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| John Martin - The Great Day of His Wrath |
“This is
the beginning of the end.”
There is something genuinely comforting about that
sentence. It removes uncertainty. It gives the chaos a name and a direction. It
makes you feel like you understand what is happening — even if what you
understand is that everything is about to collapse.
I know not why we do this.
Perhaps it is easier to prepare for a definite catastrophe than to live with
ambiguity. Perhaps the end of the world simply makes for better conversation
than its stubborn continuation. The problem, of course, is that reality has
shown very little interest in cooperating with this tendency.
Big events do
change the world — let us not be naive about that. But rarely in the clean,
dramatic, everything-breaks-on-Tuesday manner that our minds prefer. More often,
systems bend, adapt, patch themselves up in unglamorous ways, and keep going.
Not unchanged — but not unrecognizable either.
If you are skeptical of my
skepticism, consider the evidence, some of which you may recall from school textbook and most you would have erased from your memory as something that never happened.
Hypothesis: Population
growth will cause mass starvation, with hundreds of millions dying and the
global food system collapsing.
Expected Date: 1970–1985
What actually happened: Population exploded. Food production grew faster.
The crisis… inverted.
Hypothesis: Acid rain will destroy
ecosystems — dead lakes, dying forests, irreversible environmental damage.
Expected Date: 1980s–1990s
What actually happened: Damage appeared. Then policy, technology, and regulation quietly reduced it.
Hypothesis: Ozone depletion
will make Earth uninhabitable — radiation spikes, ecosystem collapse Expected
Date: 1990s–2000s
What actually happened: Global
coordination. Montreal Protocol. Slow recovery.
Hypothesis: Computer systems will fail globally, collapsing infrastructure
Expected
Date: January 1, 2000
What actually happened: Nothing
dramatic. Which proves either panic… or preparation.
Hypothesis: Globalization will reverse — borders harden, trade shrinks,
nations retreat
Expected Date: 2002–2010
What actually
happened: Security increased. Trade didn’t stop.
Hypothesis: Oil decline will end growth — energy scarcity leading to economic stagnation.
Expected Date: ~2010
What actually happened: Technology
found more oil. Apocalypse postponed.
Hypothesis: The global system will fundamentally change — end of big banks,
reckless finance, possibly capitalism itself.
Expected Date: 2009–2012
What actually happened: For a moment, it felt broken. Then
intervention. Then bailouts. Then continuity.
Hypothesis: The euro will collapse, fragmenting Europe.
Expected Date: 2012–2015
What actually happened: It bent. It negotiated. It survived.
Hypothesis: China
will collapse under debt, triggering global recession.
Expected Date: 2014–2017
What actually happened: China slowed. Reality declined
to call it collapse.
Hypothesis: Cities will die — urban life ends, offices disappear.
Expected
Date: 2020–2022
What actually happened: Cities paused.
Then resumed.
Hypothesis: Banking crisis will spread into system-wide collapse.
Expected
Date: 2023
What actually happened: A few tense days. Then
intervention. Then stability.
So why does this pattern repeat?
We are
storytelling creatures. “This is the beginning of the end” is a better story
than “things will continue in a complicated and mildly disappointing way.”
There are probably other reasons too. Old systems do not die easily — they adapt in ways that are too unglamorous to attract much attention. Stress forces the kind of innovation that comfort rarely would. Fear triggers interventions that were not visible before the crisis. And the distance between "this could happen" and "this will definitely happen" collapses faster than it should, in both media and in our own minds.
And the part that is easy to miss.
Pessimistic predictions are not useless. They often point to real risks,
sometimes force real action. The ozone layer is arguably the clearest example — the catastrophe was not averted by luck or by the system's natural resilience, but by deliberate, coordinated human effort, and it was the warnings that made that effort possible.
But across most of these cases, the predictions consistently overestimated the speed, the scale, and the finality of collapse. Reality is slower. More stubborn. More willing to patch itself together and keep going than any good collapse narrative requires.
Things do not fall apart on schedule. They stretch, adjust, negotiate with themselves, and continue — often frustratingly so, for those who had predicted otherwise.
Hypothesis: The Iran conflict will fundamentally reshape the global order — World War III, de-dollarization, bifurcated financial systems, persistent inflation/stagflation, fragmented globalization, shift to a multipolar world order, end of cheap energy, weaponized trade/finance.
Expected Date: 2026–2028
The risks are real, some of these outcomes are genuinely possible. But if history is any guide — and I say this
with appropriate humility — the more interesting question is not “whether the world will break?” but “How will it quietly rearrange itself, patch the damage, and keep going in ways that nobody quite predicted and nobody will fully explain until after the fact.”
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