Collapse, Inc.: What HR Taught Me About Our Dying World

Remember how we used to worry about stupid stuff? Like whether our performance review would land us that 3% raise? Good times. Today I’m writing about something that's been bubbling up from years ago—a connection I can't unsee between my old job in Human Resources and what we're all living through now on this beautiful, terrible, troubled planet.

There's something they don't teach you in HR seminars: how to watch a company die. But I've had front-row seats to this particular show a few times. I've handed out hundreds of pink slips, often knowing I was just postponing my own.

The pattern became eerily familiar. First came the whispers. The suddenly-closed conference room doors. The executives using phrases like "strategic realignment" when they meant "we're circling the drain."

Then the office atmosphere would change. People stopped making eye contact in hallways. The break room—once filled with birthday celebrations and awkward small talk about weekend plans—fell silent. Joy evaporated. Trust collapsed. Everyone knew what was coming, but speaking it aloud felt taboo, dangerous.

Sound familiar? I see the same patterns playing out on a planetary scale. The whispers have become scientific reports. The closed-door meetings are now climate summits that produce nothing but empty promises and calls for hope. The evasive language comes in the form of "green growth" and "sustainable development" when what we're really facing is something far more fundamental: death.

And that atmospheric shift? It's here too. We're living it. The way strangers interact (or turn away). The undercurrent of anxiety in everyday conversations. The retreat into ideological bunkers. The way we can discuss celebrity gossip for hours but fall awkwardly silent when the topic of our collective future comes up.

The Bosses Always Get Theirs

There's another pattern from those corporate collapses that might ring a bell. As the ship was sinking, the executives always—and I mean always—found ways to reward themselves. Golden parachutes. "Retention bonuses" for making "tough decisions" (like firing everyone else). The corporate equivalent of looting the supply closet on the way out. 

After each round of layoffs, I'd watch the higher ups congratulate each other in the executive suite while I dealt with shell-shocked employees cleaning out their desks. Sometimes the execs would even celebrate at expensive restaurants that same night.

Now I watch billionaires build space rockets and luxury bunkers while the world burns. Different scale, same story.

Finding the Truth-Tellers

I'm going to tell you a professional secret: I was a terrible HR person. Terrible because I couldn't keep my mouth shut when I was supposed to. The playbook said to keep people in the dark about impending layoffs—supposedly to "maintain productivity" until the very end. Keep them working hard right up until the moment I had to show them the door.

I couldn't do it. I'd drop hints. Have quiet conversations. Give people time to prepare, emotionally and practically. Management would have fired me if they'd known, but it felt like the bare minimum of human decency. I was a truth teller and I continually challenged the powers that be—sometimes quite publicly.

What I noticed was interesting. Some people shut down completely when they glimpsed the truth. Others found a kind of liberation in it: "Well, if this place is going down anyway, I might as well start that pottery business I've been dreaming about."

But here's the crucial part that kept me up at night: Those who could pivot, who could find meaning in the ending—they almost always had some combination of savings, skills, connections, or simply the psychological security that comes with knowing you'll land on your feet.

And that's where the corporate metaphor gets complicated when we talk about planetary collapse. Because there's no other company to apply to. No fresh start somewhere else. No "pottery business" equivalent when we're talking about the foundations of life itself.

The Privilege of Preparation

I struggle with this in my writing. How do we talk honestly about what's happening without paralyzing people? How do we acknowledge the reality that some have vastly more options than others? How do we face the fact that the suffering is and will continue to be catastrophically uneven?

I look for guides, for wisdom traditions that might help. Thich Nhat Hanh comes close—his ability to maintain compassion and presence after witnessing unimaginable horrors during the Vietnam War gives me hope. But even his profound teachings assume some kind of continuity of human civilization. We don’t have that.

What does it mean to face something that might be beyond even what our wisest traditions have prepared us for?

We're Not Crazy; We're Just Early

Here's what I can tell you: You're not going insane. What you're sensing is real. The unease. The disconnect between official narratives and what you see with your own eyes. The way people talk about twenty-year plans while the present is crumbling.

If you've ever been in a dying organization, you know this feeling—the surreal experience of sitting in meetings discussing the five-year strategic plan when the company won't survive five months. The collective pretending. The emperor's new clothes on an institutional scale.

I remember walking into work one day, a couple of weeks before a massive layoff that would eliminate half the company. The hallways were quiet as a library. People were at their desks, screens on, fingers occasionally tapping keyboards. But almost no actual work was happening. Everyone was paralyzed, waiting for the axe to fall.

That's where many of us are now—going through the motions, playing along with business as usual while a voice inside screams that something is deeply wrong.

Beyond the Final Paycheck

So what do we do with this awareness? How do we face what's coming with whatever measure of dignity remains available to us?

I don't have perfect answers, but I have some thoughts.

First, we name what's happening. Not in the apocalyptic language that titillates and paralyzes, but in the straightforward terms of reality. Like I might have said to an employee: "Yes, the end is coming. No, I don't know exactly when. Yes, it's okay to be scared. No, you're not crazy for feeling this way."

Second, we find each other. The strongest memories I have from those corporate collapses weren't of individuals breaking down, but of small groups forming—people checking on each other, sharing information, creating tiny islands of mutual aid as the structures around them failed.

Third, we resist the pull toward numbness and withdrawal. In those final corporate days, the people who suffered most weren't just those who lost jobs, but those who had already lost themselves—who had retreated into shells weeks or months before the official end came.

Laughing at the End of the World

You might have noticed I sometimes use humor when talking about these heavy things. That's not accidental. In those dying companies, gallows humor was often the last form of resistance—the thing that reminded us we were still human, still connected, still capable of moments of joy even as the doors closed.

I remember standing in the parking lot after a particularly brutal round of layoffs with a group of shell-shocked colleagues. Someone made a darkly hilarious comment about the CEO's vapid pep talks. We laughed until we cried—or cried until we laughed—I'm still not sure which.

It wasn't denial. It was humanity asserting itself in the face of institutional cruelty. It was connection when everything pushed toward isolation.

The Difference That Makes a Difference

This is where I struggle most. Because that corporate metaphor, helpful as it is, breaks down in one crucial way. Those company deaths, painful as they were, happened within a larger context that remained intact. There were other jobs, other possibilities, life beyond.

What we face now is different in kind, not just degree. And I won't insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise.

But I keep coming back to something I witnessed over and over: how people faced the same external circumstances with profoundly different internal responses. Some maintained connection, creativity, even occasional joy until the very end. Others had checked out long before the official termination, living as ghosts in their own lives. The happiest were those who spoke their minds and were unafraid—there was, after all, nothing left to lose.

The end came for everyone. But how they lived until that end—that varied tremendously.

Cruelty Is the Point, But It's Not the Whole Story

I remain furious at the kakistocracy—the rule by the worst among us—that has brought us here. The executives taking bonuses while firing workers are now the billionaires building bunkers and buying politicians while the planet burns. The cruelty, the shortsightedness, the bottomless greed—it's all connected.

But giving them our humanity before they've taken everything else feels like surrender of the worst kind.

What would it look like to face this honestly—the collapse, the dying, the profound injustice of it all—while refusing to let it define us completely? To maintain our capacity for connection, for meaning-making, for the occasional absurd joke in the parking lot after the world ends?

I don't know exactly. I'm figuring it out alongside you.

But I do know this: In those corporate deaths, the people I admired most weren't those with the most perfect exit strategies or the biggest severance packages. They were the ones who somehow remained fully human—fully present, connected, occasionally even joyful—even as the structures around them crumbled.

Maybe that's what "dying with dignity" means on a planetary scale. Not some transcendent acceptance that bypasses grief and rage, but a stubborn insistence on our humanity even when everything conspires to take it from us.

I don't know if that's enough. I don't know if anything is. But it's where I've landed for now, in this strange moment between worlds.

Thanks for being here with me in it. Seriously. It helps more than you know.