Overshoot, Collapse: Myth or Reality?
We all build the story we need.
Beliefs
I had two distinct conversation last week.
Two different persons yet the same basic structure.
The first happened online. Someone posted a disagreement with the collapse/overshoot thesis. Intelligent, articulate, worth engaging. We went a few rounds, found some common ground, hit a wall, agreed to disagree.
The second happened in my living room. A friend of a friend, passing through. Also intelligent, also articulate, with a genuine spiritual background. We talked for a couple of hours.
In both cases there was enough overlap to make real conversation possible. And in both cases there were gaps I couldn’t bridge.
Both were anti-vaccine. When I mentioned I’d spent ten years working in the Vaccine and Immunization Department at WHO, neither conversation changed to acknowledge I may know something they don’t. Both saw WHO as a tentacle of a one-world government conspiracy. Again, ten years on the inside, watching an institution so chronically underfunded and dysfunctional it could barely coordinate a response to a moderate outbreak, let alone orchestrate global control. None of the fact mattered. When they could not argue the point, they simply moved to another one.
I stayed calm. I said I wasn’t trying to convince anyone.
And yet.
There was something. A low hum of frustration I kept noticing underneath the equanimity. S
mart, educated, spiritually literate people using their intelligence to defend a closed system was triggering me.
That evidence did not make any difference, the data if not aligned couldn’t enter.
That no amount of first-hand knowledge could shift the architecture of the belief.
Definition
Before going further, let me be precise about something.
Overshoot is not a story. It is a definition.
We are consuming biological resources faster than the planet can regenerate them. We are emitting beyond the atmosphere’s absorption capacity. We are drawing down freshwater, topsoil, and biodiversity at rates that have no historical precedent in the human timescale. These are measurements, not interpretations.
The refuges people reach for when confronted with this are familiar: human ingenuity has always found a way; technology will scale in time; markets will self-correct when the signals get loud enough; the Earth is resilient, it has recovered before; renewables are growing faster than anyone predicted. Each of these contains a fragment of truth wrapped around a category error.
Human ingenuity has never faced a planetary level, simultaneous, self-reinforcing system failure. Technology runs on energy and materials, it cannot technology its way out of a throughput problem. Markets have no mechanism to price the living systems that they have carefully excluded through externalization of costs. The Earth will recover, indeed, over millions of years, without needing humans to still be here. And renewables are growing inside an economy that is also still growing, which is not the same as replacing the problem. All these excuses are clear red flags of denial.
Collapse, however, is not a fact. It is a scenario.
A highly probable scenario, given the data, but still a scenario. A story built on real foundations, which is not the same as a certainty. That distinction matters. It is the needle this piece is trying to thread.
Ownership
I know what inner tension means. Twenty-plus years of coaching has made one thing clear: it is never about the other person. It is always pointing somewhere closer.
So I asked myself the question I would ask any client:
What part of MY story is like theirs?
I’ve been carrying the collapse thesis for years. It seemed to be the honest reading of the data. William Rees on ecological footprint. The Limits to Growth models, largely vindicated by time. The Great Acceleration graphs. Thirty years of field work across fifty countries watching what extraction and dysfunction actually look like at ground level. The story felt earned.
But “earned” is not the same as “true.”
And even “highly probable” is not the same as “certain.”
When I’m honest, and this is the part that required some sitting with, I don’t know what’s coming. The data points toward collapse with something close to the weight of evidence. And the story remains a story. Those are both true at the same time.
So I asked the next question:
What do I get from believing the story?
The answers were waiting.
The collapse story keeps me in a state of alert readiness: fight-or-flight as a baseline , which is the nervous system I built across three decades of field work in places where that state was appropriate and necessary. It’s familiar. It feels like being alive.
The collapse story gives form and meaning to grief. Thirty years of witnessing the darkest expressions of the human capacity for cruelty and self-destruction leaves a residue. The collapse narrative becomes a container for all of it. The grief isn’t random anymore, it’s prescient. It means something.
The collapse story maintains an identity. The one who sees clearly. The one who isn’t in denial. The awakened one who reads the data while others look away. There is a subtle pride in that position. It has a shape I recognize and have inhabited before.
And finally: the collapse story, if taken seriously, demands total surrender. Let go of comfort, plans, attachments, future as I imagined it. And when I actually accepted that, to release the whole architecture, the morning anxiety dropped. Almost immediately. When the story was data, I stayed grounded. When the data inflated into story, some anxiety returned.
I’m not saying the prediction is false.
I’m saying the story part of it was worth an inquiry.
Relax, nothing is under control
Most people, when they encounter overshoot and collapse as a serious possibility, move toward denial.
That’s the standard human response to the unthinkable.
The psyche protects itself.
What I didn’t fully see was that my certainty was performing a similar function in reverse. Where denial keeps the worst-case out, a committed collapse narrative keeps out the possibility of surprise, of the miraculous, of trajectories the models didn’t account for.
Both are ways of managing the unbearable uncertainty of not knowing.
The honest position is this: some scenarios are highly probable. Overshoot is real. The data on ecological limits is not in serious dispute among people who engage with it rigorously. Collapse in some form seems more likely than not.
And miracles happen. Systems behave non-linearly. History contains inflection points no one saw coming. The larger intelligence, whatever name you give it, or no name at all, is not obligated to follow the curve we projected for it.
For example, in 2020 during COVID, global air travel dropped 60%. NO2 levels in Paris, Milan, Madrid and Rome dropped by 30–54%. Fossil CO2 emissions fell by an estimated 2.4 billion tonnes, equivalent, to taking 500 million cars off the road for a year.
And on the other side (my own rough estimate) the war in Iran produced in a month the equivalent amount of the annual emissions of a mid-sized industrial nation.
None of these event are predictable or part of the models.
And this is part of the greater discomfort:
I don’t know what’s coming. Neither do you. Neither does anyone.
The story that holds us
There’s a paradox I keep returning to, and I’ve decided to stop trying to resolve it.
I have lived an extraordinary life. Decades in places most people only read about. Genuine encounter with suffering, with resilience, with the full spectrum of what humans are capable of. A practice that went deep. A life shaped by values I would choose again.
And I am a speck of dust on a small planet in an infinite universe, and what I did or didn’t do, believed or didn’t believe, will leave no trace detectable at any meaningful scale.
Both of those things are completely true.
The first conversation, the one that started this, ended with the other person still convinced of their story, and me still holding mine. We were polite, but what I took away wasn’t the disagreement. It was the mirror. The glimpse of my own reflection in someone else’s defended position.
The question isn’t whether collapse is real.
The question is what we’re using the story for.
Those two conversations had a quality I recognize, beliefs held tightly, facts that don’t align quietly set aside, the argument moving quickly to the next parameter before the uncomfortable one can land. That is not intellectual honesty. It is not how science works. It is not how genuine inquiry works.
What I try to do, imperfectly, with effort, is the opposite. Challenge the argument. Debunk my own position before someone else does. Hold the data separately from the story built around it. Distinguish between what the evidence shows and what I’ve concluded from it. That distinction, that willingness to sit with the gap between measurement and meaning, is what was missing in both conversations. We were not using the same tools. We did not have the same openness to what the other position might offer.
And underneath that: can we hold the full weight of not knowing, the grief, the beauty, the uncertainty, the complete irrelevance of our particular speck, without reaching for a story to make it bearable?
I’m still working on that. Some days better than others.
“Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
Someone noticed I did not give a definition for collapse, so I’ll add it here:
Collapse is the gradually increasing inability of our systems ( political, economic, technological etc) to absorb the disruptions generated by overshoot, climate being one driver among many.
Thank you, Gabriel. The story that frames all of this for me, as you know, is death-and-resurrection. I'm writing about it now, as a matter of fact, last Saturday and this coming Saturday, and much of my thinking there has been shaped by your recent work. I wonder whether it helps to be older, to have seen so much of life and death and to be weary enough of the world's nonsense that it becomes easier to imagine letting it all go and letting something utterly new emerge... just a wonder.