Many people speculate and dream of a short, sharp economic reset before growth rebounds and society continues as normal, or a total SHTF collapse where we return to gold and silver as currency and all our modern daily troubles are wiped away as we return to either some idyllic agrarian society or we roam a post-apocalyptic land as foragers on the remnants of industrial society.
However, another far more likely alternative is an ongoing slow collapse punctuated by the occasional extreme economic event. Society will become more monitored, more controlled, more manipulated, and governments will drift towards authoritarianism. Disinflation would become deflation. Life will become a slow, painful grind where our best days are behind us.
What will it look like? A quote from someone on another forum:
However, another far more likely alternative is an ongoing slow collapse punctuated by the occasional extreme economic event. Society will become more monitored, more controlled, more manipulated, and governments will drift towards authoritarianism. Disinflation would become deflation. Life will become a slow, painful grind where our best days are behind us.
What will it look like? A quote from someone on another forum:
[]mysterion2 1 day ago*
I think an engineered slow crash is the preferred option right now for the elites. A deflationary spiral in the short term followed by a slow contraction of money supply, (pain for the masses but not starvation pain; more like managed pain).
For the masses, collapse will just be a question of "tightening their belts" at first. But then, inexorably over time, people will start to notice things weren't as good as when they were young. They'll hold on to old clothes more. They'll make do with that clunky old gas cooker. They'll make do with that minivan they would have traded in 3 years ago but still works so fuck what the neighbors in the suburbs think. Slowly, the suburbs themselves will become islands due to fuel costs.
Slow collapse will be the gradual permeation into mass consciousness of the idea that lesser conditions than you once remembered when you were a kid are acceptable because times are 'different' now. (Due to X,Y,Z reasons the TV will say. Rioters will be terrorists, complainers will be dissidents and the tone of life will become adversarial, us v them. But the us v them will really just be we versus ourselves.
Babies will be born and will, once they come of age, look back on today (2015) as the peak of a bell curve they are on the backside of.
The generation of teenagers 10 years from now will be pissed that we threw it all away so easily without a fight.
What really blows my mind is what the humans one hundred years from now will say about us alive today.
History will not be kind to us.