Doomscrolling the future

How collapse narratives become self-fulfilling prophecies

Where would you go if everything falls apart?¹

I hear this question constantly. From dinner parties to client workshops. It has become the default ice-breaker for the anxious professional class. And I have come to believe that the question itself is the problem.

Not the answer. The question. There is nothing wrong with taking collapse seriously as a scenario. If anything, that is precisely what futures thinking should do: sit with uncomfortable possibilities. But notice what the question assumes about the response. Not, “What would we need to change?” Not, “How do we prevent it?” The only question that comes naturally is where to run.

That is the tell. The collapse is treated as something other than one scenario among many to be examined, prepared for, or maybe averted. It is treated as settled. And the only remaining variable is personal: where do you go?

The collapse consensus

The climate is destabilizing. Authoritarian politics are gaining ground across democracies. None of this is news. What is relatively new is the degree to which collapse has become the default assumption about where things are headed.²

William Gibson gave it a name. In The Peripheral, he describes the Jackpot: not a single catastrophic event but a slow-motion pileup of crises, “more a climate than an event.” Gibson wrote fiction. But he always has been somewhat of a cultural empath, sensing where society is headed long before society knew itself. And the concept has become shorthand for how many people now experience the present. We are doomscrolling the Jackpot in real time.

In my master’s thesis, I worked on a concept for this kind of collective future expectation: Future Imaginaries. The idea is that certain images of the future become so dominant in a society’s discourse that they crowd out alternative ideas of the future entirely. People can no longer imagine that things could develop differently. The expectation becomes self-evident, ingrained in the background understanding, and taken for granted.

Here is a test for whether you are dealing with a Future Imaginary: Ask yourself how much internal and external resistance you would face if you tried to imagine a genuinely different future. Try telling someone at that dinner party that you think things might actually turn out okay. Watch their face. The condescension. The pity. As if you had not been paying attention.

The collapse narrative passes that test. It has become so prevalent that questioning it feels naive rather than critical. And that is precisely what makes it dangerous. Not because the underlying problems are not real. They are. But because when a single image of the future becomes this dominant, something else happens: it starts shaping behavior. And behavior, in turn, shapes reality.

The exit taxonomy

Albert Hirschman’s classic framework Exit, Voice, and Loyalty describes two responses to decline in organizations and states: you either leave (exit) or you speak up (voice). His key insight was that when exit becomes too easy, voice atrophies. Why invest in fixing something you can walk away from?

The collapse imaginary has made exit the default. And that exit takes many forms.

Geographic exit. Move somewhere safer. Portugal, New Zealand, rural Scandinavia. The calculus varies, but the logic is the same: this place is going down; find a better lifeboat. For the ultra-wealthy, this has become an industry like luxury bunkers in New Zealand, land purchases in Patagonia, and citizenship-by-investment programs marketed as insurance policies. For the rest of us, it is a fantasy that absorbs energy that could go elsewhere.³

Technological exit. Accelerate hard enough and technology will fix everything. The strongest version of this argument is the AGI bet: once we build superintelligent AI, it will fix climate change, cure disease, and optimize human civilization. This is an exit strategy dressed up as progress. It outsources agency to a machine that does not exist yet. It also absolves everyone of responsibility in the interim, as the machine is expected to solve the problem.

Psychological exit. Disengage. Stop reading the news. Focus on your garden, your family, your immediate circle. This one is harder to criticize because it is often a healthy response to information overload. But when it scales, when an entire educated class retreats into private life, the public sphere loses exactly the people who could shape it. The school board, the town hall, the local newspaper: they do not miss you when you leave. They just get worse.

Ideological exit. If democracy cannot handle the complexity, maybe we need something else. Techno-authoritarianism, seasteading, and post-democratic governance by the competent few. Peter Thiel’s famous line, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” is the quiet part said aloud. When capital and ideology exit together, they do not just leave a gap. They fund the alternative.

Four different surfaces, one shared move: leaving rather than staying. Every hour spent on an exit plan is an hour not spent on engagement. And the people with the most resources and the most capacity to shape the systems they live in are the ones most likely to have exit plans.

Kim Stanley Robinson has a blunter term for it: “preemptive capitulation.” Giving up before the fight has started. That is what exit strategies amount to when the thing being exited is not a failing company but a shared civilization.

The assumptions behind the exit

The trouble with exit strategies is not that they are irrational. Given certain assumptions, they make perfect sense. But those assumptions deserve scrutiny.

The first assumption is that collapse is inevitable. This treats a Future Imaginary as a forecast. But no image of the future is neutral. Every claim about what “will” happen carries interests, values, and power dynamics. When tech executives declare that AI will eliminate most jobs, they are not reporting a weather forecast. They are constructing a narrative that serves specific interests. Framing a future as inevitable is itself a power move.

The second assumption is that individual influence is negligible. This confuses personal helplessness with political reality. No single person can stop climate change. But everything we have today, we have because people fought for it. People died so we can have weekends. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the environmental movement: none of these were driven by people with exit strategies. We have become so accustomed to these achievements that we give up at the first sign of pushback.

The third assumption, the unspoken one, is that “getting out” is even possible. The Jackpot, if Gibson’s model holds, is systemic. Portugal becomes hot too. New Zealand depends on global supply chains. The bunker needs a functioning civilization to be worth emerging from.⁴

The self-fulfilling trap

Here is where it gets circular. And this is the part that I think matters most.

The economic sociologist Jens Beckert has studied what happens when entire groups of people share the same image of the future. In Imagined Futures, he argues that under genuine uncertainty, people do not make rational calculations about what will happen. They rely on collective images of the future: what he calls “fictional expectations.” These shared expectations coordinate behavior. They allow people to act in a world they cannot predict.

Beckert’s key insight is this: when enough people adopt the same image of the future, that image starts to become true. The collective expectation becomes self-fulfilling. Not because anyone predicted correctly, but because coordinated action in the same direction narrows the space of possible outcomes. Or, to put it bluntly: if everyone expects the same future, the future is less open.

And this means that whoever shapes the collective expectation has power. Beckert calls it the “politics of expectations.” Much of business communication, from consulting reports to keynote presentations, can be understood as attempts to shape fictional expectations in someone’s favor.

Now apply this concept to collapse.

Collapse narratives produce exit behavior: capital flees and talent emigrates. Exit behavior weakens the institutions and systems that could prevent collapse. Weaker institutions confirm the collapse narrative. Which produces more exit behavior. The loop closes.

Consider what it means when ten thousand of a city’s best-connected, most engaged citizens are simultaneously researching visa requirements instead of running for school board, founding civic organizations, or showing up at town halls. The loss is not hypothetical. It is happening in real time, and it compounds. Each exit decision is individually rational. Taken together, they produce exactly the outcome everyone was trying to escape.

Florence Gaub has argued that fear of the future loses its grip once people believe they have the capability to meet it. Exit strategies do the opposite. They reinforce the belief that the situation is beyond anyone’s capability, which makes the fear self-sustaining.

The question behind the question

If the collapse narrative becomes self-fulfilling through the withdrawal of capable people, then every person who stays and builds makes the narrative a little less true, simply by continuing to engage.

When someone asks, “Where would you go if everything fell apart?” what they are really asking is, “Do you still believe this is worth fighting for?” The exit question is a test of faith in collective capacity. Faith that staying and building is not naive.

I think it is worth fighting for. Whether things work out, I cannot say. But the alternative, a world where everyone with the means to leave does, is guaranteed to be worse. How do you make staying feel like a strategy, not a sacrifice? I do not have a clean answer to that.

But I know this: the darkest futures are not the ones where things fall apart. They are the ones where everyone decided in advance that falling apart was inevitable and acted accordingly.

Reading recommendations (German)

• Die unsichtbare Rolle der Zukunft in Organisationen: My new column for Changement Magazin on how organizations unconsciously assign roles to their future narratives and how that shapes their culture and decisions.

• Strategische Vorausschau in der deutschen Außenpolitik: My LinkedIn post on why German foreign policy keeps getting caught off guard: the difference between predicting the future and preparing for multiple futures.

1. The specific German version of this question is “Where would you go if the AfD wins the next general election?”

2. The term “permacrisis,” Collins Dictionary's word of the year in 2022, does similar work. It sounds like a neutral description of the present, but it quietly encodes the collapse narrative as the permanent state of things.

3. Let me clearly exempt marginalized groups, which would be persecuted if they stayed.

4. That's where all the hype around “longevity” falls apart for me. If you really want to live forever, shouldn't you be the biggest climate and democracy activist on the planet? What good does living longer do for you when everything around you is shit?