All I know is that the annihilation of all humanity won’t happen in my lifetime.

I’d say not just possible, but practically certain, given that I’ve yet to see an even halfway plausible method of preventing the collapse.

And you may be thinking about America, but when I talk about our inescapable decline, I mean the whole world. I expect, at the least, the irreversible, permanent end of industrial civilization, and quite possibly the extinction of H. sapiens in nuclear or biological warfare. By “all the way down the cliff”, I mean a crash so severe, no rebuilding will be possible anywhere on Earth, ever.

But lowercase “decline” is nevertheless a pretty accurate assessment of our current situation. From where I’m sitting, at least.

And it’s entirely possible that we’re not going to pull out of the tailspin that we’re currently in, that we’re going to fall all the way down the cliff. I really doubt that we’ll recover in our current form (and here I’m thinking about America) or at our current scale, by which I mean any halt to our civilzational decline will probably involve decentralization and fragmentation.