In the US, life expectancy peaked about a decade ago and has declined to 76.1 years, reaching levels from about three decades ago. Critically, this decline started *before* the COVID-19 pandemic, which has certainly exacerbated the decline but did not initiate it.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819944/live-free-and-die-the-sad-state-of-u-s-life-expectancy

2/

In the US, some 850 school districts have switched from a five-day school week to a four-day week. This by itself should not be a cause for alarm; there’s nothing intrinsically superior about a five-day week, a fairly arbitrary schedule that we inherited from decades and centuries ago.

But what is alarming is the cause: these districts are reducing hours not to experiment with the educational or other benefits of a different schedule, but because they cannot afford to continue operations five days a week.

3/

https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/4-day-school-week-study

Just a few decades ago, mass shootings were essentially unknown in the US, limited to infighting among organized crime or the rare spectacular incident, such as Charles Whitman’s use of the clock tower at the University of Texas to murder 15 people.

In 2021, there were 686 mass shootings in the US—incidents in which four or more people are injured or killed by a shooter. In 2023, there have been about 480 so far, with five months left to go.

4/

The British city of Blackpool “has England’s lowest life expectancy, highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing.” It’s something of a mess, in other words.

And yet its life expectancy—the lowest in the country—is the same as the average *of the entire United States.*

Everyone in the US, from the richest to the poorest, is likelier to die at any age than their counterparts in countries like the UK.

https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303

5/

Some 37% of Americans lack the savings to afford a $400 emergency expense. This is an increase from 32% in 2021. Real wages fell half a percent since last year, while expenses increased, and over a third of Americans reported being worse off financially than they were last year.

Meanwhile, capitalists exploited the pandemic to post their highest profit rates since 1950.

People cannot afford emergency expenses because someone took that money from them.

6/

https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/

Americans collectively owe about $17 trillion in consumer debt. Right-libertarians complain about taxes, which average around a third of income for many Americans.

If we imagine our income being directed to pay off each obligation sequentially rather than simultaneously, then we could calculate how long we labor each year to extinguish our tax burden—about halfway through April. But then we labor another third of the year to pay off our landlords and mortgage owners for permission to shelter ourselves. So let’s imagine that, by the end of July, we’ve covered those two.

Many people pay another 10% of their income to finance their car payments, while student loans consume another 10% of income for many people.

So, perhaps by the middle of October you’ve paid those rents as well.

7/

Americans are managed like livestock. We’re draft animals for the wealthy. And let’s be clear: this has always been the case. The US was founded as a plantation economy and while it has evolved since then, it has never lost this basic foundational aspect.

The earliest colonial settlements were vast consumers of unfree labor: of enslaved indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, and also of bonded and indentured and otherwise servile labor sometimes literally kidnapped from the dregs of Europe’s white lower classes.

The problem that we face today is that this system, which has faced plenty of challenges but endured for centuries, is breaking down, and indeed has been breaking down for decades. We might call this “collapse” if, like me, you have a taste for honesty even when it sounds melodramatic.

The fastest we ever travelled was in 1969.

8/

Societal collapse is fairly common in the historical record, but it seems melodramatic to use the phrase in this context because of how hegemonic the US has been for so long. It appears so robust in so many ways and I imagine quite a few people would laugh at me for hysterical pessimism.

But collapse is often a slow, uneven process. Historians traditionally mark the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, when the Ostrogothic king Odoacer deposed the last emperor in Rome. But Rome had faced a near-endless series of crises for centuries, including massive political transformations, loss of territory, and a decline in its ability to manage complex projects like infrastructure.

And an emperor reigned in the east until 1453, nearly a thousand years later. Lots of people living through collapse probably don’t consciously think of it as collapse, and many would probably aggressively deny any trends towards decline.

9/

So I don’t really know what else to call what I’ve seen over the decades of my life: the shuttered factories and rotted-out downtowns. The deaths from despair from suicide and opioid overdose, to which I would even add the rise of mass shootings—in a meta-sense, the same sort of aimless and destructive lashing-out you might see from caged and stressed zoo animals. The shrinking school week and closing schools and libraries. The tent camps and bread lines, all in what is ostensibly the richest society that is or ever was.

10/

If this thread has a thesis statement, it goes something like this:

In the early 70s, the capital class stages a revolt of the rich against the poor. The post-World War II consensus had transferred too much wealth and too much power to the working class, so the rich made it their mission to dismantle that consensus and make sure it could never re-emerge. First Nixon and then Reagan built and institutionalized debt traps, slashed social spending, annihilated labor unions, and poisoned the very idea that there was any such thing as “society” or that we could work together to solve our shared problems.

They took Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, that there is no such thing as society, and made it the guiding ethos of American society, to ensure we would remain atomized and unable to organize. And then they and their successors have milked us for everything they could, driving us as beasts of burden to the point of exhaustion. Or rather, of collapse.

11/

What else can I point to, in order to make this case? It’s almost too much to keep track of.

Our infrastructure is crumbling because it was left to rot.

We have the largest prison population in the world, and those prisoners are often farmed out as slave labor.

We have epidemics of suicide, opioid addiction, and loneliness. We consume more anti-depressants each year.

We work longer than our counterparts in other countries, are less healthy, and then die younger.

We are often one “oh shit” moment—a car accident or a burst pipe—away from homelessness. In any given year, about 2.5 million American children experience homelessness.

Remember those measly government benefits we received in 2020? The “stimulus” checks and unemployment benefits? Things are so bad in the US that those paltry handouts were enough to decrease poverty rates:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/key-us-poverty-rate-fell-record-low-2021-census-bureau-says-2022-09-13/

12/

I think back to that optimism I had as a child and I mourn it. The society I live in is a hollowed-out shell of what I remember, and even that was a decade or more into the decline.

Our horizons shrink. Our expectations for the future become more modest. Some of us leave if we can, and others stop having children, and some check out a bit more permanently. Big projects are postponed or canceled. Collapse is a slow process: institutions can coast on momentum and bring to bear enormous resources—including and especially violence—to maintain the status quo, at least for a shrinking elite. People will get used to new conditions, or deny that anything has changed.

But things have changed. I was trained from an early age: do well in school, go to university, get a job and work your way up. I could, I was led to believe, expect a quietly prosperous life in which I would be more comfortable than my parents and my children even more than me.

In reality, quality of life in the US is declining. I am burdened by crippling student debt. I have few realistic options for advancement. I even tried hustling a hobby into a second job once! I am so fucking tired of being stressed all the time. I am, by dint of genetics, prone to anxiety anyway, but genetics alone cannot explain away this ever-present sense of precarity, that one wrong move could ruin my life as thoroughly as millions of other Americans have had their lives ruined.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-09-11/a-global-anomaly-the-us-declines-in-annual-quality-of-life-report

13/

This has been a bit of a bummer, so I’ll finish with a few maybe-possibly positive thoughts.

One, this is happening and there’s not much we can do about it. Putting a name to it helps me to process my grief but also to make sense of all these disparate trends.

Two, lots of hucksters will tell you that America is declining because We Strayed From Jesus or We’re Just So Mean These Days, and you know that’s bullshit. We may not have much power to stop enormous processes that were set in motion decades ago but we can at least tell the conmen to fuck off.

Three, collapses like this obviously entail enormous suffering and dislocations, but also create new opportunities and possibilities. There are some suggestions in the data that, historically, the collapse of parasitic elites actually improved the daily lives of the working class, who more or less get to go about their business without paying taxes and rents. Fingers crossed!

14/end for now

Tackling this topic of discussion from a bit of a physical sciences perspective, we've run into a problem of entropy—disorder, chaos, even conflict. The temperature of the planet has risen, in both a literal, and in a metaphorical—but physically analogous—sense.

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@HeavenlyPossum