Impact

A Meditation on Our Collapse

Photo by Gareth Harrison on Unsplash

We’re past the fall but not yet at the bottom. We’re in active collapse—that grinding, daily erosion where yesterday’s unthinkable becomes tomorrow’s precedent. Exhaustion is now the enemy’s greatest weapon. The sheer volume of destruction breeds numbness, and people start accepting the unacceptable because resistance feels futile.

This is precisely when remembering what’s real matters most. When the simple insistence that two plus two equals four becomes revolutionary. When refusing to pretend the emperor has clothes becomes an act of courage. When maintaining the capacity for moral recognition—this is evil, this is fascism, this is sedition—keeps alive the possibility of rebuilding.

Soon comes the crushing arrival of consequences. The ground doesn’t approach; it strikes. Everything that seemed solid in the weightless phase—the delusions of control, the fantasies of optimization, the belief that reality could be indefinitely defied—shatters on contact.

Impact has its own physics: sudden revelations of truths long denied. Fascists discover skilled workers won’t come to countries that disappear immigrants. Oligarchs learn that dismantling regulation also dismantles the predictability their wealth needs. The Supreme Court finds that erasing constitutional limits erases the legitimacy that makes their rulings enforceable.

That’s why everything is failing at once—markets, courts, governance—each crisis colliding with the others. Immigration terror collides with labor shortages. The DOJ becomes a revenge machine just as markets crave legal stability. Media surrender to power just as public trust becomes essential.

These contradictions were suspended in freefall. Impact resolves them violently. The tech barons wanted unregulated capitalism and stable property rights. The fascists wanted to terrorize immigrants and keep the economy humming. The Court wanted unchecked executive power and judicial supremacy. Now their impossible wants meet immovable reality.

The danger? Doubling down. Denying the ground is real. Restaging the fall instead of facing the landing. That’s why Trump meets chaos with more chaos, oligarchs prescribe more optimization as systems fragment, and the Court issues ever more absurd rulings as its authority dissolves.

Impact fragments attention as thoroughly as it shatters institutions. But it also clarifies: gravity is undeniable when you hit the ground. The evaporating fortunes, the failed plans, the collapsed institutions—these are not theories but physical facts, piercing even the most sophisticated denial.

What follows impact is the rubble phase—sorting through wreckage, preserving memory, documenting truth. The wire hasn’t just trembled—sections have been cut. Some strands still hold. The question is whether enough of us will grab them to weave something new, or let the last connections snap while debating whether the wire ever existed.

The time for warnings is over. Now comes resistance, documentation, preservation—keeping alive the clarity about what is, the memory of what was, and the possibility of what might yet be rebuilt from the ruins.

Impact doesn’t last long. But in its violence is a rare moment of truth. The collision is also the moment of clarity.

And yes—this is going to hurt.

Remember what’s real.