Diary Joanne Black
Arecent headline here and overseas contained good news and bad news: “New Zealand rated best place to survive global societal collapse”.
Whichever part of that headline someone finds good or bad is likely to depend on where they live, and their view of what “global societal collapse” might entail. If their version of collapse produces a fear that they might no longer be able to import electric bikes or Gib board, they might indeed suffer in whatever meltdown – if any – is coming. However, if, like me, you think a collapse means no longer having to turn up at the office at 8am every day, it could, after all, contain some sliver of hope.
Other places to do well out of the study included Tasmania, Ireland and the UK, which are also islands. This, I think, is just reward for all the times kids in such places were sunburnt at the beach during summer holidays.
Having a coastline must surely be an advantage during a global societal collapse, when people can head down to the beach or the rocks with tridents and other improvised weapons to repel refugees from continental countries. That is, unless the continental visitors are bringing electric bikes and Gib board. Given the lack of markets during the global societal collapse, it could be a great time for us to exercise our bargaining power. Freetrade deals be damned.
I’ve always thought humans have been too keen to embrace apocalyptic visions. One advantage of ageing is that I’ve lived through quite a few predictions of doom. These include forecasts that populations could be scythed because we have eaten madcow burgers, made houses out of asbestos, stockpiled nuclear weapons or done such a bad job of computer programming that civilisation would fall apart at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999.
As a result of surviving for so long, I’ve become a little sanguine. The latest scenarios include a severe financial crisis, the climate crisis, the destruction of nature, a worse pandemic than Covid or, the real kicker, “a combination of these”, as the Guardian reported scientists as having predicted.
Unfortunately, much of the world’s population lives in nations that, by the standards of developed countries, already have some form of societal breakdown. Perhaps what’s really meant by “global” is that even rich white people won’t escape such a collapse. On the upside, that will be one way to create more fairness.
Another way of looking at all this is that we could try to do not just “something” but many, many things to avoid such a scenario. I’ll start with nature; people are too hard.
Recently, the last of my children – all of whom had returned home last year during lockdown – moved out, so my husband and I are empty nesters for the first time. This has positives and negatives.
Perhaps what’s really meant by “global” is that even rich white people won’t escape a collapse.
My husband has always been our cook and is having trouble adjusting. Each night, our dinner plates spill over with excess food that would have fed an extra person or two. The hundred shoes inside the front door have reduced to a couple of pairs. My make-up is where I left it, as is our car. And we are no longer woken at 3am by the crashing of kitchen implements as our daughter, having arrived home from a night out – sometimes with her DJ friend Hurricane Emily – makes a toasted sandwich. If I bake, the ingredients are still in the pantry, instead of there being just empty containers.
There are a hundred things to be grateful for now that there are just two of us. Oddly, I’d give most of them up to have the kids back. l