For the future, I am both pessimistic and optimistic.
My pessimism says that a collapse is coming. Probably within my lifetime, say under 25 years. The collapse may or may not start in the US. That does not matter. Governments and economies are too interwoven for any to escape once it begins. It will not be confined to any country, nor to any continent. The collapse will result in death, both from killings and from “natural” causes, such as exposure and starvation, on a scale that will make the 20th Century look mild. The killings will be done by both government agents, until the collapse overwhelms even the remnants of government, and clashes between individuals and groups of “survivors.”
My optimism is from considering the reconstruction that will follow. People will survive, apply either of the words “some” or “many,” but people will survive. Mankind will revert to tribalism (it is only a short reversion) because that is how we know whom to trust. Families are not dead and gone, because families are the most basic of “tribes,” and form the basis of the larger tribe, as has always been the case.
We won’t collapse to the stone age, but there will be no corner grocery stocked with products from far and wide. Food will have to be produced locally, as has been the case with nearly all our existence. Learn all you can of traditional skills: axe, knife, shovel, rope craft, food growing and preservation, soap making; any manual skill will be of value. Relearn the mending of clothing.
And, we will recover to a somewhat more comfortable existence. But, we better avoid the man who says he can make it all better, if we just follow him.
Here’s a book you’ll enjoy:
“The Knowledge - How to rebuild our world from Scratch” by Lewis Dartnell...
from the above link:
... and his book is full of those “oh!” moments... In the fascinating chapter on substances, for instance, Dartnell talks about the uses of wood. Not merely the obvious one – building stuff out of it – but its importance as a source of industrial chemicals. No doubt many people already know this, but to me it was extraordinary to learn that you can get tar, pitch, acetic acid, turpentine, acetone and methanol out of wood, by heating it and capturing the vapours that pour out – and that the cordite used in the First World War was made using acetone captured in this way (until Britain ran out, and started gleaning acetone from conkers).
Similarly, cement is something I rarely think about. But the invention of so-called “hydraulic” cement, the stuff that sets underwater, was one of the reasons the Romans were able to dominate the Mediterranean – because they could create huge breakwaters of concrete, simply by pouring it into the sea, where there was no natural harbour. Cement itself is based on quicklime, made from limestone, without which little of our civilisation would operate.