Why 2024 is Shaping Up to Be a Total Shitstorm

Hope is highly overrated. Perhaps 2024 is the year forlorn hope dies — and collapse acceptance is born.

We started out 2023 with a war raging in Ukraine, rising fascism and far-right politics in many nations, the pandemic waning, and Donald Trump still very popular and making headlines.

Now we’re starting 2024 with two major wars raging, rising fascism and far-right politics in many nations, Donald Trump indicted four times on 91 felony counts, Trump nevertheless still being the GOP front-runner and likely 2024 nominee for president, COVID-19 starting to surge again, and having just been through the hottest year ever recorded.

Plus, as of Jan. 1, 2024 the earth’s human population officially passed eight billion for the first time ever — as our grain and food resources are shrinking due to climate disruptions. The U.S.A.’s semi-democracy and the rule of law itself are on the line. Can anyone say shitstorm?

I’m not talking about your average, humanly-exaggerated shitstorm. As we enter 2024, I’m talking about a bona fide, life-changing, expectation-shattering, humongous shitstorm of epic proportions.

I’m reminded of Dante’s image of the gates of Hell, which offer the devastating inscription “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”

The hopeless pathology of hope

Now, I’m not suggesting we should abandon all hope. Or … maybe I AM.

See, I think hope is highly overrated. Hope is the opiate of the uninformed and the delusional (my definition). Hope, to me, implies that a thing, person, or event is not doing very well, and is also not likely to change or improve — but we can always put on a happy face and live our lives in ‘hopeful’ denial.

No matter the truth of the situation, we can always ‘hope’ for the best, and hope it/they will change.

I’ve got to say: at bottom, I think hope is total bullshit. If a situation is worsening and becomes hopeless, what’s the point of pretending and hoping? If our global situation keeps worsening, hope is not an effective or intelligent response.

So what would be an effective, intelligent response? Action. Action would be. Change would be. Actual communal effort and transformation would be.

Also, collapse acceptance would be an intelligent response. Not grudging, occasional quasi-acceptance, but deep, real acceptance. Acknowledgment and acceptance of what is.

But hope? No, hope — especially unfounded hope — is just … pathetic. It’s utter nonsense steeped in denial. As a wise teacher of mine once put it, “Hope is the ship that sank.”

But if we give up hope … what then? We embrace ‘radical acceptance,’ that’s what

But what then? If we give up all hope, how do we deal with life? How do we ‘cope’?

Well, the answer is right in front of us. We get down and dirty and actually deal with life — in all its ups and downs — and we evolve and cope. We grow, change, and create new pathways and new social realities. We get frustrated, angry, sad, ‘stuck’ … and then get back to growing, changing, and maturing.

Strangely enough, the opposite of hopelessness is not hope. The opposite of hopelessness is something quite different: calm acceptance that embraces the truth and also works to improve things.

Hope is actually totally impotent. It changes nothing, accomplishes nothing — except miring us in happy-face denial — while ‘radical acceptance’ combined with action can produce real change.

It’s all rather paradoxical, in truth: hope is ultimately just an unhelpful illusion. It promotes an illusion of positivity, but holds and recreates the stark, dark reality of despair. “If only things were better … if only humanity would be more rational … well, damn, these things aren’t happening, but we can always hope.”

During WW II, do you think that conquered European nations overcame Nazi oppression and occupation through ‘hope’? No, they actively resisted, organized, fought, persisted — and eventually were liberated. Hope had nothing to do with it; determination, cooperative efforts, and informed anticipation of coming Allied assistance were what ‘saved the day.’

Acceptance AND dispassionate action: a crucial pairing

Now, back to our atrocious present-day reality: the coming 2024 shitstorm. Things are getting so bad that perhaps it’s quite appropriate to give up all hope … and gradually move into a mental space of ‘collapse acceptance’ and unattached action.

The concept of unattached, dispassionate action fascinates (and sometimes frustrates) me. It implies taking action without expecting any reward or obvious, fast results — which is not an easy thing to do, for most of us. Unattached, dispassionate action requires a high state of spiritual integration and insight, and most of us just aren’t there most of the time.

Yet — when life is turning to shit all around us, what other choice do we have? Our ‘normal’ day-to-day awareness and consciousness simply aren’t up to the task of dealing with collapse, or ever getting anywhere near full ‘collapse acceptance.’

So … what to do? Over the past 2.5 years I’ve been writing, over and over again, about the horrors that are being unleashed by Trump, MAGA, climate change, rising fascism, and other aspects of collapse. Just last month I wrote an article that seemed to strongly resonate with people, titled “A Terrifying Nightmare is Enveloping the Entire U.S. — and It’s About to Get Worse.”

It’s true. It IS about to get worse. For all the reasons I’ve been thinking and writing about.

The ‘end times’ are beginning, for real — and intensifying

Now we’re here. We’re entering the potential ‘end times’ for the U.S., and for the world as we know it. We’re entering TEOTWAWKI, for real.

I’m not going to bore you with endless examples and endless lists of problems. I’ve done plenty of that in the past already (meaning the lists and examples, not boring you, hopefully!). Here I’m just pointing out the depths to which we’ve already sunk, as well as the unfolding catastrophic nightmare we’ve brought on ourselves.

Sadly, we’ve been avoiding, denying, equivocating, resisting, and generally doing everything we can to NOT deal directly with the critical issues leading to societal collapse. Decades of denial and avoidance have taken their toll, and have resulted in … exactly the awful results that we’re now seeing emerging all around us.

Folks, the time for hope is gone. And the time for hopelessness is also gone. Now the only sane thing left to do is to accept the coming collapse, and work dispassionately to ameliorate the coming pain, destruction, and suffering. That’s it.

Riders on the Shitstorm — that’s who we are now, and that’s who we’ll be for the foreseeable future.