When you are cured, the world cheers; when you are dying, it mourns. But when you are simply maintaining, the world is at a loss

I posted this to the excellent reads community on shit just works the other day and I have just kept thinking about the article from the perspective of collapse as an individual experience. I think this article fits here as perhaps an initial threshold or centering point for the broader experience of collapse beyond the borders of our own body.

Collapse after all is always individual eventually, if not already.

While median survival is now measured in years rather than months, we are seeing the emergence of “super-responders” navigating their second decade post-diagnosis. As a psychologist, I view this not just as a medical victory but as a profound existential shift: we have replaced the suddenness of the cliff with the tenuous permanence of the high ridge.

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When I joined my patient support group, we were a collection of disparate lives tethered by a reluctant masonry. We spoke in bruised shorthand: comparing palliative care, clinical trials and the provisional nature of plans. There was an unexpected symmetry in this shared vocabulary. We began as strangers, yet were quickly bound by a radical intimacy that made conventional friendship feel almost superficial by comparison.

But mortality is a notoriously capricious auditor. Some of us, through an opaque quirk of biology or the blind luck of a genetic mutation, traverse the wreckage, while others are overtaken by it. Porous by nature, I absorb the emotional charge of others with an unguarded ease. Consequently, when a peer such as Saskia admits in our group chat that she has reached the end of her options, messaging from an old house in the middle of nowhere about “hospice at home” and texting until she no longer can, the loss feels like a physical removal, an erosion of my own internal geometry.

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It is a frequency shift: moving from a life lived for the next milestone to one lived for the morning light of the kitchen table or the depth of a single conversation. In this state, time is no longer a resource to be spent, but a medium in which to dwell.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger called this “being towards death”. While the phrase carries a morbid chill, he argued it is the essential catalyst for an authentic life. He suggested that we usually spend our days “falling”: getting lost in trivial noise and the performative expectations of others. The long middle forces an end to that fall. When death is no longer a distant “some day” but a persistent, breathing neighbour, the ego’s vanities slowly evaporate. You cease being an actor in your own life, shedding the borrowed costumes of status to inhabit your raw, unvarnished self.

Is this not what draws us to collapse fiction as a fantasy? This firmly launched entrance into a simpler experience of now in more direct relation to the organic experience of the moment, as brutal as it may be? Or why stories so often begin with characters waking up with some form of amnesia in a seemingly new world?