Don’t get too comfortable

Super-smart people are predicting collapse – and not so far in the future either.

Looking for metaphors since 1966: Today, a garden table, tomorrow, civilisation?

On Monday, the Macquarie Dictionary announced its annual word of the year. Even before I clicked through to see what it was I had a sense of it … I thought it might be “collapse” (as in, civilisation’s collapse). I was wrong, but the winner, “enshittification”, is surely just one step below “collapse” on the stairway to the apocalypse that the human race seems determined to climb:

For weeks now we have been in the most enshittified part of the year: from Halloween, through Christmas and on to Easter, our indulgence and profligacy is such that collapse seems almost guaranteed. Halloween’s cheap decorations, the fake spider webs stretched across one house after another which consumed god knows how much energy in their manufacture and transport (plus … emissions) and which are destined for landfill. Christmas gluttony and excess. Easter eggs in the shops by mid-January.

But I need to be careful of hypocrisy because I play in this mud-pit too. It’s hard to stay clean: I’ve found that Kmart T-shirts are great affordable gym wear and, this week, back in that awful place, stocking up, I was overcome with guilt and shame for supporting such an enterprise. T-shirts for $8. PJ top and bottom $14. Sports bra $12. We might think we’re winning with prices like that but the Earth is losing. (The fast-fashion industry consumes enormous volumes of water and is responsible for 2-8% of global carbon emissions, according to the UN.) And, at prices like that, someone, somewhere is being exploited. Increasingly, as the T-shirt brushes my skin, I find myself thinking of the Chinese workers who touched the garment, poor bastards slaving in some godforsaken factory so I can have cheap “soft touch” T-shirts.

I visited the Kmart in the odious Westfield Bondi Junction, a shopping centre designed with as much calculation as a gambling venue … daylight excluded, lose track of time, lose yourself in its 131,259m² of floor space (then lose yourself in the carpark all over again), spend-spend-spend. On the way back to my car, I pass a retailer called allkinds? Have you heard of it? I hadn’t before… seems to be some teen-targeting thing ... a fever dream of cutesy, sybaritic excess … “Chupa Chups Raspberry Jelly Wash”, “Micro Waffle Hair Towel”, “Hey Vacay Going Places Set” … etc

Whipped shower foam?

It reminds me of that maxim from the American writer Michael Pollan about food – “Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”. One could add – “don’t take anything into the shower with you that your great grandmother wouldn’t recognise”.

Later in the week, queuing to buy a stamp in my local Australia Post: waiting, waiting, and studying the shelf-loads of rubbish for sale (“squishy mangoes” and “squishy burgers” – what are they? soft toys? – and a “remote control urban chaos stunt car” etc). And how’s this for perversity, a world gone mad: Australian Geographic-branded “native flora and fauna Christmas collection musical snow globes with eight festive tracks” made in China. Which brilliant merchandising brain was responsible for that decision!? (I’ve reached out to Australian Geographic for a comment … still waiting.)

Oh, but wait, there’s more: Glancing through the Ikea website (I know, I know but my 20-year-old teak outdoor table has, seriously, see pic at top, collapsed, and so far I haven’t been able to find a suitable/affordable secondhand replacement despite searching FB Marketplace high and low over months), I came upon a table, the “NORRMANSÖ” table, promoted with, wait for it, the optional extra of a $29 HELGEÖ “decorating rod” … like, seriously?! (You are, I believe, meant to extravagantly drape flowers, greenery, decorations etc over the rod, presumably so you can’t see your guests at the table and their deep discomfit with your life choices.)

You might think I’m being glib about “collapse”. I’m not. It’s a word, a subject that is popping up more and more frequently in my continual travels through news sites and social media. And it’s not coming from ranting fringe groups, survivalists or preppers. It’s coming from scientists, deep thinkers, from people who understand history and data or from those who have done vast volumes of research such as the smart and prescient Sarah Wilson who is currently serialising a book on her Substack, This Is Precious, about “how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world”. From Chapter 4 (“Holy shit, *this* is what civilisational collapse looks like”):

On her “Wild” podcast, Wilson’s focus is increasingly doing interviews with experts who specialise in areas related to “collapse” including systems designer and Dark Matter Lab co-founder Indy Johar (who believes we will be sling-shotted into a new world in the next 10-15 years and that new world will feature mass civil unrest and some sort of catastrophic “wipe-out”), and collapse theorist and global leadership consultant Margaret Wheatley (who says we will need to create “islands of sanity” to survive what lies ahead). In this episode of Wild, Wilson suggests how her listeners can “explain collapse to someone”:

As Wilson notes, it’s a subject not without deniers. And it sounds mad, right? Things just keep on keeping on don’t they? How can we possibly consider a near-term future where the world is utterly changed? But it would seem a little foolish not to consider it. Did you know that the Doomsday Clock, set by a group of atomic scientists, is at 90 seconds to midnight. In January, they noted:

“Ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe. The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation. China, Russia, and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernize their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation. In 2023, Earth experienced its hottest year on record, and massive floods, wildfires, and other climate-related disasters affected millions of people around the world. Meanwhile, rapid and worrisome developments in the life sciences and other disruptive technologies accelerated, while governments made only feeble efforts to control them. The members of the Science and Security Board have been deeply worried about the deteriorating state of the world.”

What the hell to do? Easiest would be to keep on keeping on. Ignore the issue and hope it might go away. But how can we look our kids/grandkids/nieces/nephews in the face knowing that there’s even a chance that they’ll have to cope in a dystopian future we had a hand in creating? (Let us not forget the famous New Yorker cartoon from 2012 – a man in raggedy clothes sits by a campfire and talks to three raggedy children; the caption: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”)

As ever, little things. They might not prevent catastrophe but better to have tried. Lots of little things. You will have heard it all before, but again:

• Buy secondhand where-ever possible.

• Consider buying antique/vintage for someone for Christmas (eg: 11 Edwardian champagne flutes, a George V silver asparagus scoop, a still life (with nasturtiums) or art glass perfume bottles).

• Don’t buy plastic. (Sarah Wilson on plastic here, horrifying information.)

• Don’t buy shit.

• Get on your bike.

• Hassle your family and friends to listen to this podcast from Sarah Wilson.

• Hassle your family and friends.

• Get a compost bin or worm farm (composting is the best).

• Don’t waste food.

• Don’t stop building community.

• Don’t stop being kind.

• Don’t stop carefully considering where your vote goes.

• Don’t gift this year, donate: to the Wayside Chapel, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Bush Heritage Australia, Niall Harbison’s Happy Doggo, the Rainforest Trust, BackTrack and Unicef (for Sudanese in the middle of a desperate crisis, famine and war).

• Don’t thrash yourself if you don’t get everything right.

  (PS: I just checked my inbox, fellow Substacker the noted John Birmingham refers to “collapse” in his newsletter, Alien Sideboob, today. I am in good company.)

Um, it doesn’t belong in the green bin … Spotted in my neighbourhood today.

Next week, my last newsletter for the year and I’ll end on an upbeat note, I promise!

🎵Mood

littlecloudsduo

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Such a beautiful song, played by Little Clouds, a Sydney duo – Nick Henderson and Emily-Rose Sarkova. Their album, Quiet Life, is on Spotify.

Wild thing

In a madly frivolous vibe shift – can’t resist sharing this. Coming to Australian cinemas February 13, 2025. No reviews yet. But, god, Mr Darcy is dead.

Reading

MAMMAL-WATCHING: Could not adore this story in The New York Times more (I was a voracious reader of Gerald Durrell when I was a kid … makes me think of some of the expeditions he took). “I felt the most intimate connection with Borneo at our last – and wildest – destination, the Danum Valley, which teemed with rainforests that are, by some estimates, 130 million years old, among the most ancient in the world.”

DON JR: Catching up on the sensational Marina Hyde in excoriating fine form in The Guardian: “Don Jr recently shared a video of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy with the caption ‘POV: you’re 38 days from losing your allowance’. By way of a reminder, the Ukrainian people are 1,000 days into a devastating war they didn’t start, while Don’s personal struggles have amounted to not getting a wedgie at private school. (A goal with which his entire demeanour suggests he achieved limited success.)”

FAKE TEETH: The big new trend in teeth – “perfectly imperfect” veneers, fake, but not perfectly so. In her Substack, “The Review of Beauty”, Jessica DeFino writes: “Standardized beauty is always a class performance. Teeth are no exception to that. Whenever any feature becomes particularly desirable in the culture, there are usually ties to class and power – the desirable feature is a symbol of something else. And there’s so much about dental care in particular that is indicative of the class divide. Dental insurance is not part of standard health insurance, at least in the United States. It’s always something extra. Lots of people can’t afford dental care, let alone veneers.”

Plus: Also by DeFino, in her Guardian column, “Ask Ugly”, a knock-out answer to a reader’s question about beauty culture: “First of all, let’s acknowledge the labor involved in simply looking Blah. I’m talking about beauty work so integrated into the performance of femininity that it seems invisible or is incorrectly labeled ‘hygiene’ – the baseline for those who want to avoid covert judgment and overt mocking. Removing body hair. Removing or lightening facial hair. Smoothing, straightening or curling the hair on your head. Grooming your eyebrows. Using whitening toothpaste or Crest White Strips or getting your teeth bleached at the dentist. Dieting and exercising to maintain a certain weight or shape, or dressing in a way that emphasizes or disguises a certain weight or shape.” (And so much more good stuff in the column! Big thumbs up!)

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Beautiful Thing

Ouroboros, Lindy Lee’s new $14 million sculpture at the NGA. Says The Guardian: “The impact of Ouroboros is undeniable. Installed roadside in front of the NGA, the 13 tonne, 4.2-metre-high structure, made from mirror-finish stainless steel (recycled from scrap metal) and mounted in the middle of a shallow square pool of water, is a showstopper.”

Food

justonecookbook

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OYAKODON: A Japanese staple, chicken, eggs and onion over steamed rice.

Plus: A meditation on breakfasts (in “The Humanities Library” Substack), with a particular eye to the literary (Pynchon, Joyce). Plus, plus: In her Substack, “Home”, India Knight looks at food in fiction. She writes: “My absolute favourite is the food in The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, my favourite novel … It appears throughout the book: here a minestra, there a rum jelly, but the one that sticks most in the head is the macaroni pie, produced for a dinner for local grandees (sort of). There are servants in ‘green, gold and powder,’ each of them holding an enormous silver dish ‘containing a towering macaroni pie’.” (If you haven’t read The Leopard it is sublime!)

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Home and garden

christian_douglas_design

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GROWING FOOD: I love the thinking behind this … “So many designers I speak to relegate food to the far reaches of the garden – or convince homeowners to avoid it because of how it looks,” says Christian Douglas, the author of a new book, The Food Forward Garden. “What if, instead of relegating our vegetable patch to a remote corner of the backyard, we brought it forward?” There’s an extraordinary video here … showing just how lovely a food garden can be.

SUSTAINABILITY: In Good Weekend magazine, Joost Bakker and his house, “an ambitious demonstration project for a new kind of construction, designed to restore and enrich the natural environment instead of exploiting and degrading it”. (Worth picking up The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald tomorrow for the magazine if you don’t have a digital subscription).

SWEET POTATOES: The easiest crop in the world to grow. ABC Gardening Australia offers some tips.

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Christmas shopping

HEELS: A personal recommendation (which flies completely in the face of everything I wrote above in “Collapse”, forgive me, hypocrisy, as I said, none of us can be perfect) … in the few weeks since I was persuaded by an ad on Instagram to buy this electronic pedicure tool/foot grinder my life has changed, my heels are those of a newborn baby, I step out with fresh confidence and verve, men turn to gaze at me as I pass, two dozen red roses from an anonymous admirer arrived today … no of course they didn’t, and I’m not stepping out that much at all, certainly not in strappy sandals, but, the Nuvé Silk 3 Pro is a dry-heel game-changer. Rechargeable via USB charging cable; replacement refills available … I’ve been using fairly regularly for a few weeks and the difference in my heels is remarkable … a way better result than I’ve ever had from a pedicure. (Don’t buy the “smooth feet in minutes” sales line though … it needs time.) Price: hard to tell because discounts abound but around AUD$59 I think.

REPURPOSED SECONDHAND JEWELLERY: A recent Sunday Life magazine cover with its delicious blue-green tones grabbed me … I’ve never heard of Chrishell Stause (who is she?) but loved the styling, the top and pants by Viceta Wang and the necklace by Xanthe Ficarra. It is, according to its website, “a small, Melbourne-based designer that repurposes second-hand jewellery. The brand embraces the story behind pre-loved materials, with a paramount focus on sustainability. Every piece is unique and handmade. Xanthe Ficarra celebrates the marriage between grandma’s jewellery chest and whimsical renewal”. Most pieces in the shop are blingier than I would choose but I love the mission statement, delighted to endorse anything that embraces grandma’s jewellery chest! Price: From $50. (Will custom-make pieces from your own sentimental items of jewellery.)

TEA-TOWELS: The brilliant Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Cathy Wilcox has a little online shop. Canvas bags and mugs and T-shirts and tea-towels. I like this tea-towel. Says Wilcox describing her thinking behind it: “Something we do well in this country is blame the whistle-blower: the climate protester, the human rights activist, the person who decries racism, corruption or war crimes. As we are reminded, they should all just learn to shut up! – for the sake of social cohesion, of course.” Price: $30.

Socials

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(via Substack Notes; answer: yes.)

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Stolen words

“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.”–M.C. Escher (via Marginalian)