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Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by onethought on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:17PM (#50109643)
Honestly there are writings from the greeks, romans, enlightment, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s... That read just like this.

At some point, this view point, and this predicament is just "The Human Condition".[0]

[0] That's not a excuse to not try to fix the broken things around us. But perspective is important.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by Loquebantur on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:53PM (#50110056)
The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory.

Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in.

It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go.

Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects.

The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors.

So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by polishdude20 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:02PM (#50110194)
Isn't this how it always was though? It just feels to the individual it's different probably because our news feeds are all so toxic. The stuff that's happening in the world is bad but the way it's presented and with such significance is way worse.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by Loquebantur on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:35PM (#50110655)
No, it's categorically different. Your point about not being able to judge based on "news feeds" is valid though.

Societal collapse has happened before, many times actually (but usually with great spans of time between them). Western culture doesn't particularly like to speak about it, lest people get the idea, such cataclysm might repeat.

A society doesn't exist after it collapses, so "reporting" on it is usually rather scant and framed from the view of those left to talk about it (often not many).

Consequently, historians struggle with pinpointing the reasons for those collapses. People often had no clue themselves and didn't see it coming. Complexity theory is a rather new development.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by Daishiman on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:23PM (#50110473)
Sure, the difference was that in the past local crises gave way to events that would normally span out to neighboring countries. The level of interconnectedness, as the article points out, means there's nowhere to go and nowhere that's exempt.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by marginalia_nu on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:37PM (#50110682)
To be fair, depending on when these things were written, there was a lot of shit going on in Greece and Rome that merited such a take, including invasions, plagues, civil war. And the '20s[1], '30s[1], and '40s[2], and '50s[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1953%E2%80%931962)

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by HPsquared on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:11PM (#50110314)
Speaking of the Romans, decline can indeed take hundreds of years to play out.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by watwut on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:54PM (#50110063)
> 20s 30s

They were heading up towards large catastrophy. In fact.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by card_zero on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:31PM (#50110608)
But what kind of doom did they anticipate in the roaring 20s? I guess Upton Sinclair wasn't very happy, but that's not the same as crises everywhere you turn.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by marginalia_nu on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:43PM (#50110757)
The Great Depression began in 1929.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by card_zero on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:44PM (#50110765)
October 1929. Tenuous.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by marginalia_nu on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:44PM (#50110777)
A reminder that technically correct is the best kind of correct.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by watwut on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:00AM (#50115067)
That would require historical research the person I responded to did not bothered to do. Like at all, they just assumed what people wrote at the time

And factually both 20s and 39s ended up in massive unprecedented catastrophes.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by GolfPopper on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:44PM (#50109953)
Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1979:_History

That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.

That's my perspective.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by rickydroll on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:56PM (#50111534)
I have a few more times around the sun, and you are not the only person with that perspective.

I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.

I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.

I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by hyperman1 on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:49AM (#50114556)
I wonder why you don't add 9-11 to your list of multi year persistent events. Covid and 2008 are repeats of older crises. Meanwhile, 9-11 caused the political course of the main world power to completely change direction. Even if the event itself only caused about 3000 victim's, I'd still rate it on the same scale as Napoleon or the world wars. Trump is just the latest continuation of it.
Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by rickydroll on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:02AM (#50119251)
The previous commenter had mentioned it already, and I don't think 9/11 had the same psychic shock and persistence as COVID and 2008. But I'm sure you have had a different experience behind your feeling of 9/11 as a more persistent traumatic event.

Trump is a continuation of a multi-tentacled, longer-timeline octopus that encompasses all of our collective traumatic events.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises by bubbluppugus on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:01PM (#50110165)
Well yeah but at the same time social specifics exist; Trump doesn't go about things like Caesar because the world is fundamentally different

So negotiations and solutions must be too