What do y'all think of /r/collapse?

How would you feel if the world didn’t collapse in 30 years and you made no plans for retirement on the assumption that it was going to collapse? Invest in your potential future. Nothing is guaranteed.

The world/society is significantly more resilient than the doomers over there would have you believe.

That sub and many like it want things to collapse, don’t spend much time there or it will corrupt your worldview. It’s not healthy to read/engage with that much negativity.

Our entire economy is built around a boom/bust cycle, much to the advantage of the rich. I think it's healthy to keep a level of cynicism around the US economy simply because those who are wealthy and in positions of power have an incentive to keep this cycle going

I am in that sub and it’s mostly discusses climate change collapse and then that would usher in financial collapse.

How can people who are experts at technical analysis look at this chart not realize that something is terribly, terribly wrong?

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

I haven’t browsed it but my boss told me an interesting story about a former coworker of hers who ported literally his entire life savings into grain as preparation for Y2K. After society didn’t collapse he was stuck with a bunch of grain in his basement he couldn’t get off his hands. Nightmare

They will keep pushing their timeline back. It will always happen “within the next decade”, but never actually arrive…

Stocks only go up ☝🏼🤓

Their narrative hasn’t changed at all in at least 35 years. I had a long conversation with a guy in the early 90s about how the national debt was unsustainable and the dollar will lose all its value within a couple of years. I thought about it quite a bit, but decided there’s no point in worrying.

He’s (financially) comfortably retired now, but still unironically spouting the exact. Same. Warnings to anyone who will listen. He’ll go to his grave in the same perpetual terror he’s spent his life.

I think it's a joke lol. Terminally online doomers.

Collapse will happen some day, is that in a decade or centuries away is the question. But what is the point of living life worrying about it? Make money, enjoy life and hope for the best.

Eventually they’ll be right and all the times they were wrong will be forgotten

I'm in both subs. Both are extreme at times, both have irresponsible people acting on hunches and both have some great points.

It's good to be prepared for the best, the worst and everything in between.

But tbh that sub is maybe a bit pessimistic but mostly about the current climate and economic crisis. Investing is most profitable for those who already are rich and those people will be fine in every scenario (unless we finally literally eat you guys). So it makes sense that most people here don't have to worry about an inevitable collapse of our society. Whether it already happened or it happens in 1000 years, the lower classes will feel it first.

They are mostly right on everything. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, the destruction of the oceanic ecosystem, societal collapse, currency collapse…

It is not a cult. I wish they were just that, but it’s backed by data and scientific evidence so we are mostly on borrowed time.

At least i got more profit than losses for the right amount of time and numbers you know. Feels good i guess.

I think we are more fucked than we are not

Seriously now… the mental gymnastics i experience with most folks over climate change. And how its not an issue right now.

5 billion people experienced extreme heat in june. That doesnt mean they parish, but the risk raises every day (and a lot more did)

The glaciers and ice caps are never coming back. You can argue how long they will melt

Our soils are depleted, corral is mostly gone. One year of Forest forest fires wipes out more than we can plant annually (yeah?)

The ocean in florida was over 100 last year. That basically kills life there

Hurricanes (like the current one) are worse. Cost more and impact more.

1 in 500 year floods are happening every 10 years now

I can go on and on but it doesn’t matter because no one will ever vote for the economy over climate change

Oh and since this is stockmarket… want evidence… look at the insurance companies fleeing not only florida and California but the midwest and other areas. Who’s is going to ultimately pay for that? Thats right. Its all of us.

I mean they could eventually be right and someone will always be there to say “see I told u so!” But I think of them as the “worlds gonna end” people. Same energy. And I treat them the same way. Maybe one day yea, but I’m gonna keep living until then.

I always say if the US folds or defaults heavily and goes into free fall, the last thing I’ll care about is my stock holdings

Read “Overshoot” by William Catton Jr., or DM me for a free audiobook. It’s inevitable, but I wouldn’t base my investment decisions around it because it is a generational issue, the timeline is too uncertain to really do anything about in a practical sense.

I don’t think it’s going to collapse but if it we are all fked anyway….i don’t think keeping our money in the bank is going to be the solution 👍🏻

The one absolute about the progress of human "civilization" or the state, is that all societies collapse. Some happen fast with the sacking of a city, some are slow. Egypt, Assyria, Rome all stood for monumental lengths of time compared to most modern nations.

All societies disintegrate, our global society will disintegrate in time. And humans will return to "subsistence" living before forming complex societies again. That is a given.

It's just the difference between the fall of Rome and now is that we have more or less destroyed the majority of the natural world, there are a greater number of humans than at any other one time and for most of us, the last time a member of our family lived a peasant lifestyle was in the 1700's. The majority can't survive without the state unlike in previous lifetimes.

Climate change is going to ruin so many countries as there is nothing out there to fix it at this stage and there is also no incentive.

It’s never bad to have critics of a clearly flawed system get their voice out there

That being said, those people are basically exactly who Wall Street loves to extract money from via options and bonds and holding their cash for them

Apparently something is going to happen in July 15 during the Republican convention. My coworkers that love trump were talking about it. When someone asked what will they think when nothing happens. I replied, what they always do believe the next lie.

A big part part that's not very well understood is that collapse is likely extremely gradual.

It's a continuing degradation of everything. Base costs going up from a failing environment are impossible to reverse. Coupled with decreasing quality of products and services. You will continue to pay more, for lessfrom here on out.

The collapse process could take hundreds of years, think if the fall of Rome. Of course there will be big disasters, collapse is society's failure to recover from these events.

When you see a road washed out that is abandoned instead of replaced. That's collapse. When farmers abandon land (aquifers not recharging, increased salinity, fertilizer supply chain costs) instead of replanting. That's collapse. When the refugee camp becomes permanent. That's collapse. When the poor eat less and less beef because of the increasing scarcity of cattle, from loss of gazing land, mass livestock die off, increasing feed costs. That's collapse

I think there’s a lot of money to be made selling overpriced doomsday prepper crap to idiots. There’s a whole industry doing it, and making a lot of money at it, helping to further delay the thing they’re buying stuff to survive from.

If we go full Mad Max, I hope I’m at ground zero. I don’t want to get winged and I don’t want to live out their fantasy of living in a destroyed world. I’m out.

What do these people do with any excess savings then? Cash itself is a commodity, so avoiding stocks and bonds isn't going to safeguard you if the world economy collapses.

Are they kinda crazy? Absolutely. At the end of the day, a market crash doesn't equal doomsday and things will get better.

But the market crashes. You could be 16 and have lived through 2 of them.

If you look back on history when world powers shifted, you can find examples of how the stock market reacted particularly in the shift from the Dutch to the English to the American empire.

While these changes don’t happen overnight, there are moments of wild volatility. Outside of world powers and world reserves currencies, there’s also demographics to consider. If younger populations are dwindling and older generations are entering retirement, it stands to reason that the money invested by the boomers for their retirement, could be liquidated to pay for expensive health care and lifestyles.

While you toil away for 30 years funding your retirement, there will be less and less people able to do the same. Are you just financing boomer retirement, keeping the indiciea a float while they sell high? And come to find out when you retire, your investments have gone from severely overvalued to undervalued? Diversify as best you can I say.

Invest, but don't count on it being there forever. It's pretty easy to see how razor thin stability is at the moment, but that shouldn't stop you from investing. Unless you want to join r/prepperprepare and spend it all 😉

the people there are the same people here.

Good thread. I don't think people pay enough attention to this type of thing in finance circles.

My perspective - I have been having a look at r/collapse every now and then for years now. I remember when they were freaking out about the pandemic back in 2020 saying that would be the end, somehow. What actually happened is that interest rates were cut, the fed dumped in a load of liquidity, and asset prices inflated. The rich (asset owners) got richer and the poor got poorer. This seems to be the same story we see in every crisis. I feel like if collapse is right and im not in the market, I'll end up a serf in a dystopia. If collapse is right and I am in the market, I'll be better off in the dystopia.

If the whole economic system collapses we're all fucked anyway so... If you're actually worried I'd start some low level prepping and maybe owning some land would be helpful (they don't make it like they used to) and one or two gold coins. (My dad has been prepping since the cold war and that's what he's done 😅). However, the whole economic system is highly unlikely to collaps for the long term. So diversify, diversify, diversify!

Ive always been hearing about this collapse coming and thirty years later still waiting. Who do you think is eating or going to eat America's lunch?

The best single investment you can ever make is in other humans to collaborative life with. Money is cool and useful, but if you don't have people you can turn to when you are out of commission, the money won't help you for very long by itself.

Invest in relationships, friendships, your fitness, and your mind. The rest will come automatically when shit gets rough.

Infinite growth can’t be supported on a finite planet

Well, the markets are based on speculation after all. It has its limits and cannot go on indefinitely.

It would seem politics might be the downfall of the US though, if things like Project 2025 persist. The markets would get absolutely obliterated.

There are always people projecting collapse. One day they may be right

But if you live long enough there is a 100% chance you will want to retire.

I mean who cares if it does just switch your position to a short😂😂

Archaeologists always us this one weird phrase- What happened to this civilization?

Disclaimer: I came here from a cross-post from the /r/collapse sub

Although there are extremists in there that think we'll reach doom by Tuesday, the common consensus there (from my point of view) is that we agree with the "Limits to Growth" study, meaning we'll start to see a global decline in population in the 2040's, ignoring extreme situations like a world war, due to ecological overshot and peak oil.

There's also a common point of view that collapse is not homogeneous, and it's already happening in parts of the globe (think Haiti) and slowly expanding.

And to counter some comments here, we do not "want collapse" to happen, but we're unhappy with our predicament, and learning to accept it, every user at a different stage of acceptance.

I'm also investing in the stock market to try and retire before I get personally affected, but I know the system will not hold indefinitely. Only an economist would defend Infinite Growth on a finite planet.

Hello, I'm at the weird intersection of finance bro/WSB'er and a collapsnik.

The fact is, if we collapse so hard my portfolio goes to zero, I'm gonna have a lot bigger immediate problems to solve than being broke. Having more money and making reasonable plans for retirement makes my immediate and long term life better by giving me more flexibility and freedom.

I'm still going to read collapse because I do feel that there are large scale changes that are making life harder which they keep a pretty good eye on such as climate change, the cost of energy production, etc. Seeing other people also worried about that type of stuff makes me feel more normal and sane.

Are some people overly worried in there? Sure. Are some people in WSB insane? Also yeah. But there is still plenty of diamonds in the rough. Some of my best stock moves have come from WSB, and some good science info has come out of collapse.

A "fun" finance/collapse intersection is water privatization.

The denizens of r/collapse have ALWAYS thought the entire financial system was going to collapse. They have been hoping to be right since the day they came into existence, and will continue hoping until A) it happens and everyone is too worried about survival to care to post about it and B) they can PRETEND it has happened as many currently do.

The stock market went down...COLLAPSE! Peak oil happened....6 years ago...COLLAPSE! Cost of living has increased post Covid...COLLAPSE! They have gotten so tired of claiming and it not happening that they now see collapse in the news story of the day. The why is irrelevant to them...just as long as they can pretend it is happening. Today preferably, but they'll wait until tomorrow if they have to.

I wonder what their angle is?

People in this sub tend to have a skewed vision of the way things are in the sense that they dont see the fragility of the system and just expect that it will be functioning forever, even though it depends on constant growth, which is not possible permanently. Nothing lasts by nature of the laws of physics. The prosperity we experience today is the result of post WW2 boom, which has been an anomaly in the context of human history. To expect that the stock market can just keep inflating forever is not logical because it represents a physical world which is finite, changing, and cannot support endless growth, which is tied to extracting resources and consumption. Fundamentally, we are not really dealing with anything existent. We are dealing with digital numbers representing something in the physical, and a system in which everyone is reliant on that continuing to grow. But when that starts to break down in the physical because we have overshot the actusly physical limit to growth capacity, the game will change a lot.

This is starting to occur, but a lot of people here may not see that. High level geopolitical powers see it, and that is why you are seeing the geopolitical landscape change so much. It may be that your retirement accounts and social security can no longer be funded in 10 years, all your current stocks become useless, and the only things of value remaining are what has always been valuable: arable land, food, clean water, energy. If that happens and you haven't invested properly or have no practical skills to provide those things for yourself, or if you waited too long and now all these things are controlled by a very small population of concentrated power, then its gonna be a bad time.

We can see real examples of this in countries that have collapsed before, such as Venezuela, where food actually became currency. Those willing to provide security for the state to control people in miles long bread lines were paid in early access to groceries for them and their families. So food became a currency, and security services became a currency. Many places in the world have already collapsed, and all previous civilizations have all "collapsed" to some extent. We don't see this potential because of our privilege and inability to look beyond our own narrow vision. Being scared of the actual things happening in the world does not mean that the information presented is fear-mongering.

Disgruntled bears are funny. I’ll make sure to pour one out for them today as I’m counting my NVDA call earnings from yesterday.

On a serious note you diversify, make sure some of your wealth is in a commodity, currencies (including BTC), and real estate.

For one thing, people on collapse with financial knowledge and backgrounds don't delude themselves into thinking that the stock market is the economy. My experience is that most have educated themselves with information from many sources, including climate science, all of which have an impact on r/collapse folks and where they think the world and the U.S. economies are headed. The fact that the hothouse denizens that inhabit the Wall Street bubble think that all is well is instructive and one of the main reasons that actions to prepare for and adapt to the climate crisis haven't gained much traction. Such actions negatively impact profits and the next quarter numbers. We have increasingly been satisfied with short term success in this country and maybe the world with long term consequences to be borne by others sometime in the "distant" future. We must flog the mule until it perishes and then just find another mule (but they are going extinct, one-by-one). What will you do when private equity owns everything and there is nothing left to buy and rent back to us commoners?

While there are other geologic factors that can cause dramatic and long-run climactic changes, such as atmospheric oxygen content (snowball earth events), ice ages are now understood to be caused by Milankovitch Cycles.

No planetary orbit is circular; all orbit is eccentric (ovular). Obliquity is the degree of Earth’s axial tilt (currently 23.5 degrees), which ranges from 22.1–24.5 degrees. Procession is the “wobble” of the planet’s axis… imagine the wobble of the handle on a spinning dreidel.

The variation of these three factors over tens of thousands (obliquity, procession) and hundreds of thousands of years (orbital eccentricity) align to facilitate short-term changes to Earth’s climate on a geologic time scale.

Geologists and glaciologists estimate that the next glacial maximum (farthest orbital distance from the Sun) will occur in around 80,000 years, so we are actually moving INTO an ice age right now. So that leaves us with a serious problem: why is it still getting warmer? If we’re currently moving into another ice age while observing rapid warming, ocean acidification, glacial melt, etc, then why?

TL;DR: The consensus among geologists is that temperature retention within Earth systems is directly correlative to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Warming follows massive outgassing events, which is essentially what we’ve been doing on an industrial scale. The fact that Earth is moving into the next ice age while 150 billion tons of meltwater pours into the ocean every year tells us that something (GHG emissions) is seriously wrong with the Earth system. Don’t you even dare look up thaw slumps.

There have always been preppers predicting the disintegration of society. Imagine the frustration they must feel as they grow old and die without that occurring.

When everyone says the people expecting a crash are always wrong I tend to disagree.

The way I see it they're actually calling it correctly.

The things governments and central banks have been doing only really make sense if they were right.

The bet you have to make is how long we can prevent a crash, not IF one is coming.

I think the big takeaway from r/collapse is that your “investments” should also include plenty of food and water, friends to help out if things are bad, and skills needed for an ever-changing world that might be less friendly than our current one. Hedge your bets, basically.

The world has already ended 3 times just since I’ve been alive.

buy gme to hedge a collapse. if you don't understand there is another reddit talking about MOASS. it is not a meme

People said the same thing 20 years ago as well. Maybe it will, maybe it won't at some point. I do think there are other possible outcomes far more likely. There is just too many powerfull people who profiting from the system we have for any real change. Billions of poor won't matter as long as we have our algorithm fed social media feeds to keep us complacent.

Look at all the devastating events the american stock market has recovered from. WW2, the great depression, pandemics, more wars. Yeah there's no guarantee of anything but there's no gain in being a dooms dayer and not making any decisions

Just be aware that the market will hit its last all-time high within the next few years. You need a plan on when you're going to sell. In the meantime enjoy the bubble while it lasts I guess.

they need to stop playing video games and dreaming of the day they will be the main character.

These sorts typically suffer from Mental issues, immaturity, or stupidity.....some are just trying to farm karma.

It’s going to rain someday!

Look at the big brains on Brad…

The downturns are always tiny blips on the overall charts. If economies didn’t grow civilization would collapse. Would rather be right most of time as opposed to every so often

A collapse will happen, they always do, we have a bit more prospective than past generations. What's important is that you do not have too much risk and that when it does happen you see it as an opportunity, the best I ever did in the stock market was the money I put in during late 2008 and 2009 and then March of 2020. The rest of the money has just steadily appreciated.

A good capitalist never lets a tragedy go unprofitable!

Collapse doesn’t have to be all bad. Look at all the countries where empires once stood. Most of them are probably better off as they are than being the center of their era’s war industrialists.

Maybe we can move past government by blackmail to some friendlier technocracy

The climate will get worse but we have solutions even with just today’s tech.

They will be right eventually, but it may not be in their lifetime.

There is no counter point just be prepared. Stocks won’t matter all that will matter then is who has the food and guns

Ask the doomers during the depression, or WW2, or 9/11, or …

We are always one bad day away from no more days. I won’t allow that to reduce my financial duties

Invest in the S&P 500. If that “collapses”, then all this will be the least of your worries

"Permabears are always Perma wrong" - Tom Lee, Fundstrat

Reddit isn’t real life

Some people just get off on picture the downfall of stuff. Might be a big recession or two but nothing too crazy like a full collapse