If you are not keeping yourself busy dulling down your senses with drugs (prescription psychotropics or recreational), or food, or shopping, or seeking an adrenalin rush, or TV, or ideology, etc., then maybe, like me, you felt the whole world shift a little closer to the precipice this week. I know I did. Since the Dallas event on 7/7 I have felt the zeitgeist of the planet shift just a bit more toward chaos and confrontation and a little bit deeper into the realms of increasingly marginal returns on investments in complexity. We are into the things-are-starting-to-move stage of collapse now and it has been a really long time coming. But, with the momentum of this collapse being linked to it happening this time on the scale of a planetary civilization, the slow-motion train wreck is so slow-mo it is developing at a glacial pace. That is until we hit the break point. But, this week I have been very sensitive to the fact that the insane craziness is just a little more out in the open, a little more widespread, and a little more, well, crazy. In addition, everyone also seems just a little more sick and tired, a little more broke, a little more fed up with their job, a little more overloaded, and a lot more apathetic and unsympathetic.

But, that is how these things work. Things don’t change, until eventually they do. Things just keep on getting a little more dysfunctional and people keep responding by finding more and more creative ways to cope until they can no longer keep it up and then finally, suddenly, something gives. And then all hell breaks loose. This kind of change process where nothing seems to change at all for a really long time until a seemingly unanticipated catastrophic change happens suddenly out of the blue is explained several ways. In evolutionary theory it is called punctuated equilibrium. In science it is Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) famous "paradigm shift." In chaos theory it is a state change between two Lorenz attractors. It goes by many names, but in all versions the build up is slow with little or no perceptible movement, followed by a rapid and significant change in the system as a whole. And, when it happens, like the 1929 stock market crash, everyone says “well I never saw that coming.” Except if you actually look at history, in every case of revolutionary, catastrophic change there were a few people who did see it coming and tried to warn everybody only to be ignored, silenced, or worse, persecuted. Because if you are not keeping yourself busy ignoring the cognitive dissonance with increasingly drastic measures, it turns out the signs of impending revolutionary change are all around you if you care to see them.

Well, this week it just got a whole lot harder to ignore the signs. And, a bunch of people are starting to wake up to varying degrees. And, a much larger bunch of people are finding it takes a whole lot more energy to keep on ignoring the signs and they are getting a lot more tired and cranky. And, I am sensitive to these kinds of changes. So, remember, it is always darkest before the dawn, but things are going to begin to develop more rapidly and more in-your-face from here on in.

So, if you were beginning to think there is something you should be doing to ensure your future prosperity or survival, you should probably get on it without delay. Alternatively, if you want to keep on ignoring it all as long a possible and party like there is no tomorrow, now is the time to max out the credit card and have those bucket list experiences before it is too late. Because things are finally starting to move and I’ve been waiting for this moment for a very long time. But, now that it is actually here, I do not really want to believe it myself. In fact, if I had not coincidentally just done a big detox and gotten really clean I might not have noticed it or believed it either. Just don’t try to say in the future that no one saw it coming or that you were not warned.