I saw a man in a wheelchair with an injured foot in the ER waiting room. He can’t walk. His foot is wrapped haphazardly in what appears to be some makeshift cast. He says he’s been there for thirteen hours. He’s still waiting to be taken back for x ray results—an x ray he received many hours ago. The hospital is so understaffed, they cannot handle all the people there seeking medical attention. When urgent care’s limited resources fail (facilities that are also understaffed), they simply direct people to an already overburdened emergency room. The workers are burnt out, the patients are pissed, everybody’s miserable, no one is really helped.

This is what collapse looks like.

It’s just another summer day, a little hotter than the past, but nothing too out of the ordinary. I get an air quality alert on my phone. “Wildfire smoke? From where?” From Canada. The air is engulfed in a dense, dark haze. The air becomes downright hazardous. Experts are saying to not go outside unless you absolutely have to. It lasts for days. It smells awful, too. And all this from a thousand miles away.

This is what collapse looks like.

A man is drowning in debt, barely breaking even. He is trapped in a cycle of paying credit card debt—paying back the very credit that kept him afloat for so long as things continued to get more difficult, as goods continued to get more expensive. He is one crisis away from financial ruin. One stroke of bad luck away from collections agencies, from losing his car, from losing his apartment.

This is what collapse looks like.

The society we once knew is already collapsing around us. The evidence is there. It’s everywhere we look. It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore it. I don’t know how people can still not see it. Maybe it’s willful ignorance. Maybe enough people are still doing well enough that they just think everything’s fine, since they got theirs. I don’t know.

What I do know is: this is what collapse looks like, and if we don’t radically change things, this is how each and every one of our lives will look.

Edit for clarity: A lot of people are saying this is naive and not anything like what collapse looks like. When I say “this is what collapse looks like,” I mean that these are signs of the cracks showing. These are signs of strained systems that will continue to bend until they break. This is what it’s like living through the process of collapse, not what post-collapse looks like.

Collapse of societies is a slow, painful process. These are all part of that process.