I have been called a pessimist, a doomer, a Cassandra. I am none of these things. I am simply someone who has read the evidence and refused to look away. The recurrent phenomenon of societal collapse — from the Bronze Age to Rome to the Maya — teaches us that complex societies do not “solve” their way out of diminishing returns. They continue to invest in complexity until the returns go negative, and then they simplify, often violently and always painfully