Collapse Is Accelerating

Nothing Is Stable Anymore

"The world is becoming a very unstable place, and the pace at which things are changing all around us has become absolutely mind-numbing. In fact, change has become one of the only constants in today's world. Once upon a time, people in the United States could actually make 20 or 30 year plans and feel confident about achieving them. But now, nothing is stable anymore. The financial crisis showed us that some of the biggest corporations on the globe can collapse in a single day. The events of the past few weeks have shown us that entire governments can be brought down in a single week. We live in a world where there are now very few "guarantees" that you can count on. One of the only things that is guaranteed is that technology and information will continue to grow at exponential speeds. This year, the total amount of information produced on electronic devices around the globe is projected to be more than a zettabyte. A zettabyte is equivalent to one sextillion bytes. In other words, imagine a one with more than 21 zeroes following it.

Many of the things that we take for granted today didn't even exist a few short years ago. Facebook has only been with us since 2004. YouTube has only been with us since 2005. Can you imagine a world where those two websites did not exist?

We live in a world of information overload. Once upon a time it would have been possible to go to sleep for a decade and wake up and everything would still be pretty much the same. But today if you were to do that you would be in for a case of severe culture shock.

Do you remember when you could buy a set of encyclopedias and the information in them would still be good a decade or two later?

Well, things do not work that way anymore.

In fact, most of the articles on this website will be obsolete a month from now.

In today's world, you really have to think twice before you say that something is "not possible".

A few months ago, it was absolutely inconceivable that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would declare to the world that he has "spent enough time serving Egypt".

Yet here we are.

One week the government of Tunisia seemed perfectly stable and the next week it was toppled.

Do any of you out there still think that you can make realistic "plans for the future" in today's world?

Once upon a time in America, many of us were taught that if we worked really hard in school we could get a great job with a great company. We were promised that if we were faithful to that company for 30 or 40 years that we would be treated fairly and given a good pension.

Well, in today's world you might as well crumple up that plan and throw it into the wastebasket.

There is no such thing as a stable job anymore. Businesses are coming into existence and going out of existence faster than ever before. Today, one out of every four Americans workers has been with their empl0yer for less than a year.

Most Americans still don't really understand that they are now part of a global economy. They keep thinking that things were the way they used to be. They keep thinking that the U.S. economy is invincible.

Well, those days are long gone. The United States is being deindustrialized at lightning speed. Tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been sent overseas. China, once a complete economic backwater, is now kicking the crap out of us on the global economic stage.

Our financial system is certainly on incredibly shaky ground. Will any of us ever forget what happened in 2008?

Do any of us actually believe that it can't happen again?

Our health care system is also incredibly unstable. Today, 46 million Americans have absolutely no health insurance. That means that 46 million Americans are just one major injury or illness away from financial ruin with no protection whatsoever.

Not that those that actually have health insurance are protected. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that did have health insurance.

So just because you have health insurance does not mean anything. One bad accident or one really bad disease and you could be totally wiped out.

Isn't that comforting?

But the truth is that our entire economy is on the verge of total collapse."