Doomsday prep is a common theme around here. There is a certain underlying assumption about history; that civilizations collapse and our time is almost up. This article disputes that narrative.
There are political revolutions, wars, and sinusoidal interest in megastructures. But sudden mass changes in average living standards are rare.
Periodic Armageddon sells more books, though.
Stories of mass destruction, societal breakdown and civilisational collapse run deep in our culture, from Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by a wrathful god, to the destruction of Atlantis, submerged under the sea after a massive earthquake
Turning that to the possibility of near-future collapse, by imagining ourselves standing on the precipice of some epochal change, we make ourselves feel more important – we are living at a key time and we have the power to affect global civilisation, either positively or negatively.
The stories of the Maya and climate change, and the Easter Islanders’ ecocidal self-destruction, suit those who want to make a dramatic argument about our own mistreatment of the environment in modern times, and the possible fate of our own civilisation.