The Trauma of Social Collapse

Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a little Snowy grin to chase those Mondays away.

Today we’re going to discuss…

As I’ve been doing sessions with a lot of you, many themes have emerged. Money, finances, society, politics, life. How to just exist in an age of collapse. What does that make me, your existential…advisor? I don’t know, like I say, I don’t think there’s a name for it yet. (Here's how to book one for those who were asking.)

I want to talk about a concept that unifies many of these themes.

The trauma of social collapse.

Your Life and the World in an Age of Collapse

What’s happening to our world? To our societies? To us?

When we think about life, we often have a kind of unconscious map in our heads. It’s just put there over time, the accretion of norms, values, expectations, the lives lived before us.

And this map has many components, domains, areas. Relationships, money, careers, and so on. And in this map, too, are great mountains we know we’ll have to cross—think of those as life’s challenges, earning a living, starting a family, retiring, taking care of your loved ones, and so on. 

But there are also valleys in this map.

These are traumas.

But not just traumas: ways in which we know, unconsciously, that we could, or maybe even, will be, traumatized.

These are things, in other words, we expect, and for most of them, all of us will have to experience them to some degree.

What am I talking about?

Let’s think of some of these traumas which we know are traumas.

—Losing your job
—Changing your career
—Breaking up with your partner
—Losing your loved ones

There are a few more, but when we make lists of life’s great traumas, they go something like this.

But this situation that we’re in now isn’t like that.

Now we’re going through something new, at least for most of us.

Social collapse.

The Trauma of Social Collapse

Now. I’m bringing all this up for a deceptively simple reason, which is, I think, crucial right now.

Right now, you need clarity, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. To make wise decisions. Not panic. So you don’t Sink With the Ship. See Trump already crashing the economy? You know what happens next.

The point I’m making, and I really want you to sit with it, is so simple, but so overlooked.

This is a traumatic event, too.

Maybe one of the most traumatic. That there can be in a life.

For your society to collapse around you.

But most of us are unprepared for it. Even if we had good instincts. It’s one thing to have good instincts, that said this would happen. it’s another thing to go through something like this. It’s one thing to imagine, another to experience.

Let’s go back to that unconscious list of traumas which we know are traumas. Breakups, job losses, finances, mortality, loss. 

We know that all these will happen. Even if we live in a kind of arrogant denial, there’s no escaping, at the end of the day, that we’re all going to lose the people we love, that we’re going to face some degree of struggle with careers, that we’ll break up with our partners, and so forth. Almost none of us, period, escape that. That’s life. The truth of it. The human condition.

And so we prepare. Unconsciously, again. This is what much of literature and art and music do. This is what culture exists for, to help guide us in the world, and so books and films and poems touch on all these themes, of loss and mortality, or just more prosaic ones, of making it and taking care of your loved ones. They are all helping us navigate the maze of life.

So we are prepared to walk through some of these valleys. Not perfectly. Nobody’s perfectly prepared. But we expect it. And so we learn to anticipate how we will think and feel and plan and even change.

Think about it. These traumas which we know, and we spend so much of our lives preparing for—who hasn’t contemplated losing their parents, or if their partner is gone, or stops loving them, or if their job goes away—we prepare for them, and think of how much they still wound us.

Now think of this trauma. Nothing really prepared us for this. Maybe if you went back and read books, I don’t know, about the fall of the Soviet Union, or watched one of my favorite movies, Z, by Costa-Gavras, which is about this sort of thing, you might be prepared.

In some small way. And it’s true that many smart and wise people have tried to prepare you, and that many of you are wise and smart, too, so you prepared as best you could.

But nothing can really prepare you for this.

The experience of it.

The shock. The despair, the anger, the futility, the sense of “what have these fools done?,” the head-spinning act of reading the headlines, the horror at watching things around you implode, deep and serious things, institutions, norms, building blocks, seedcorn, the future.

It’s a hard thing to put into words, the idea I’m trying to express. Let me try again. Most traumas, we’re prepared for, in some way, our whole lives an act of preparing for them, even in small ways, like losing your loved ones, for examples. And they still hurt us. This trauma, though, you can’t really prepare your whole life for. Just can’t be done.

I’m not saying that you were taken by “surprise,” let’s chuckle and leave that word behind. I’m just saying that even I only predicted all this a decade ago, and so nobody, I think, can really perform this immense task of preemptively absorbing this particular trauma.

The trauma of social collapse.

Don’t Panic—You Are Being Traumatized.

Go ahead and chuckle, because that’s supposed to be funny, in a bleak way.

So why am I writing all this abstract stuff?

The point, again, is deceptively simple.

You are being traumatized.

See, if you lost your parents, or your child (heaven forbid), we’d all understand, including you, that this was a traumatic life event. A Big One. One of the Biggest Ones there is. And you’d regard yourself in a certain way, as you grieved, perhaps a little bit more softly. And from that place of gentleness would come a secret gift from the universe, time, and dust. Wisdom, grace, truth, purpose, the capacity to love and live at a higher and higher level.

This is a trauma.

Only we’re not talking about it that way.

So you must—must—recognize it.

You must understand: this, too, is one of the Major Traumatic Life Events that a person, any person, a human being, can experience.

Social collapse is right up there with losing your loved ones, a major job loss, going broke, breaking up with a long-term partner, and so on.

Only, as I’ve tried to explain, we don’t regard it that way. Because it’s so new, at least in this context, for America, in America, to America.

You must understand this. This is what your panic is saying right now.

It has many messages, but among the most vital for you to know, to really hear, to grasp, is the one that’s the simplest.

I am being traumatized. I am so much spiritual and emotional pain. I am hurting.

You cannot heal from a trauma like this, this big, without starting there, can you?

It's Not About Them, It's About You, Or Externalizing the Injury

So many of us are being taught, right now, to externalize the problem.

That is, we’re told to make the issue about society healing.

Will America recover? How long will Trump last? How much damage will be done?

These are secondary questions. Maybe even tertiary questions.

The primary question is about you.

Healing from any trauma begins with recognizing it. Acknowledging the depth of the pain and the gravity of the injustice and the seriousness of the injury.

The injury in this case takes many, many forms. There’s moral injury, the sense of disbelief at the cruelty and stupidity of it all. Emotional injury, despair and shock. There’s social injury, the feeling of being unsafe and at risk. There’s financial injury, too, and we’ve talked at length about managing your money.

The injury is real. Because the trauma is real. And to heal from it will take work, time, and a different approach to being in a world this broken and conflicted now. Many of you are taking steps already, and that’s a good thing, a brave and noble and wise one.

The point I want you to understand is this.

The question of whether society will heal is externalizing the injury.

The primary question is about you. Society is just people. “Society” doesn’t get traumatized, you do. And in that sense, no society can “heal” without people rising to higher levels of consciousness. Whether or not that can be done in this case—we’ve discussed that, often, too.

I don’t want you to make the mistake of overlooking yourself.

Externalizing the trauma, disregarding it, ignoring it, denying it, through this frankly pretty awful approach of redirecting it to the question “will society heal, make it, recover, fix itself.”

Why is that an awful approach? Am I being mean or unfair? 

I’m pointing out something that you must recognize. Must recognize.

Society may or may not heal. 

That’s an open question.

But you can and should.

See the difference? You cannot make it about society first, and you last. It must be about you first now, and society afterwards, but probably not “last.” Otherwise, you can’t heal from this grave and incredibly serious trauma. Society might or might not make it back from a trauma this grave. 

But you can and should. 

Sit with that. It’s a subtle thought, and I really want you guys to hold it and live it.

Trump is Going to Try and Collapse (and Traumatize)...the World

So what do we do with all this? 

First, we understand: this is a trauma. Not in some airy-fairy way, but in a real one.

We are all the walking wounded right now.

If we get that far, then we can make progress, but we have to start there.

Just as traumatic, by the way, is what’s happening to, for example, Canada. That’s a better way, maybe, to explain all this, so let me talk about it.

Canada’s leaders are right to say that it’s now under existential threat. That America’s government wants to collapse its economy, so that it can’t or doesn’t exist.

That is a trauma. That is what trauma is: existential threat. Really take that in, because it matters.

So here we have trauma spreading, like a shockwave. America. Now Canada. Soon beyond.

Canadians are being traumatized, too, by American collapse, threatening Canadian collapse.

And just as real is the question of healing from that trauma. Not just sort of fending America off, which Canada can do, brave and wise nation that it is, but really recovering from the injury that it is suffering right now. Becoming wiser and truer and more loving as a consequence of this level of existential threat. 

Does that make a little sense?

What to Do With the Trauma of Social Collapse

So what do we do with this trauma? If we recognize it, which is the first step?

I’ve been talking in sessions with many of you who are psychotherapists and psychologists and coaches about developing the field now in a new way. To help people deal with this new trauma. New maybe not in a historic sense, but certainly new for them. Most of us haven’t experienced any of this before.

What would “treatment for the PTSD of social collapse” look like? I don’t know. I have some thoughts, sure. I’d say it involve recognizing all the forms of injury and injustice above, and envisioning a life where you’re less at risk, and then developing one. But I don’t think it’s just about learning more skills to Smile Through the Pain. It has to be deeper now and really take psychology in a more mature direction. Right now, I don’t think psychology as it is is equipped for this, or to help us enough with it.

So those of you in this field who take on this challenge? You’ll be tomorrow’s leaders. Pioneers. You’ll probably have booming client bases and roaring businesses, because guess what, the world is about to be very, very traumatized by social collapse, as Trump tries to basically collapse every society on earth, not just America.

Go ahead and chuckle, because that’s as surreal and bananas as it sounds. But here we are.

I think that there’s a lot you can do to sit with the feelings, and acknowledge them, and really sort of fully experience the pain you are in. Only then can it go to a better place, which is what every ghost story is really about.

But me, in my role as existential advisor, or just your cool uncle? I think the point, for me, is to see you take this almost as…maybe not a gift…but as a kind of liberation. Society’s collapsing, that’s traumatic as hell, true. Now, though, you can also have the freedom to develop a life that isn’t so constrained by failing systems and institutions anymore.

This is of course the many discussions we’ve been having about moving, or investing, or changing it all up. Now you are freer, in a strange, paradoxical way, as the system melts down around you. You shouldn’t abuse that, like, say, the guys taking a blowtorch to the government, but you should see it as a liberation, and ask yourself: what kind of life do I really want to live now?

The Gift of Suffering, or the Valley and the Meadow

This is the gift of deep suffering. It always is. It reorients us, cracks us open, guides us. To richer lives, that we scarcely could have imagined in the days that we felt so injured and weak and like maybe even we could scarcely go on. 

That is because we are learning to live and love at higher levels. And that impacts everything. Money, finances, careers, relationships, where you are, what you are, who you are, why you are, everything.

This is the meadow you reach after the valley.

I know that you haven’t walked this valley before.

I know that this valley is deep, full of shadows, and crossing it will take many dark nights. 

That is why I’m writing all this, it’s why I decided to start doing sessions, which was your idea not mine, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart, really, because it makes me so happy and amazed and humbled to get to know you guys and advise you on what I can and teach you what I can.

So for now, just understand where you are. Now the ground beneath your feet that felt so stable, like a peak, has become a valley. And you are disoriented and startled and afraid. You feel panic. Even if you had some sense that this mountain wouldn’t take the weight so much pain, all that hurt bottled up and buried in the American psyche. That’s OK.

The message in that panic is: you are being traumatized by all this. 

Clarity comes from seeing where you are.

In one of life’s great valleys. One of life’s great valleys.

Recognize it, respect it, be gentle with yourself, because this loss too, is like that of a loved one. Isn’t it?

You must walk through this valley, too. Do not pity yourself. Admire yourself. This is what life is. This journey, this voyage, these steps. Through them, with them, you become your highest self, the most loving and sophisticated and mature person in you. Only that way. That’s the gift and the point of the journey. It isn’t meaningless. It isn’t futile. 

But you must see all this, know it, really feel it.

Here you are, and here is the valley.

But you are not alone. I’m here to guide you as much as I can, and all history’s great minds and great souls stand beside you, whispering to you. They too took this journey, and they are with you every step of the way. They are all saying: take your first steps, and then the next ones.

There is nothing more important right now than you really understanding that. Because a whole lot of people won’t. They will freeze in the valley. They will fawn all over its ruins and idols. They’ll flee to nowhere. They’ll fight each other. These 4 “Fs” are the classic trauma responses. But they are not the way out of the valley. The way out is to take step after step.

Nothing more, but also nothing less.

I know that’s a lot, and it’s abstract, but I care about you guys and I wanted to orient you in a deep way today. If you need more guidance, just reach out and book a session, I'm (tired, LOL, but) always here. Soon we'll start doing group and community stuff, too.

Lots of love,

Umair (and Snowy)

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