Making Sense of This Mess

We hacked the system and broke the planet — but sure, let’s fix the economy

You wake up. The faucet groans — again. Eggs are twice the price they were last year. The bus is late. The air smells like fire, even though there’s no smoke in sight. Headlines blur together — another flood, another blackout, another faraway war that somehow feels uncomfortably close. You promise you won’t read about it just for today, but today never comes.

It’s a habit now — scrolling the apocalypse during breakfast.

You know something’s wrong. Everyone does. But no one knows quite where to start.

Everything’s breaking — burning — melting — drying — vanishing. Plastic dust in your lungs, in the rain, and your unborn child’s bloodstream. Corals dying in slow motion. Fossil fuels scraped from garbage rock. Inequality exploding. Minds unraveling. Civilizations fracturing. Genocide in 4K.

Amazon still delivers on schedule, but this is climate collapse in real-time, creeping through the cracks of your daily routine. Meanwhile, we’re told the economy needs fixing. Seriously, like everyone’s obsessed with “saving the economy” while ignoring that our house is on fire. Hello!!! Fixing the GDP won’t matter much when the roof collapses.

And more: that ‘overpopulation’ is the reason behind all our problems…Give me a break. This predatory, wasteful, outsourced, consumption-oriented system is the problem, not the population count.

And so, you keep going, half busy stitching your life together with duct tape and hope, conspiracy groups and actionless protests, while the other half is numb and treads in zombie-like autopilot — because that’s the only way to cope.

So how did we get here? Why does everything seem to be unraveling all at once?

This isn’t a series of unrelated disasters. It’s not a random meteor strike, and it’s certainly not bad luck or mismanagement or another political cycle gone wrong.

It’s a trajectory, one baked into the very DNA of our civilization: a species chasing infinite growth inside a finite system. We have blown past oil, minerals, forests, fish, water, topsoil faster than the Earth can recover. Dumping waste — CO₂, methane, plastic, poisons — faster than it can absorb. We’ve turned the biosphere into a landfill and called it “progress.”

So this isn’t just climate change. This is a system in overshoot: when life consumes too much, too fast, with no natural brake.