responses. Reading Blip through that lens, it becomes clear: much of what we’re witnessing right now isn't just political posturing or economic policy. It’s the shadow rising. The reactionary fear, the drawing of hard lines between “us” and “them,” the instinct to protect, to hoard, to control. A collective unconscious, shaped by centuries of industrial growth and unchecked resource extraction, is surfacing now in ways we’re not always prepared to understand. These patterns are old. We’ve seen them in history, in literature, in culture.
There’s not much more I can say here, except to be observational, pointing out things you might already know, yet they certainly aren't a waste of time. If anything, consider this an eerie reminder. I’ll leave you with the closing words of Chris Clugston’s epilogue.
The epilogue to Chris' book is quite terrifying. I read it again recently, and it’s suffocating, but necessary. It reminds us that each of us has a responsibility to understand our actions and behaviors in the context of the whole. Our personal choices aren’t isolated; they’re part of a global system under strain. Whether we like it or not, the consequences are already unfolding.