There Will Be No Collapse – OR – why we are already living in the ruins
Society has been thoroughly conditioned to believe the collapse of society will be announced, televised, or worse, that you will know by looking outside through the living room window.
After all, it’s the collapse of society. Who wouldn't notice such a thing? The truth is, most people won't notice one bit. And part of that is due to what I call “generational decay.” The gradual and slow burn of an ever-lower quality of life and declining living conditions. The idea that one may only be able to notice things have declined if they step back and look at the society in question over not years or decades, but marked instead by entire lifetimes. 
If I've seen it once, I've seen it a million times; that is online posts that go something like this, “there’s nothing we can do but wait for the collapse,” and “wake me up when the boogaloo starts.” How naïve. How stupid. How negligent and perhaps intentionally lazy and dishonest. 
There was a 1982 BBC documentary called “Survivalists,” I think about a lot. In a clip, a man that is the leader of a sort of militia, perhaps a Christian separatist group, says, “I don't like to set dates, but it's feeling kind of spooky. And it might be tomorrow or sometime in '82. But it could last another ten years, but I don't think so." [Timestamp, 30.38 / 48:25].[1] The documentary is filled with statements like this. Various survivalists go on to discuss racial strife, political struggles, along with other tensions that are legitimate and real. Things people like us are concerned with greatly. These survivalists had more or less the same sentiments, and they all also thought a collapse was imminent. Suppose you froze one of them in time in 1982 and unthawed them in the summer of 2020 amid BLM riots and Covid lockdowns. Almost 40 years would have gone by. Would they have assumed the collapse had already happened? Perhaps. I’d wager so. 
The collapse will not look like Mad Max or the Fallout video game series. You will not wake up one day with a total lack of electricity, internet, water, and the like. Your life will slowly and steadily become incrementally worse in ways you might not fully appreciate or understand. 
You will most likely still have the electric and the internet, but they will be much more expensive. You might not live in the pod, but your rent will continue to rise and become a larger share of your income, despite your living conditions never increasing with the higher costs associated. In fact, most might be watching Tik Tok and streaming Netflix during the collapse. They are right now.
This past summer, California struggled to keep up with power demands, with energy companies and politicians urging people to turn their air conditioning up to the 80s and not use large appliances. Many liberals blame this on global warming, such as a Business Insider article, "Get ready for blackouts from London to LA, as the global energy crisis overwhelms grids and sends energy prices skyrocketing."[2] 
Global warming is a convenient and political explanation – even assuming man-made global warming theory is correct, how does allowing an endless stream of migrants into a country or state with an already overloaded infrastructure help? It seems to me that when it becomes difficult to expand infrastructure at the rate needed to meet demand, we could easily curtail demand by limiting, or reducing the number of people using the strained infrastructure. 
You will spend more time at work and on overly congested freeways that seem to spend more time under repair than not, despite never improving. You'll get to spend less time doing what you’d like to do and more time waiting in line at Target or wherever you are to get some item you need that is more expensive than ever. 
There are already so many people on earth being fed that the fertile-enough soils of the world have been depleted of nutrients, and we are left growing food in dirt, not nutrient-rich soil. This leads to the nutrition density of raw fruits and vegetables being heavily depleted of value. Even "natural foods" are beginning to become empty calories. The food you consume will have less nutritional value, the calories are empty, you feel and look worse, and it all costs more. 
Without realizing it, your standards have fallen, and your tolerance for the previously intolerable will continue to rise unabated. This has already happened to you. You will experience more public meltdowns of people who probably would have been rightfully institutionalized in a previous era. 
The collapse of society isn't going to look like warlords and total disarray. It will look a lot like everybody does now, just fatter, more depressed, with less money, and a crummier place to live. 
Speaking of which, the bugs and pods… most people are going to eat the bugs and probably live in something quite pod-like as well. I see these posts online often as well, people proclaiming that they “will NOT live in the pods or eat the bugs.” But I think most well do both. There is a potential future where the bugs and pods will become the most sensible option at some point. People often imagine some martial law type of declaration that starting October first, you will eat the bugs as you’re being drug out of your home to the pods where they will heroically fight to the death instead of facing such a fate. The much more probable scenario is that bugs are simply used in everyday food items, the way processed sugar and artificial flavors and oils and syrups are used now, much to our collective detriment. The bug-food lobby might simply “sneak” them in, the way we see Kosher food snuck into everything today.
As for the pods, if the cost of living continues to rise, the pods could very well be the safest and most pleasant place for people who are not wealthy. If people are given the choice between an exceedingly dangerous neighborhood or a small but much safter pod, people, especially families, might willfully opt for pod living. 
They say Rome took 240 or so years to fall. A collapse in such slow motion it would have felt suspended at times. So slow that several generations were born, lived, and died, each of whom may not have noticed or appreciated they were living at the end of an epoch. 
If we assume an average life of 70 years, a lifetime during the fall of Rome would be 30% or less of the fall. From the earliest memory to the last breath, a Roman might have only witnessed a 30% or less decline in the quality of their empire, and while some things were disintegrating, others could have appeared, on the surface anyway, to look better. Gradual enough that most went unnoticed and unbothered. 

240 years of collapse, the USA is now 246 years old, to give you even more perspective of the time we are talking about here. 1776 seems like an eternity ago from the view of current-year Americans. The amount of history that took place in the past quarter millennia, the number of eras, 46 presidents, wars, Amendments, all of it that we know as Americans, could fit into the timeline of Roman collapse. 

Consider inflation, for example. From your earliest memory of buying something or having money, to today, how much has the value of a dollar changed? For me, it's around a 95% increase since the mid 1990s. Looking back, I realize it, but at no point while it was happening, did it ever stand out. 
That might be you too. The Roman who lives and dies in the very midst of the collapse, thinking it won't happen like this, it'll be all at once. But why would it be? Rome wasn't built in a day; why would it have crumbled in one? 
Why would this empire be any different? 
You will never wake up and see a CNN or Fox News banner scroll alerting you that it is all over. You'll instead experience rolling blackouts, higher energy costs, and more frustration trying to complete small tasks. Three times this past summer, I stopped to get gasoline and had to leave the gas station as they were out of gas, in one case, it ran out as I pumped the last three or four gallons from the station into my car. In another case, their “system” was totally “down” for whatever reason. I remember seeing individual pumps out of order from time to time in my life, and the rare case of seeing a whole station closed. But never, until this summer, have I experienced the sort of chaos and frustration that is a busy gas station while it is crashing in real-time. I have no idea why it happened. I know those stations did not appear to be run or owned by people like me. That might be part of the issue, perhaps not. 
But I do know this is how it looks. The collapse isn’t driving around in fortified rat rods shooting at rival gangs near your section of the creek in some riparian fued. It's not being able to find parts to repair a car, parts that you could have found a couple of years ago easily. In this timeline, the collapse looks more like Falling Down than it does Blade Runner. Speaking of Blade Runner, it is a beautiful film aesthetically, but it depicts a dystopia that we would be lucky to trade for ours. And that's both a problem and a feature of science fiction dystopias. The problem is that particular dystopia is depicted in a way so unlike reality, people are living in a dystopia without realizing it. The feature is that it is sci-fi, fantasy, and is supposed to be different. That's an important lesson too, I believe. 
Any examples people can give of things being cheaper or better quality compared to 30 years ago are probably consumer electronic items like televisions and cell phones. Two items that keep people entertained, docile, stupid, weak, and obedient. If I was running a country and wanted to keep a population in line that I loathed, I'd probably make sure they had affordable access to mindless yet addicting entertainment too. 
Outside of that, what is there that is better now than it was in 1990? I struggle to find anything, and that’s because I find myself in the very midst of the collapse of a society. I find myself standing among the ruins. 
With all of this said, the solution cannot simply to be to sit around and wait for some cataclysmic event that will likely never come. And if it does come, there’s nothing in place for any sort of salvation beyond merely existing. 
Ultimately, the way you live your life whether you believe a collapse will happen or not, may not change. But a possible change in mindset could change how you navigate the situation we find ourselves. 
“Waiting” for a collapse entails anxiousness and passivity. Stockpiling supplies you’ll likely never use, always wondering “when” and “how.” It’s a defensive posture and a weak one at that. Understanding that you are among the ruins already is life affirming in a way. Once you’re past the initial denial and shock, you may find it liberating. Now you can go forward on your own terms, salvage what you can, and perhaps begin to rebuild.