The blank page arrives unexpectedly, somewhere in the middle of Sarah Wilson’s latest book. It sits there, intentional and unhurried, offering readers “a neutral space to stare at for a minute while your feelings catch up.”
You will need it.
In I Eat the Stars, the Australian journalist argues that the world as we know it is in collapse — and that we are already too late to prevent the worst of it. This is not merely another tome about global warming. Wilson’s thesis stretches far wider: civilisation itself is buckling under the sheer weight of its own complexity, driven by spiralling inequality, political polarisation, collapsing fertility rates, dwindling resources and wars without end. The trajectory, she insists, mirrors that of ancient Rome, the Mayan empire and every sophisticated culture that has risen and fallen before us.
A writer ahead of the curve
Wilson has built her career on spotting what the rest of us have not yet dared to articulate. Her earlier works — on sugar addiction, anxiety and the climate emergency — became international bestsellers long before those subjects entered the mainstream conversation. I Eat the Stars was first serialised on her Substack newsletter before Penguin picked it up for publication.
The result is a sobering but oddly clarifying read. Yes, things really are that bleak. But there remains plenty worth fighting for, and much we can still shape — provided we are willing to stare reality squarely in the face.
Wilson, who lives a nomadic existence, spoke to The Update Desk shortly after arriving in Greece. “A life skill I’ve developed over the years is finding wifi,” she quipped.
“If there’s an elephant in the room, Sarah will just scream it out”
Wilson’s father once offered that assessment of his daughter, and she wears it as a badge of honour. She is not, she insists, positioning herself as an expert. Rather, she translates dense, complex science into public conversation.
“What I do is feel what people are thinking and wrangling with internally, but hasn’t yet been expressed as a public narrative,” she explained.
Her 2009 book I Quit Sugar was once dismissed as faddy nonsense. “Can you imagine, our biggest enemy being big sugar?” she laughed. “There were headlines: ‘Sarah Wilson’s telling us to get rid of a food group.'” She moved from sugar to anxiety — taking on the pharmaceutical industry — and then to climate. Each leap drew howls of protest before eventually landing in popular discourse.
Beyond climate: the polycrisis
Wilson is adamant that the climate crisis cannot be treated as an isolated problem with a neat solution. “Not a single nation stuck to the Paris agreement,” she pointed out. “People are getting solar panels, but we’re all using more carbon-emitting fossil fuels as well — our habits aren’t changing.” We remain trapped, she argues, in the very mindset that caused the crisis: the belief in infinite growth and the conviction that we need not fundamentally alter how we live.
“We are living in a time of polycrisis,” Wilson warned — and this is the crux of her argument. A civilisation, in her framing, is a complex system composed of countless other complex systems. Without exception, throughout recorded history, such systems have eventually collapsed under their own accumulated weight. A relatively small shock — a heatwave, a financial wobble, a pandemic — can be enough to topple the entire edifice. Climate change is merely the most powerful node in this web, the force dictating the buildup of tension across every other system, even as they simultaneously accelerate its advance.
We catch fleeting glimpses of the picture in headlines and expert warnings. Pull them together, and the outlook is grim.
At the top of the bell curve
Wilson describes the present moment as liminal — we sense that the existing arrangement cannot hold, but we cannot yet see what comes next. “We are basically at the top of this very sharp bell curve, just in the moments before it tips down the other side,” she said. “Everything that has been going up and up and up — population, wealth, the price of oil — are about to dip.”
It is a terrifying prospect, and she refuses to dress it up. Yet she also insists it is “a moment of stunning possibility.” Periods of transition, she notes, have historically catalysed extraordinary human flourishing. Between the two world wars alone, existentialism, communism and fascism all took root. The axial age — another liminal epoch — gave us Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the market system and great art.
“There is a threshold, and an opportunity,” Wilson said.
What does collapse actually look like?
Anyone who claims to know precisely how or when collapse will arrive should not be trusted, according to Wilson. Uncertainty is the defining feature of the present. Certain models will decline, but how that plays out depends on countless interacting variables — and on geography.
“I would argue that there are parts of the world, such as Sudan and Gaza, that already know what collapse looks like.”
For the rest of us, the picture is murkier. But one thing is certain: things will not keep improving. The comforting notion that swapping to solar panels, recycling diligently and voting in the right government will restore some lost golden age is, in Wilson’s words, delusional. “Collapse is going to basically look like things being shit and, instead of improving, getting shittier still. At a bare minimum, life is going to get extremely uncomfortable over the coming decades.”
Why bother, then?
Here Wilson pivots. The book exists because something genuinely worth protecting is at stake: the collapse of the post-industrial, colonial, extractivist, growth-obsessed system itself.
“If we tether ourselves to that system, we will go down with it,” she said. “But if we start to distance ourselves, see what’s happening and refuse to take part in its worst excesses, the better chance we have.”
The market will eventually implode, she predicts, stripping the ultra-rich of their assets in one sudden heave. That, historically, is when revolution happens.
Avoiding the blame game
Many readers, Wilson acknowledges, arrive at her work seething — furious that this is humanity’s inheritance and that those in power are doing so little. The temptation to turn on one another is real. Her response is to insist on complexity.
“I go into detail explaining these complex systems concepts so that people can see there isn’t a cabal of bad dudes plotting; the government isn’t out to get us,” she said. “We’re all part of this system … no one is to blame.”
Yes, there are opportunists — she names Trump and the so-called technofascists — but framing this as “them doing it to us” is dangerously simplistic. Recognising the layered nature of the crisis, she believes, allows people to relax, to think expansively rather than to spiral into resentment.
Hope, redefined
Wilson is frequently asked whether she has any hope. Her answer is characteristically unsentimental.
“I have no hope that it’s all going to be OK if we just recycle, or that we can return to the way things were, when everything was comfortable and we didn’t have to take responsibility.”
What she does have hope in is nature itself — its relentless tendency to recalibrate. What is happening now, she argues, is a correction. Individualism has run too far. Capitalism has ceased to serve us. “The centre cannot hold,” she said, quoting Yeats. In the process, humanity is being forced to rediscover what truly makes us human.
Artificial intelligence, paradoxically, may accelerate that rediscovery. “It’s going like a bull out of a gate, and we were not consulted,” Wilson said. “It’s terrifying, but it’s actually forcing us to ask: if it can take our jobs, and become a lover, what is left? It’s art, poetry, messiness, all that juicy human stuff.”
What can actually be done
The first task, Wilson argues, is for those who can grasp the scale of the crisis to steady themselves — to become “islands of sanity” — and to deploy whatever privilege they possess in defence of the things they wish to preserve. Democracy and the right to protest, currently being eroded across the globe, top her list.
Research bears out her priorities. The two strongest determinants of how quickly a society collapses, she notes, are levels of inequality and polarisation. Both are, in principle, within our power to address.
On a personal level, she recommends simplification — choosing goods that travel the shortest trade routes — and a deliberate return to analogue skills. “Knowing how to ride a bike, use a compass — I would go as far as saying they’re survival skills,” she said. European authorities have already advised citizens to prepare survival kits for war or extreme heat. A three-day supply of water and food, a battery torch, pen and paper — these are no longer fringe precautions.
But she draws a firm line at full-blown prepper culture. “If things get so bad that you need to be off in the hills with a stockpile of tinned corn and batteries, then you’ll need to be able to defend it with weapons and violence,” she said. “I myself am not prepared to do that, and I think it is absolutely the wrong direction.”
The alternative is collectivism. Studies show that fewer than five per cent of deliberately constructed “intentional communities” survive beyond five years. What does endure are organically formed groups of 20 to 30 families, or a single apartment block. Food co-operatives, tool-sharing schemes, neighbourhood skill exchanges — these are the building blocks of whatever comes next.
Living beautifully at the end of the world
The book’s title comes from a poem by Rebecca Elson, an astronomer who wrote it as a counter to her own terror of mortality after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Wilson seizes on its meaning: once we are pressed right up against the prospect of ending, we discover an urgency to truly live.
Neoliberalism, she argues, taught generations to defer — to save, accumulate, retire, and only then begin to enjoy existence. Collapse puts a bomb beneath that deferral.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen — so live beautifully regardless,” Wilson said. “You’re still allowed to have a beautiful life. In fact, there’s an imperative now.”
Why it Matters
Wilson’s argument cuts against the grain of mainstream environmental discourse, which still hinges on the assumption that better policy and cleaner technology can salvage the status quo. By reframing collapse not as a future catastrophe to be averted but as an active, unfolding process already underway in parts of the world, she forces a confrontation with consequences that policymakers and consumers alike prefer to avoid. Yet her message is not nihilistic. If the systems we have built are doomed, then the values, skills and community bonds we choose to nurture now become the seeds of whatever replaces them. Whether readers accept her bleak diagnosis or not, I Eat the Stars insists on a question increasingly difficult to dodge: if not now, when?