G.K. Chesterton was a bloated apologist for comfort. A Catholic cheerleader in tweed, perpetually drunk on his own righteousness and cheap wine. I despise everything he stood for; his smug certainty, his theatrical conversion, his ability to make orthodoxy sound revolutionary while keeping his arse firmly planted in a velvet armchair. But even a broken clock tells the truth twice a day, and even a sanctimonious bastard can accidentally stumble into wisdom. He said, "When a society loses its moral compass, it collapses from within."
And he was right. For once. Tragically, apocalyptically right.
You don't need to be a prophet to see the collapse coming. You just need eyes that haven't been gouged out by Instagram filters and a brain that hasn't been lobotomised by TikTok. Look at the culture, really look at it, like staring into an open wound that's gone septic.
Act One: The Fetishisation of Decay
The body positivity movement started with something beautiful, something necessary. A woman with burn scars refusing to disappear into the shadows. A veteran with missing limbs demanding to be seen as whole. Real people, scarred and broken and magnificent, saying: We exist. We matter. We are not your tragedy porn.
That was the revolution. That was the fucking point.
But somewhere between the first brave soul posting their surgery scars and the tenth influencer selling diabetes as a lifestyle choice, the message got hijacked, perverted, twisted into something unrecognisable. What began as radical acceptance, as a war cry against impossible beauty standards, curdled into something else entirely; a celebration of surrender. Now we're not just tolerating obesity, we're glamorising it, fetishising it, building entire industries around the lie that slow suicide is self-love. We've rebranded metabolic failure as "health at every size," as if physics gives a shit about your feelings, as if your pancreas reads hashtags.
This isn't empowerment. It's permission to rot in place while the world burns around you.
Consider the grotesque theatre of it all: we inject ourselves with Ozempic, a diabetes drug repurposed for vanity, while actual diabetics ration insulin they can't afford. We swallow appetite suppressants with one hand and stuff ourselves with processed poison with the other. The cognitive dissonance is so violent it could split atoms. We're medicating the symptoms of a sick society while the disease metastasises, spreads through every institution, every relationship, every cell of the collective body.
Equilibrium, for fuck's sake! Remember that word? That ancient concept of balance, of sophrosyne, as the Greeks called it? Dead. Murdered. Its corpse Weekend-at-Bernie's-ed through social media by corporations that profit from your weakness.
Instead of helping people climb out of the pit, out of addiction to sugar, to screens, to the sweet sedation of scrolling through other people's curated lies, we hand them hashtags and slogans. We pad the walls of their prison cells with motivational quotes. "Love yourself" becomes an anaesthetic, a morphine drip keeping you docile while your arteries clog with plaque and your bones crack under the weight of flesh that was never meant to be carried. Your heart, that faithful pump, works overtime until it doesn't. Your joints scream until they go silent. Your liver drowns in fat until it gives up.
And we call this love. We call this acceptance. We call this progress.
Meanwhile, in glass towers built on insulin profits, the pharmaceutical industry executives pop champagne. The processed food corporations, those merchants of slow death, those architects of addiction, cash their quarterly bonuses. Every pill to manage what food created, every bypass surgery, every mobility scooter in a supermarket, every plus-size mannequin normalising what should terrify us; it's all part of the machine. The body becomes a profit centre, a recurring revenue stream. The sickness becomes an identity, a tribe, a brand. You're not dying; you're "living your truth."
The truth is you're a mark, a customer, a lifetime subscriber to your own destruction.
Act Two: Faith Exorcised, the Market Enthroned
In the same breath that we tell people their diseased bodies are temples regardless of the black mould growing in the walls, we strip the sacred from everything else. Faith is backward. Religion is oppression. Tradition is trauma. God is a punchline delivered by comedians who've never wondered why they wake up at 3 AM feeling like there's a hole in their chest that no amount of applause can fill.
But here's what the enlightened forget: human beings are built to worship. It's coded into our DNA, carved into our skulls, written in the stars we used to navigate by before we decided we were too clever for mystery. When we kill God, and make no mistake, we've been murdering Him by a thousand cuts since Nietzsche declared Him dead, we don't become rational. We don't ascend to some higher plane of logic and reason. We become desperate. We become hollow. We become zealots for substitute religions that demand twice the sacrifice and offer none of the redemption.
We trade spiritual hunger for consumer gluttony, stuffing ourselves with products and experiences and identities we can buy off the shelf. Meaning gets replaced with dopamine hits, those little digital pellets we get for performing our tricks online. Sermons get swapped for influencer content, for lifestyle gurus selling enlightenment in monthly instalments. Confession, that ancient practice of acknowledging our failures and seeking absolution, gets repackaged as trauma-dumping on podcasts, as therapy-speak testimonials where everyone's a victim and no one's responsible.
No one's forgiven because there's no one left to forgive. But everyone's monetised, everyone's content, everyone's a brand waiting to be discovered.
With bare hands, I'll tell you this: I'm not just an atheist, which means literally 'without a god'; I deny the very existence of one. I've looked into the void and found it looking back with my own eyes. And yet, and yet, I understand the need to believe in something greater, something beyond this meat prison, this chemical accident we call consciousness. I respect the hunger even as I reject the feast. Because without that hunger, what are we? Just clever apes playing with fire until we burn the whole fucking forest down.
Morality, once anchored in thousands of years of tradition, in stories passed down like genetic code, in rituals that connected us to our ancestors and our descendants, is now decided by the algorithm. Every principle is disposable, subject to the terms and conditions we never read. Every taboo is up for auction, sold to the highest bidder or the loudest voice. The result? A society that's spiritually malnourished and philosophically comatose, kept alive by machines that beep and flash but never heal. No compass. No true north. No centre that holds. Just constant, frantic motion in a void that echoes with the sound of our own emptiness.
Act Three: The Architecture of Collapse
Watch how we build our own gallows with a smile, how we craft our nooses from ethernet cables and charging cords. We've created a culture that celebrates its own symptoms, that mistakes the fever for the cure.
Consider the paradox: we've never been more connected and never been more alone. We have ten thousand friends online and no one to call when the darkness comes knocking at 3 AM. We document every meal but taste nothing. We photograph every sunset but see nothing. We're so busy performing life that we forget to live it, so busy curating our decay that we forget we're decomposing.
The young, those beautiful, doomed creatures, they're born into this madness. They emerge from the womb into a world where reality itself is negotiable, where truth is whatever gets the most likes, where identity is a costume you can change with a filter. They're raised on screens that teach them to hate their bodies, their histories, their futures. They're fed a steady diet of anxiety and outrage, of comparison and despair, until mental illness isn't an exception; it's the baseline, the cost of admission to modern life.
And we wonder why they're killing themselves in record numbers. We wonder why they're so fragile, so lost, so desperate for meaning that they'll join any cult that promises purpose, whether it's political extremism or eating disorders or the sweet release of opioid oblivion.
This is how a civilisation dies. Not with fire raining from the sky, not with barbarians at the gates, not with plague or famine or war, though those may come later, vultures drawn to the stench. No, it dies with comfort, with convenience, with the slow morphine drip of entertainment that keeps us docile while the foundations crumble. It dies with applause for disease, with awards for participation, with the steady replacement of excellence with inclusion, of merit with equity, of truth with whatever makes us feel better about the rot.
We're not building a future; we're selling each other pallbearers' promises. Participation trophies for existing when existence itself has become an achievement. Rituals stripped of meaning, bodies without direction, souls on indefinite lease to the highest bidder. We're the last generation that remembers what it was like before, and the first generation that chose to forget.
The Compass Spins Wildly
Chesterton, that pompous git, saw it coming from his comfortable distance, from his safe perch in a time when the centre still held, however loosely. He could afford to be philosophical about collapse because he wasn't living in it, wasn't breathing its toxic air, wasn't watching it metastasise in real-time through fiber optic cables.
But we are. We're living in the collapse, swimming in it, drowning in it. Every day brings new evidence: another institution corrupted, another tradition demolished, another boundary erased in the name of progress that leads nowhere but down. The compass isn't just broken; it's spinning wildly, its needle pointing everywhere and nowhere, leaving us to navigate by the light of our phone screens through a darkness that grows deeper with each passing year.
And perhaps that's the cruelest joke of all: we can see it happening. We're not blind to our own destruction. We document it, analyse it, share think-pieces about it. We know exactly what's killing us, and we choose it anyway, again and again, because the alternative, real change, real sacrifice, real meaning, is too terrifying to contemplate.
So we medicate. We distract. We perform. We rot.
And somewhere, in whatever afterlife his Catholic imagination conjured, Chesterton is having the last laugh, watching us prove his point with every swipe, every click, every comfortable compromise with catastrophe.
The collapse isn't coming. It's here. And we're Instagramming it.
Damn him for being right.