Links of the Month: August 2026

my own chart of collapse being a multi-stage, centuries-long phenomenon, with no ‘Hollywood’ moments or endings There is a phenomenon in psychology called “creeping normality” which asserts that often changes occur so subtly and gradually that we don’t even notice them happening. And there’s a related phenomenon called “shifting baseline syndrome” by which what we think of as ‘normal’ shifts over time to accommodate these changes. These could both be considered forms of amnesia — we’ve simply forgotten how things used (even quite recently) to be. These phenomena have catastrophic consequences. The collapse of the world’s fisheries has long been ignored, for example, because as fishers retired or died, no one was left to actively notice the degree of that collapse. This phenomenon is perhaps best exemplified by the (untrue but powerful) ‘boiling frog’ myth that Daniel Quinn made famous. And these phenomena apply not only to the realities of life, but also to human behaviours: The…