Ever since reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a teenager, I’ve been fascinated by the decline and collapse of empires. The trilogy chronicles the slow collapse of an immensely powerful, galaxy-spanning imperium ruling thousands of planets. Asimov drew directly from human history. Civilizations have always experienced periods of breakdown. Empires expand beyond their capacity to govern. Elites extract more than they invest. Public trust erodes. Complexity becomes fragility. Eventually, the bonds holding societies together unravel.
This narrative has resurfaced recently across literature and commentary. I recently read Umar Haque’s essay “The Year the World Broke“ (Substack, Jan 5, 2026). Haque argues that 2025 was a historical rupture, a turning point after which the world “broke” structurally and systemically. He frames 2025 as the end of multiple potential futures and the beginning of a single, bleak trajectory: rising authoritarianism, geopolitical fragmentation, economic stagnation, and civilizational decline.
According to Haque, the last U.S. election triggered rapid fracturing in geopolitics, economics, and global cooperation. Growth slipped toward stagflation, climate action faltered, and democratic norms went into shock internationally. He paints a future where global public goods such as peace, stability, growth, cooperation, and the rule of law all erode. As these decay, the world shifts toward conflict, instability, stagnation, isolationism, and disorder.
While bleak, he captures a growing sense many of us share: something is fundamentally wrong. I’m reminded of the line from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “The world is changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.”
We sense that things are breaking not just politically, economically, or environmentally, but civilizationally. Institutions that once felt stable now appear hollow. Democratic norms fray. Climate commitments slip. Geopolitics hardens into zero-sum competition. Even prosperity, where it exists, feels brittle and unequally shared.
This mood is not the product of social media excess. It is pattern recognition. Writers across disciplines are converging on the same observation: the large systems that organized the postwar world no longer deliver legitimacy, security, or meaning at scale. Pessimism, in this sense, is not emotional; it is observational. To deny it outright feels dishonest. To minimize it feels complacent. Something is ending, or at least failing, in plain sight.
This matters because our modern imaginations tend to equate decline with totality. We speak as if a failing global order means everything is failing.
One consequence of such pessimism is that it encourages us to think almost exclusively in planetary terms. We worry about the fate of democracy, the trajectory of climate change, the arc of history. These are real concerns, but they are abstract — far removed from the domains where individuals can meaningfully act. When responsibility is framed at the level of systems we cannot control, disengagement begins to feel not just tempting, but rational.
Yet history shows that collapse rarely resembles apocalypse. The fall of the Roman Republic did not end Roman life. The breakdown of medieval Christendom did not end European civilization. China’s imperial rule ebbed and flowed through intense periods of conflict and breakdown, yet its culture persisted — and now resurges. Even the catastrophes of the twentieth century, including two world wars, genocides, and economic depressions, destroyed millions of lives without erasing the social fabric everywhere at once.
Collapse, historically, is uneven. It thins rather than annihilates. Central authority weakens, but local systems adapt. Some institutions fail spectacularly, while others persist quietly. Life continues. It is often harsher and narrower, but still structured by norms, relationships, and responsibilities.
So how do we, as individuals, cope and survive? History suggests that when large structures weaken, responsibility does not disappear; it moves downward. It shifts from empires to cities, from nations to communities, from grand narratives to everyday institutions. The survival of civilization has never depended solely on the strength of its capitals, but on the durability of its connective tissue: families, professions, local governments, religious bodies, schools, voluntary associations, and cultural norms.
The failure of the nation-state does not mean the failure of neighborhoods. The erosion of global cooperation does not negate the value of local trust. The hollowing out of institutions at the top does not mean all institutions are empty; only that some require repair, and others require protection.
Seen this way, the question “What can one person do?” is poorly framed. No individual can stabilize the climate or restore global order alone. But individuals can uphold standards in the institutions they inhabit. They can transmit norms, mentor successors, insist on competence, resist cynicism, and preserve forms of life that still function. Historically, these are the actions that allow societies to survive periods of contraction without losing their moral and cultural core.
This is not a call to optimism. It is a call to responsibility. Civilizations do not end because people lose hope. They end because people stop maintaining the things that matter — once hope becomes abstract. The real question is not whether the world is breaking. It is whether we mistake global failure for universal meaninglessness and abandon the smaller structures that still depend on us.