Collapse isn’t coming.
It’s already here.
And in January 2025, it came back with a vengeance—like the cursed sequel to a disaster movie nobody wanted, directed by a sentient golf cart full of fascism.
But Trump didn’t cause the collapse.
He didn’t break the system.
He just made it visible.
He dragged a big, sweaty, screaming magnifying glass over the fractures that have been widening for decades.
This moment isn’t the beginning.
It’s the spotlight—or maybe the laser pointer of chaos—that forced everyone to see what we in the trenches already knew:
This system has always been designed to break people.
Late-stage capitalism isn’t “malfunctioning.”
It’s doing exactly what it was built to do:
- Squeeze labor dry
- Punish vulnerability
- Reward exploitation
- Treat rest like rebellion
- And sell you therapy for the wounds it just inflicted
We don’t collapse because the system fails.
We collapse because the system is functioning perfectly—
and we’re human.
That’s the part most people still haven’t metabolized.
For some, collapse still feels like an interruption—
an emergency to be managed, or a nightmare to wake up from.
But for us in the Cult of Brighter Days?
It’s a Tuesday.
We stopped waiting for the world to get better.
We stopped believing in “normal” as anything but a marketing strategy.
We stopped designing for stability because we finally understood:
If you’re building for clarity, you’re building for a fantasy.
We design for entropy.
We build within collapse.
Not because we’re brave—
because we’re tired of breaking.
What does that actually look like?
It looks like workflow built on the assumption that someone’s going to melt down halfway through the meeting—and that’s fine.
It looks like project plans with backup plans and backup plans for the backup plans.
It looks like laughing at the chaos, not because it’s funny, but because you ran out of tears two global crises ago.
We write while grieving.
We launch while anxious.
We rest when collapse demands it—
not when the calendar says it’s allowed.
This isn’t failure.
This is adaptive design.
Most institutions are still selling “resilience” like it’s a luxury candle.
Their strategies involve pretending stability will return any day now,
if you just believe hard enough and attend enough webinars…
Faith, trust, and pixie dust.
But collapse doesn’t care about your strategic plan.
Collapse doesn’t reschedule.
So we stopped asking how to get back to normal.
And started asking:
What can we build that still matters when everything falls apart?
We build with what we’ve got:
- Grief
- Rage
- Humor
- Cardboard
- The weird glitter of collective survival
We stopped seeking certainty.
We started seeking capacity.
That’s what fuels survival:
Not resignation.
Not nihilism.
But designing for humanity inside inhuman conditions.
Perpetual collapse doesn’t mean nothing matters.
It means we have to create meaning differently.
We have to build like the floor might give out.
Because sometimes it does.
So we build modularly.
We build redundantly.
We build relationships, not empires.
We leave room in our frameworks for nervous breakdowns, power outages, grief spirals, and unexpected beauty.
We don’t pretend it’s fine.
We design as if it’s not.
Because that’s what keeps us alive.
This is not a temporary condition.
It’s the terrain we live on.
And pretending otherwise doesn’t make you strategic—
it makes you brittle.
So it’s time to stop pretending.
It’s time to stop waiting.
It’s time to stop shaming ourselves for being tired in a system that runs on exhaustion.
And it’s time to start building with intention.
With weird glue.
With jokes at the edge of despair.
With people who understand that “fine” is a weapon when it’s used to silence pain.
Because when your next collapse comes—and it will—
we will stand with you.
We won’t be surprised.
We’ll be ready.
And we’ll still be building.
