The Boring Apocalypse

My neighbour Manuela stopped me on the track down to the village last week, not to talk about the heat, or the water shortage, or the fact that half of Europe’s leaders seem to be resigning on a rolling basis like it’s some sort of relay race nobody wants to finish. She stopped me to complain about the price of chickpeas. Genuinely furious about chickpeas. I stood there in the sun nodding along, thinking, this is it, isn’t it. This is the actual headline. Not the summit, not the sanctions, not the six different flavours of geopolitical dread currently on rotation. Chickpeas.

Turns out Manuela is in extremely good company. A median of 23% of people across 107 countries name the economy as their nation’s biggest problem, more than double the number worried about work, politics or safety put together. Not war. Not the algorithm eating democracy one deepfake at a time. The economy. The thing that sounds, on paper, like the single most boring answer a human being could possibly give when asked what keeps them up at night.

That’s the joke, and it’s not a very funny one once you sit with it. We’ve built entire industries around telling people the world is ending in cinematic fashion. Rogue AI. Rising seas. Men in expensive suits plotting in rooms we’ll never see inside. And all the while the thing genuinely fraying the seams of the planet is considerably less Hollywood. It’s rent. It’s the sense that the numbers on your payslip and the numbers on the shop shelf have quietly stopped being on speaking terms.

I’d love to tell you this is a uniquely British disease, something I can smugly trace back to a specific policy failure or a specific man in a specific tie. But it isn’t. It’s everywhere, and it’s worse for the young. Younger adults in America are roughly two and a half times more likely than the over-55s to name economic hardship as the thing that scares them most, and the same pattern turns up in Canada, Australia and Ireland, all of them nations currently watching their under-40s do increasingly inventive maths to work out whether owning a front door is still a realistic life goal. It’s not a generational vibe. It’s a spreadsheet with a body count.

Here’s the bit nobody wants to print on a mug though. It isn’t really about the economy at all. Not underneath. What’s actually curdling is trust, and once trust goes, everything gets stranger and much harder to laugh at. In the US, people who don’t trust their institutions are dramatically more likely to say government itself is the country’s biggest problem, 41% of the distrustful said so, compared to a fraction of those who still believe the system is roughly on their side. Multiply that pattern out across a planet where geoeconomic confrontation now sits, according to the World Economic Forum’s own risk merchants, as the single most feared event of the year, ahead of actual armed conflict, and you start to see the shape of the thing. Not one crisis. A thousand small erosions of faith, all quietly agreeing to happen at the same time.

Running underneath all of it, like damp behind wallpaper, is the stuff nobody can quite see but everybody can feel. Misinformation isn’t sitting politely in its own little risk category any more. It’s the thing accelerating everything else, geoeconomic tension, polarisation, cyber chaos, the lot, blurring into each other until nobody can agree on which fire to point the hose at first. We’ve built machines that can fabricate a convincing lie faster than most humans can fabricate a convincing excuse, and then acted surprised that trust is the first thing to go up in smoke.

So no, there isn’t a secret. There’s no vault somewhere with the real reason stamped on a file marked TOP SECRET. There’s just several hundred million people, myself and Manuela included, quietly doing sums in their heads about chickpeas, rent, and whether the people meant to be steering this thing still remember how the wheel works.

Which brings me, inevitably, to a room.

Somewhere with excellent lighting and worse ventilation, because irony demands it. A rectangular table, the kind that costs more than most people’s cars, ringed with delegates from something called the Global Fragmentation Taskforce, a body that exists, as far as I can tell, purely to produce documents about the existence of problems rather than the solving of them.

The Chair opens proceedings by thanking everyone for their “continued commitment to dialogue,” which is diplomatic-speak for nobody in this room agrees on anything, but we’ve all agreed to keep meeting about it. There is a PowerPoint. There is always a PowerPoint. Slide one reads GEOECONOMIC CONFRONTATION: AN EVOLVING LANDSCAPE, over a stock photo of a container ship, because nothing says evolving landscape like a large metal box full of other, smaller metal boxes.

The delegate from a mid sized economy raises a hand to note, gravely, that misinformation is “eroding the very fabric of shared reality.” Everyone nods. Someone writes fabric of shared reality on a flipchart and underlines it twice, as though underlining will stop the fabric fraying. Nobody mentions that half the room checked their portfolios on their phones during the last coffee break, quietly relieved the market hadn’t yet noticed the fabric of shared reality was on fire.

A junior aide is dispatched to fetch more sparkling water. She will later go home to a flat she can’t quite afford, in a city she used to be able to afford, and will not think about geoeconomic confrontation once. She will think about the chickpeas.

By 4pm the Taskforce has produced a fourteen page communiqué “reaffirming the urgent need for renewed multilateral cooperation frameworks going forward.” It will be filed. It will be quoted twice, by two different think tanks, neither of whom will have read past the executive summary. Nobody in the room will use the word trust, because trust is the sort of word that makes powerful people uncomfortable, in the way a smoke alarm makes you uncomfortable mid nap. Not because it’s wrong. Because it’s working exactly as intended, and you’d rather it didn’t.

This isn’t a dig at any real summit, you understand. It’s a dig at all of them, generically, all at once, the way a smallpox vaccine is a dig at all future smallpox rather than one specific outbreak. Because the pattern is the same everywhere. Enormous, well lit rooms, full of enormously well paid people, producing enormously earnest paperwork about a fire that the people outside the room are already standing inside.

Here’s what the fire actually feels like, from inside it.

You don’t experience geoeconomic confrontation. Nobody has ever lain awake at 3am fretting about supply chain weaponisation in the abstract. What you experience is smaller and stupider and much more effective at keeping you awake. A price that’s gone up again. A landlord who’s “reviewing the market rate.” A headline you can’t quite tell is true, shared by someone you love, who is furious about something that may or may not have actually happened.

That’s the real trick played on all of us, and it’s not being played by any particular villain, which is precisely what makes it so hard to satirise cleanly, and so hard to fight. The economy isn’t collapsing dramatically enough to make the news lead with it every night. It’s just quietly, unglamorously grinding, the way a knee grinds after forty years of stairs, not enough to stop you walking, just enough that you notice it every single time you do.

And the institutions meant to be reassuring us keep reaching for language that makes the grinding sound like strategy. Resilience. Frameworks. Renewed cooperation. Words engineered in rooms with excellent lighting, designed to make fragmentation sound managed, when what most people actually want to hear is much simpler. Someone, anyone, admitting out loud that the chickpeas cost more because the whole system’s a bit wobbly right now, and here’s what we’re actually doing about it, in a sentence a human being could repeat to another human being on a village track without either of them needing a glossary.

I don’t have a tidy solution to offer you here, and I’d distrust anyone who claims they do. What I’ve got instead is a suggestion, which is smaller and more honest. Next time someone hands you a fourteen page communiqué about the fabric of shared reality, ask them what it costs to fill a shopping bag in their constituency this month. Watch how fast the room goes quiet. That silence, more than any risk report, any summit, any solemnly underlined flipchart phrase, is the sound of the actual apocalypse. Not loud. Not cinematic. Just very, very quiet, and getting quieter, one grocery bill at a time.

Until Next Time