Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others

Perception, pattern-seeking, and the role of neurodivergence in a failing civilisation

Editor’s note: My earlier essay, Collapse: A Framework sets out the structural dynamics of ecological overshoot and collapse. Here, I explore why so many collapse-aware people appear to share traits associated with neurodivergence, particularly autism, and what that overlap might reveal.

This is neither a diagnostic argument, nor an attempt to romanticise or criticise any neurotype. This is a reflection grounded in research, lived experience, and the stories of people who message me privately saying, “I always felt that something was wrong.”

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Chapter 1. A strange pattern

Earlier this year, I posted a thread on social media exploring the possible link between neurodivergent cognition and collapse awareness. It generated a great deal of interest and discussion. What stood out were the replies from many people who said the post made sense to them in a way other writing on collapse hadn’t.

Many added, in comments and direct messages, that they were autistic, awaiting assessment, or had ADHD with autistic traits. Some simply said they had always felt out of step with how other people seemed to think and view the world.

After the thread circulated, people asked me to take the idea further - a steady stream of messages from readers who wanted a more detailed account than a thread could offer. This essay grows out of that earlier exchange.

Revisiting the thread and subsequent comments, I decided to dig deeper into what felt like a challenging but important question:

Why are so many neurodivergent people collapse-aware?

And why are so many collapse-unaware people neurotypical?

I’m not making a universal claim. Plenty of neurodivergent people are not collapse-aware, and plenty of neurotypical people eventually get there. But patterns matter, especially in a civilisation shaped by socially reinforced blindness.

So we begin with the obvious: collapse awareness is fundamentally a pattern-recognition event.

Some people are wired for that.

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Chapter 2. Systematising minds in a world built on avoidance

Baron-Cohen’s work on hyper-systemising (2006) describes how autistic people naturally gravitate toward understanding structures, mechanisms, and causal patterns rather than social signalling. They notice inconsistencies, detect contradictions, and see what does not add up.¹

Collapse awareness begins here; with the realisation that the cultural story of infinite growth in a finite system fails even the most basic coherence test.

Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct is helpful here: he argues that cultures inherit deep cognitive templates that shape what people perceive as real. The Western template of linear progress and human control makes ecological limits harder to see.²

Neurodivergent cognition, being less bound to these cultural patterns, often registers structural contradictions earlier. A hyper-systemising mind does not need ideology to reach this conclusion, because the mathematics is often enough.

Emerging predictive-processing models of autism, characterised by reduced reliance on prior assumptions, also align with this pattern: fewer top-down filters allow contradictions in the dominant cultural story to be perceived more quickly.⁸

At this point, a profound divergence begins.

Much neurotypical cognition is geared toward maintaining social cohesion, even at the cost of internal dissonance. Dominant cultural narratives like progress, technological salvation, and political optimism persist because they are socially stabilising, even though they are empirically implausible.

Autistic cognition, by contrast, is less influenced by conformity pressures. Yafai et al. (2014) found that autistic children were significantly less likely to conform when asked to give obviously incorrect answers. This is epistemic independence rather than a social deficit.³

When collapse awareness emerges, epistemic independence becomes a liability socially, but an asset cognitively.

Put another way, the autistic mind is not trapped inside consensus trance - the concept Charles Tart articulated decades ago: a socially reinforced narrowing of perception that preserves cultural stability at the cost of realism.⁴

To see through the trance is unsettling, while remaining inside it is comforting. However, only one of those states aligns with the physical world.

For those who perceive the inconsistency early, the next step is often inquiry over seeking reassurance.

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Chapter 3. Hyperfocus, moral intensity, and the difficulty of “looking away”

Dupuis et al. (2022) describe how many autistic adults experience periods of intense hyperfocus; sustained attention driven not by choice but by internal compulsion. When directed toward a field of knowledge, the depth of understanding can become extraordinary.⁵

Many collapse-aware people describe the same experience; months spent reading scientific papers, energy analyses, climate modelling, ecological history, and complexity theory.

If you’re reading this, you probably recognise the territory; the sense of falling through layers of illusion into something brutally clear.

No one is in charge. No one planned this civilisation.

Hyperfocus is more than a single cognitive response. It is often accompanied by moral intensity - when something is true, it matters, and when something is harmful, it must be confronted. When a system is breaking, pretending otherwise feels unacceptable.

Monotropism, the tendency toward deep, highly focused attentional patterns, may help explain why certain minds track systemic signals earlier and with more intensity.⁹

This combination, deep pattern analysis plus moral intensity, produces a profound relationship to collapse awareness: You cannot pretend the system is stable when the evidence says otherwise, and you cannot keep playing along with narratives that dissolve under scrutiny.

For many neurodivergent people, the idea of “just not thinking about it” is not a viable response. Hyperfocus is often pathologised, but in a culture invested in distraction, it can be a form of clarity.

As with all autistic traits, hyperfocus exists along a spectrum. It doesn’t appear in the same way for everyone, but where it does, it often shapes the process of becoming collapse-aware.

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Chapter 4. Alienation, dissonance, and the relief of finding an explanation

Many collapse-aware people describe a lifelong sense that the world felt structurally wrong, long before they had any framework to articulate why.

Growing up inside a culture that insists everything is normal, progress is inevitable, technology will solve everything, and that economics is separate from the physical world, creates dissonance for anyone who intuitively senses limits, and fragility, under the surface.

Collapse awareness explains this sense of alienation.

For many, the turning point is not the data itself, but the recognition that the surrounding cultural story no longer aligns with biophysical reality.

This is a profound psychological reorientation that reassigns causality, shifting the sense of “what’s wrong” away from the individual and toward the cultural story that no longer matches the evidence.

Higher intolerance of uncertainty, common in autistic cognition, can make ambiguous or contradictory cultural narratives harder to accept, accelerating the search for coherent, reality-based explanations.¹⁰

Many people who feel ‘out of step’ eventually realise the conflict wasn’t with the evidence in front of them, but with a culture built to avoid seeing it.

For many, collapse awareness becomes the first framework that makes sense of both the world and their place within it.

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Chapter 5. Cognitive Styles, Linearity, and the Shape of Collapse

One of the most consistent themes in the literature is that autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people tend to rely less on social cues and more on structural cues when making sense of the world.

Baron-Cohen’s work on systematising (2006) is one expression of this, but the theme appears in multiple studies: autistic cognition often favours pattern-based reasoning, recursive logic, and multi-variable tracking, whereas neurotypical cognition more often defaults to socially mediated, linear, expectation-driven reasoning (Yafai et al., 2014; Dupuis et al., 2022).⁶

This difference matters in a civilisation entering instability and collapse.

Industrial society is structured around smooth curves, predictable paths, business-as-usual forecasting, and the assumption that tomorrow will resemble today. That’s the cognitive world in which neurotypical linear reasoning evolved to thrive.

The institutions that trained us (schools, workplaces, media) reinforce a worldview in which problems progress gradually, respond proportionally, and can be managed by incremental adjustment (the creed of managerialism).

And yet ecological systems don’t behave that way. Neither do energy systems, financial systems, or climate feedbacks. They move in nonlinear jumps, phase shifts, and runaway feedback loops. They look stable until they aren’t.

A clear example of this nonlinear behaviour can be seen in Thwaites Glacier (also known as the “Doomsday Glacier”): decades of apparent stability can give way to rapid, irreversible collapse once warm water pushes its grounding line past a critical threshold, triggering self-reinforcing retreat.

Fig 1: Schematic representation of the marine ice sheet instability (MISI) with (a) an initial stable grounding-line position and (b) an unstable grounding-line position after the incursion of warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) below the ice shelf (source: Fig. 3 of Hanna et al., 2013 ).

For many neurodivergent people, this kind of threshold dynamics is intuitive. Pattern-sensitive cognition tends to notice:

· when variables start interacting rather than behaving independently;

· when noise resolves into structure;

· when a system is no longer “slowly changing” but preparing to snap.

The autistic cognitive style (less reliant on social reassurance and more comfortable with complex causality) can make tipping points legible before they are socially acknowledged.

To a neurotypical worldview, this often looks like pessimism, but to a systems-oriented brain, it simply looks like the moment the pattern finally resolves into coherence.

This is a claim of context, not superiority. In a growth-stable civilisation, linear cognition is adaptive. In an overshoot-destabilised civilisation, nonlinear cognition becomes revealing.

Collapse rarely moves in straight lines, and neither does the recognition of it.

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Chapter 6. The emotional landscape of divergent perception

Neurodivergent people who become collapse-aware often describe emotional responses that differ from their neurotypical peers.

Many speak of reaching clarity earlier, sometimes accompanied by an earlier sense of anxiety, simply because pattern recognition brings the implications into view sooner. Yet this can sit alongside a sense of steadiness; the absence of self-deception.

There is also typically less reliance on cultural reassurance. When a person’s identity is not anchored in dominant social narratives, the erosion of those narratives does not produce the same level of disorientation.

They tolerate the collapse of cultural stories more easily than the absence of coherence itself.

Their relationship to grief can look different as well. Collapse grief is often processed through analysis, integration, and the search for coherence rather than through denial or oscillation - not because they feel less, but because coherence often takes precedence as the primary stabilising force.

Some also describe a heightened sense of responsibility, a moral intensity that can accompany hyperfocus: not a fantasy of saving the world, but a commitment to living truthfully within it.

For some, this shows up as a drive to understand the world as it is; for others, it becomes an ethic of care, a desire to reduce harm, or a resolve to act in ways that feel aligned to the reality they now see. The expression varies, but the underlying impulse is the same: alignment between perception and action.

None of this is universal, but the pattern recurs often enough to be noteworthy. For many, these emotional differences are not symptoms of divergence but adaptations to a world that was already misaligned.

Collapse awareness doesn’t produce these responses; it shows the conditions that shaped them.

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Chapter 7. The Inversion of Cognitive Advantage

To understand why neurodivergent people often perceive collapse earlier, it is necessary to look directly at the function of neurotypical cognition.

The primary evolutionary and social role of neurotypical cognition has been to maintain cohesion: to preserve group stability through shared narratives, emotional synchrony, and a collective sense of continuity.

These traits are not deficiencies on the upward slope of the overshoot curve. In an expanding civilisation, they are adaptive. They minimise anxiety, they reinforce cooperation, and sustain the cultural story required for large-scale coordination.⁷

Fig 2: Ecological overshoot (Source: Research Gate) 2025

But the same traits that support stability can obscure disruption. Social-conformity bias, optimism bias, normalcy bias, and culturally reinforced worldviews (all well-documented psychological mechanisms) help keep a society together during its growth phase.

They also make it difficult to perceive structural risk, ecological overshoot, or the fragility of a paradigm that has begun to falter.

This is where the inversion emerges. The cognitive style that once served the maintenance of a growth-based civilisation becomes less suited to recognising the limits of that civilisation.

Meanwhile, the perceptual traits often associated with neurodivergence, pattern recognition over social reassurance, systemic perception over short-term reward, and truth orientation over comfort orientation, become increasingly relevant in a world where biophysical reality is asserting itself.

This reflects a change in environmental conditions. A culture built on continuity, stability, and upward trajectories rewarded those who reinforced its narrative.

A culture entering contraction requires something different; an ability to see the cracks in the dominant story, to detect pattern breaks, and to register tipping points, even when they remain socially unacknowledged.

In this light, the apparent mismatch between neurodivergent perception and normative culture looks less like dysfunction and more like early alignment with an emergent reality.

The cognitive minority happens to be tuned to the underlying dynamics sooner - not because of special insight, but because the environment has shifted away from the conditions that shaped the dominant cognitive style.

The result is a hidden but consequential reversal: the minds best suited to maintaining a growth civilisation are maladaptive in recognising its limits.

Both cognitive modes are human - both are valid, and both evolved for different ecological contexts.

But only one of them believes the ship is unsinkable.

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Chapter 8. What this means for the future

If the overlap between neurodivergence and collapse awareness is real, and not merely an artefact of who chooses to write to me, then it carries practical implications for how collapse discourse unfolds in the years ahead.

The first is straightforward: collapse-oriented spaces are likely to contain a higher proportion of neurodivergent people than the general population. This is simply a reflection of who tends to perceive systemic risk earlier and who is less buffered by dominant cultural narratives.

A second implication concerns support. If collapse-aware communities continue to grow, they will need to account for different cognitive styles; differences in information-processing, emotional regulation, communication preferences, and thresholds for ambiguity. A single approach won’t work for a group that arrived here for different reasons and in different ways.

Third, neurodivergent perspectives should be taken seriously. This does not mean treating them as authority or expertise in themselves, but recognising that atypical perception can illuminate dynamics that remain invisible within more conventional frames.

Collapse awareness has always depended, in part, on people who notice the gaps in the dominant story.

A fourth implication relates to the culture of collapse discourse itself. If it is to be accessible to a broader audience, including neurotypical people who may not intuitively grasp non-linear dynamics, it must remain grounded, rigorous, and communicated in plain language.

The aim is to build conceptual pathways that allow others to cross the perceptual threshold without shame or defensiveness.

Neurodivergent people are often early to recognise collapse, but that does not mean they should be left to carry it. Clarity by itself is not resilience. Collapse will demand many forms of work, distributed across many kinds of minds.

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Chapter 9. Closing reflections

Many people who are late-diagnosed describe spending decades sensing a kind of fragmentation beneath the surface of ordinary life without having the language for it.

Collapse awareness does not break anything in them, but gives shape to a break they were already carrying. Their cognitive style makes certain patterns impossible to ignore, and this clarity often arrives with its own costs; intensity, dissonance, and grief that shows up long before there is any preparation for it.

For many readers, this landscape will be familiar. What is offered here is not a diagnostic frame, but recognition - a way of understanding why some people move through collapse awareness differently, and why those differences do not deserve pathologisation or praise. This is not about hierarchy.

Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing.

They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.

That clarity carries weight, and it deserves to be honoured.

If this essay has helped you think differently about collapse or understand your own experience more clearly, you can support my work by liking, sharing or subscribing. Everything I write here will remain free.

This essay explored how some minds perceive patterns differently. The next will turn to the patterns themselves, and what they tell us about the future of humans and the living world.

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References

¹ Baron-Cohen, S. (2006). The hyper-systemizing, assortative mating theory of autism. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.

² Lent, J. (2021). The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. Prometheus Books.

³ Yafai, A. F., Verrier, D., & Reidy, L. (2014). Social conformity and autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

⁴ Tart, C. (1975). States of Consciousness. Dutton.

⁵ Dupuis, A., et al. (2022). Hyperfocus in autistic adults: Cognitive and experiential dimensions. Autism Research.

⁶ Dupuis, A. et al.; Yafai et al.; Baron-Cohen (See references 1, 3, and 5).

⁷ Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Random House.

⁸ Pellicano, E., & Burr, D. (2012). When the world becomes “too real”: A Bayesian explanation of autistic perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

⁹ Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism.

¹⁰ Boulter, C., Freeston, M., South, M., & Rodgers, J. (2014). Intolerance of uncertainty as a framework for understanding anxiety in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.