The Vaucluse foreshore is the sort of place you go to forget your problems. In this quiet pocket of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, trees form a protective canopy overhead, tiny beaches interrupt the bush, and the harbour unfurls across the horizon in all its glory. It is here, on a dazzlingly bright blue day, that Sarah Wilson is telling me there can be no hope for the future.
For the last three years, Wilson has been researching and writing a book on systems collapse, the first chapter of which is called Hope – about “how there is no hope, and we need to face this”.
As we make our way along the walking track here, Wilson takes me through what she has learned. In short: every single – “every single, without exception” – complex civilisation from the Roman and Maya empires to Easter Island, ends up collapsing, generally within 250 to 300 years. Our post-industrial civilisation is now at 270 years and that, coupled with the escalating climate crisis and a host of other factors, suggests, she thinks, that our own collapse is imminent. The interconnected nature of the globalised world means that once one of the systems starts to fail, the rest will domino.
“It’s not a matter of may or may not happen,” she says. “It will happen. It’s just a matter of the speed at which it’ll happen.”
Despite the nature of the topic she’s here to talk about, Wilson is peppy and upbeat, still bearing the sunny disposition that made her a TV host in a past life. She’s dressed in colourful activewear, appropriate for our walk but also one of the few outfits she had in her suitcase during her return visit to Australia. Wilson moved to Paris two years ago on an artist’s visa to work on her book. The topic of collapsology is one the French are “really on top of” – collapse experts there do morning TV, and books on the subject top bestseller charts, making it a more fitting place to get to work than Sydney. “It’s a topic that I would say Australians are just not alive to yet,” she sighs.
Wilson has taken something of a roundabout path to the topic of systems collapse. In the 2000s she spent nearly five years as the editor of women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, before becoming a wellness columnist and the host of a show called Eat Yourself Sexy. In 2013 she wrote a recipe book called I Quit Sugar that became a cultural phenomenon and grew into a business employing over 20 staff – only for Wilson to walk away from it all five years later. She sold I Quit Sugar, gave the proceeds to charity and wrote two very contemplative books, one about her lifelong struggle with anxiety and the other about living hopefully amid the climate crisis.
Going from diet to mental health to climate and collapse “makes sense” to Wilson, because she feels she has always delved into spaces that hadn’t been properly investigated, which at the time included the sugar industry. Now, though, she regards her stint as an accidental wellness hero with a shrug.
“I did it and I wanted to get out, so that’s why I sold it and gave all the money away: I didn’t want to keep doing it,” she says. “That’s not my thing. I don’t like making money.”
And she’s not fond of where wellness culture has gone since her departure.
“It’s narcissism,” she says with the roll of an eye. “Worrying about your gut biome when the world’s burning is too indulgent … I think it’s particularly rampant in Australia, where the opulence is such that that’s what people now spend their time doing.”
Today, Wilson says, she doesn’t own furniture or a car, doesn’t “buy stuff” and largely lives out of a suitcase. Anxiety remains something she has to actively manage, including by regularly getting into nature on hikes like the one we’re on today. Perhaps paradoxically, what’s most helped her anxiety is delving into the subject of systems collapse. Anxious people, she says, feel at a visceral level “that something’s not quite right”. Researching this topic has been a salve that’s proven, well, something isn’t right – and has brought her its own kind of peace.
Wilson found her way to the field of collapse after she finished her 2020 book on climate – and then watched in growing horror at the continued inaction on the crisis. Then came the failed voice referendum, the acceleration of AI, dialled-up nuclear threat, the Doomsday Clock ticking ever closer to midnight and, later, the return of Donald Trump. She realised “the problem was way bigger than climate” and began reading about systems collapse. “Once I dug into that, I couldn’t unsee it,” Wilson says.
While it may be at the extreme end of the spectrum, collapse theory – and it is, at this point, just a theory – is not out of step with growing global concern about what the future holds for the planet. The precarious position of our global systems is an alarm academics and scientists have been sounding in recent years – one analysis of population sustainability from 2020 put the chance of catastrophic collapse at 90% or more – but it is a topic that’s often communicated about in complex, inaccessible terms. Wilson wanted to write a book that would help everyday people navigate impending collapse, “while being really clear that there’s no fix for this”.
To get her words out there as quickly as possible, she opted to eschew traditional publishing and instead serialised the book chapter by chapter on her Substack, where she now has 60,000 subscribers (the actor Liam Neeson, who likes Wilson’s ideas, is one of them). All 100,000 words are available there now. After Trump’s re-election, Penguin US bought the world rights and will publish it in a “hold-in-your-hands” format – “but I guess it remains to be seen whether there’ll be bookshops left by the time it comes out,” Wilson shrugs matter-of-factly.
But despite being about the end of the world as we know it, the book is not all doom and gloom. Wilson thinks that breaking up with hope, as she has, can actually be an invitation to live in the here and now.
“Really, nothing changes, because none of us know when we’re gonna die. And that’s the absolute absurdity of our existence,” she says, as casually as one might recount the weather. “So it’s really an invitation to live fully – not narcissistically, and not nihilistically – but as beautifully and as fully human as we can, because that is what brings us our greatest happiness.”
With Wilson leading the charge, we have now power-walked our way back to her hire car (the “most economical” way of getting around while she’s in town, despite her misgivings about its environmental impact), which is parked opposite a school. Before she has to dart off to her next appointment, I’m eager to find out where Wilson sees the world in 50 years.
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“Oh boy,” she exhales. “I’m very careful not to put predictions on this, and I’m very careful to say to people, anyone who says they know what’s going to happen, don’t believe it, because the point – we are in abject uncertainty. That’s the actual nub of all of this.”
But basically, she says, it will be “the shittification of life. Things are going to get more and more shitty.”
A best-case scenario, Wilson feels, would be massive population decline and an extreme gap between the haves and have-nots. “The billionaire set will probably be in bunkers”, and the rest of us will have to learn to use remaining resources in cooperative ways. To that end, Wilson recommends what she calls pro-social prepping. “Form communities. Get to know your neighbours – you are going to have to rely on them. Going forward, you’re going to have to share things.”
You don’t need to hoard canned corn, she says, but it might pay to try to get used to a life without technology.
“It brings me no joy to say this,” Wilson adds. “I’m devastated. I accept it, and I’m prepared for it … But I’m devastated for young people. It’s not their fault.”
As if on cue, the moment these words leave her mouth, the school opposite us begins playing a sombre piece of music over its PA system, before a choir of students join in song. It is a too-perfect, movie-scene moment and Wilson can respond only by laughing. “Hilarious!” she says, throwing her hands in the air.
But Wilson is keen to point out that she doesn’t think all this means we should stop having children. That’s for the same reason she thinks we should keep being climate activists, keep standing up for Gaza, and keep creating art: we must keep being human.
“We are going to be forced into grounding into our full humanity, because it’s the only thing we’re going to have left,” she says, the choir of schoolchildren still singing behind her, and the bright blue sky taunting with its beauty.
“We should be fighting for humanity and for human values, because the dispiritedness, the moral injury of not doing that, will destroy us faster than any other kind of thing. It’ll produce massive unrest and despair at a level that we can’t fathom.
“So, yes. We fight because this is what we do.”
