In the end, I understood that my fear of the collapse of civilization was really a fear of having to live, or having to die, like those unseen and mostly unconsidered people who sustained what we thought of as civilization. The people who grew the coffee beans for the flat white I bought as I strolled to my office. The factory workers in some gigantic Chinese city, whose name I would never need to know, who made the smartphone on which I listened to leftist political podcasts as I walked, drinking the flat white. The countless homeless people I passed as I walked, for whom civilization had already collapsed, and had perhaps always been so. The end of the world, I knew, was not some remote dystopian fantasy. It was all around. You just had to look.

Mark O’Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (2020)