The Beginning of the End (Again)

John Martin - The Great Day of His Wrath

I have noticed this pattern for years now, and I confess I am not entirely immune to it myself. The moment something starts going wrong — markets wobble, a war breaks out, banks begin to fall — conversations shift in a very predictable direction. People stop asking what might happen and start declaring what will definitely happen. And almost always, that declaration goes one way.

“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.

1. The Population Bomb (1968–1985)

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.

2. Acid Rain Will Destroy the Forests (1970s–1980s)

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. 

3. The Ozone Layer Will Be Destroyed (1980s)

Hypothesis: Ozone depletion will make Earth uninhabitable — radiation spikes, ecosystem collapse Expected Date: 1990s–2000s

What actually happened: Global coordination. Montreal Protocol. Slow recovery.

4. Y2K Systemic Collapse (2000)

Hypothesis: Computer systems will fail globally, collapsing infrastructure

Expected Date: January 1, 2000

What actually happened: Nothing dramatic. Which proves either panic… or preparation.

5. Post-9/11 End of Globalization (2001–2010) 

Hypothesis: Globalization will reverse — borders harden, trade shrinks, nations retreat

Expected Date: 2002–2010

What actually happened: Security increased. Trade didn’t stop.

6. Peak Oil Collapse Narrative (2005–2015)

Hypothesis: Oil decline will end growth — energy scarcity leading to economic stagnation.

Expected Date: ~2010

What actually happened: Technology found more oil. Apocalypse postponed.

7. The Great Financial Crisis Will “Reset Everything” (2008–2012)

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.

8. Eurozone Breakup (2010–2015)

Hypothesis: The euro will collapse, fragmenting Europe.

Expected Date: 2012–2015

What actually happened: It bent. It negotiated. It survived.

9. China Hard Landing (2013–2017)

Hypothesis: China will collapse under debt, triggering global recession.

Expected Date: 2014–2017

What actually happened: China slowed. Reality declined to call it collapse.

10. COVID Will Permanently Kill Cities (2020–2022) 

Hypothesis: Cities will die — urban life ends, offices disappear.

Expected Date: 2020–2022

What actually happened: Cities paused. Then resumed.

11. Global Banking Collapse After SVB (2023)

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.

And now, the Iran war

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.”

What is Peace?

A melancholic “minor key piano” music playing in the television, in distant hall room, right across the wall.

Sitting in the swing in the veranda.

That slow lazy motion of the swing.

The mild fluttering of the breeze, touching the skin and passing by.

The bustling of the leaves, the neem tree in front of me, the coconut trees and the rest of it.

The leaves, the walls washed in the yellow street light.

The rickety noise of the broken swing.

No human sound at the dead of the night, 2 am of April 20.

That eminence of the swing and my leg hitting the adjacent walls.

The nudge of pain on the knees.

That minor irritation of mosquitoes.

The realization that all of this is accepted as is.

All the pains to be endured, all the joys to relished, as is.

The realization that this is all that I want from life.

To sit in a swing, the melancholy, the breeze.

This was peace.

Value of Money

We value money just because it is perceived to have value by everybody else. 

Money in itself has no intrinsic value, it is just a piece of paper or a number in your digital bank balance. The very allure of having more and more of this commodity without the need of utilizing it for anything is rather strange. People want to have billions and billions of dollars in their bank but have no need or intention to spend them in any way. It is like the tulip mania of the 17th century. People wanted to get more tulips because the value of tulips was perceived as going up, not that they had any need of tulips or they were trading tulips for their needs/luxuries.

Rai stones from Island of Yap          

What if money comes with an expiry date?

If money had an expiry date, say the death of the person who earned it or 100 years, people will be forced to spend it instead of stock it. The fundamental property of money/wealth that it can be stored will be destroyed. It can have earth-shattering ramifications on the way we humans exists.

1. No stocking of money: Money will stop being stocked in the bank accounts. There would be a pressing need to spend it within its lifespan.

2. Fulfilling lives: People will be enjoying more fulfilling lives as the very need to store money would be gone and people would be spending generously.

3. More Charity: People would tend to donate any unspent and going to expire money and/or would be more included towards charity.

4. Less Tax Evasion / Black Economy: Tax is evaded for the sole purpose of stocking more money. With no more need of that extra money, the population would tend to be more honest and find it less useful to evade tax.

5. Having a rich dad or mom would mean much less now.

What if the same concept of expiry is applied to other forms of wealth (real estate, precious metals, etc.)? Say all the properties owned by you will be returned to the society once you are dead.