It's Time to Stop Panicking About Empty Shelves in 8 Weeks

End the doom cycle.

Adobe

Hi, there.

We’re going to talk about that viral article predicting empty shelves and famine (one more time), because the world needs to hear a full, cogent critique of it—and all the attention it got. We’re not doing it because we like bashing prophets, but because this snafu illustrates a problem that runs deep in western culture, especially American culture. It has plagued us all decade. So, I thought, who better to offer a critique of this mess than the writer once referred to as “the queen of doom,” the one roasted online daily for her “fearmongering?”

So, let us begin.

Maybe some of you still haven’t seen this article, which has gone super viral, even outside Substack, inspiring urgent and often panicked discussions across Reddit and YouTube about starvation in America this summer. If not, it’s worth skimming, just so you know the context. Read this one, too. The author himself told us he got hundreds of thousands of views just over the first couple of days. There’s nothing too unique about the content. It predicts mass shortages and famine by early July, driven by the Iran War and the ensuing oil crisis. We’ve seen these predictions for years now, since the pandemic began. What’s unique about the article?

The tone, and the spiritual element.

The author doesn’t just discuss the likelihood or the probability of the famine. He frames it as a certainty, something he’s seen coming “spiritually” for decades. He says fate has selected him to share this message. In fact, he describes all this nonsense as his “assignment” and perhaps the reason for his struggles as an artist and father. No messiah complex there, am I right?

He goes on to say that “your” mortgage, “your” debt, and “your” other responsibilities are no longer “your” priority. He commands you to start building community, stocking up on food, and preparing for the end of our financial system, because money will become completely useless, and the entire government system is going to come crashing down. By the end, I was just sitting there shaking my head at how reckless someone could possibly be in their advice.

It would be one thing if this article had simply vanished into the ether, another false alarm by another false prophet. Instead, it pleased the algorithm gods. They presented the nonsense to us as truth, and people bit. They liked. They shared. They heaped praise on this guy. And that’s a problem.

The Collective Failure

This is not simply the story of one bad writer.

When a platform’s algorithms reward that story, when everyone who allegedly “isn’t a doomer” clicks and shares and heaps praise on the bad writing and research, that’s when it becomes a collective failure.

A big one.

The same calm cucumbers who’ve disregarded every warning about every real threat we’ve faced for years, suddenly felt that this guy was worth listening to, because something godlike had touched him with prophecy. His age, and no doubt his gender, conferred a sense of authority on him.

Everyone started freaking out.

In all honesty, it was not a well-written article. On top of all the froth and long-winded explanations, the author drops all their sources in one big pile at the end, poorly formatted, not contextualized, not cited in text, or even discussed. They’re just vomited down at the bottom, with the assurance that he has read them carefully, with the help of AI, to arrive at his conclusion of mass famine by July. Why would you trust this guy? Because he’s an expert in logistics or energy? No. Because he’s a journalist with a reputation for being right? No.

Because he explains it all very well?

No.

Hundreds of thousands of people listened to him because he checked all the boxes of what counts as an authority in America.

The author had a chance to apologize, and he bombed that as well. In a follow-up post, he talks about his spiritual and mystical insights into collapse. He says the data “now backs everything I have been tracking spiritually for forty years.” He talks about his struggles as an artist.

He also backtracks:

When I talk about bare shelves and famine, I am not talking about the United States in sixty days. That is not what I have said. That is not what I have ever said. I think the idea that famine hits the United States in six to eight weeks is, frankly, kind of crazy. That is not what I see.

What I see, and what I have said consistently for over two years, going back long before Trump attacked the Strait, is that in the United States, by June and July, things will start getting hard to get. You will go to the store and you will not be able to find this or that. Supply chains will begin to visibly buckle. Not famine. Not total collapse. But friction. Intermittency.

Oh, now he tells everyone…

Go back and read the original article, if you have the stomach for it. This is not how he frames the crisis. Alas, to sum things up:

No, you don’t need to panic about a famine by July. You shouldn’t stop paying your mortgage or your other bills.

Unlike the author, I’m no mystic.

I haven’t been tracking anything spiritually for 40 years. But now we get to the core of the problem in American culture. If you’re a scientist, or you just understand science, nobody listens to you. They don’t look at your data.

They don’t want your evidence.

A Real Prophet: John Wesley Powell

You know who actually predicted all this?

John Wesley Powell.

We’re not living through a fuel crisis; we’re living through a climate crisis. The fuel crisis is a driver. Empty shelves are coming with or without dumb presidents and their wars. And this was foretold by guys like Powell, long before any mystics entered the picture. A Civil War veteran who lost his arm at Shiloh, Powell led the first major expedition along the Colorado River, explicitly for the sake of determining its viability for settlement. He told everyone: Don’t do it.

That’s right. The U.S. federal government hired John Wesley Powell to lead an expedition through the west, then come back and tell them whether it was a good idea to develop that territory. His exact words:

“I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not enough water to supply the land.”

He said that in 1893.

120+ years ago.

As the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Powell continued to argue against the settlement of the southwest.

He called it unsustainable.

Nobody listened.

Instead, they settled. They built big cities, exactly where Powell told them not to do it. They built dams and giant reservoirs, thinking they would outsmart nature. They named one after him. Yep, Lake Powell. Lake Powell is now drying up. It won’t supply the land, exactly as Powell said it would.

Americans have a long heritage of disregarding facts and evidence in favor of mystical thinking, and it’s exactly why we’re in this mess. Most Americans have no clue what they could be doing to actually prepare for, or even prevent, many of these catastrophes, because they don’t listen. They don’t listen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about. They listen to grifters and charlatans, who are right by accident sometimes, often too late.

So, I guess it’s fitting for Americans to continue shrugging off warnings from their actual Cassandras, like John Wesley Powell. It’s fitting for them to completely freak out when some dude with zero training or background tells us he has spiritually foreseen a famine, backed by data delivered to him via AI models designed to validate his thoughts, run by robots that will also tell you to eat pebbles and poisonous mushrooms. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

This Has to Stop

Please, stop sharing clickbait articles about famines in 8 weeks.

Guys like this, who write articles like this, aren’t helping anyone. They’re making it that much harder for the real Cassandras to get their message out. They’re making it that much harder for us to be taken seriously.

The next time someone like me talks about real threats now and down the line, like Dust Bowls and failing breadbaskets, or airborne diseases, people are going to remember Mr. Famine and his mystical clickbait article that scared them into thinking they were going to starve.

They’re going to remember how they overreacted, and how the author dodged responsibility for predictions he ultimately retracted.

They’re going to ignore the next warning.

There are times when I’ve gone too far in my predictions, when I was certain something was going to happen.

Then again, the most I ever asked anyone to do was wear an N95 mask and take some precautions. And you know what? Most of my predictions have come true, because they were backed by actual data done by real human beings, peer-reviewed, and subjected to intense skepticism.

The problem is that the world has simply learned to accept slow-moving disasters. We have various names for this phenomenon. Call it shifting baseline syndrome. Call it normalcy bias. Call it the Region Beta Paradox.

I’ve written about them all.

The world doesn’t seem to care if you tell them that 6 million children have been disabled by an airborne virus, because it happened slowly and it doesn’t affect them directly. They can ignore it. They can keep blaming social media. The same goes for my warnings about Trump and the flaws of our two-party system, or the cascade of biblical record-breaking disasters we’re seeing every week now. They can continue throwing hopium at each other.

If I have any advice:

Stop ignoring your real Cassandras for years on end, then freaking out over viral articles about empty shelves in 8 weeks.

This is not healthy behavior.

It’s not productive behavior. There are things you can be doing now to help prepare for and even prevent pandemics and famines in the future. They require you to put in some effort, not because you’re absolutely going to starve 8 weeks from now, but because you might starve 8 years from now.

A related example:

We committed tens of billions to preparing for pandemics, and then… we didn’t do it. Our leaders spent the money on everything from cop cities to wrestling tournaments. People didn’t get used to wearing N95 masks. They taught each other to see them as symbols of trauma instead of protection. Universities threw hundreds of air purifiers into dumpsters. I’m serious. If you don’t believe me, look it up. Now, people are wondering if they should freak out over hantavirus. They’re missing the point. If we had done the right thing, then we wouldn’t need to freak out over hantavirus, because we would have the tools to manage it. We didn’t commit the sustained time and energy, and now we don’t have the tools.

It’s like this with famine, with pandemics, on and on.

Maybe you get it.

Between each one of these viral freakout articles over empty shelves or a new virus, there are so many things we could be doing. There are ways to clean the air and make pandemic viruses much less dangerous. There are ways to grow food in parking lots. There are ways to capture water even if it’s not raining. There are ways to localize prescription drug production.

Lots of us are working on these ideas, and we need help. We need sustained support. What we don’t need is to be ignored, laughed off, and insulted when we try to talk about all these problems, only for the exact same skeptics to freak out and give all of their bandwidth to the next viral article written by a mystic, with AI insights, who doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

One day, the mystics will accidentally be right.

The shelves will be empty.

Then what?