[please excuse this exploratory fiction, as I am recovering from running a chainsaw all morning and am feeling old and tired]
I'm almost 50 and mostly retired except for work I like doing (producing musical events or performing).
About the time my kiddo graduated high school, I moved to a rural area far from cities, and about 18 months ago I bought some land that had primitive shacks on it.
I spend a lot of time reading history. I assume that the US fails eventually;
not because I have any illusions about surviving that house fire, have a lack of awareness of the mass death that would cause, or fantasies about how I'd be able to function in some post-US world.
That assumption comes out of watching the capitalists strip the wiring from the walls of US soft power along side watching the fact that it's 85 degrees in March at 6500 feet here... "climate isn't weather" is true, but I'm not an idiot and we didn't have a real winter this year.
The failure of the US is terrifying, not because I and my community would mourn the loss of some glorious and benevolent order, but in the way that the death of my estranged parents was terrifying:
we are no longer doing things because we're forced by the fantasy of belonging to some larger political order, but now have to choose what to do.
Having read a lot about what the US has done in the world, I believe that a) it's unethical/racist/genocidal / exploitative in almost all its actions and b) I think the only actual hope for climate change is the end of the US as a world order. I don't know if the end of that order is sufficient to fix the ecosystem, which I feel is on the verge of some calamitous changes, but it certainly seems necessary.
Not having control over that failing system, and not having a lot of fantasies about belonging to the polis associated with that system, it's perhaps easier for me to look at its failure modes more clinically than I might have when I was 25 and saw it as an impenetrable solid face; I've moved downstream from Fisher's statement, and now it's much easier to see a possibility for the end of capitalism (or at least the uni-polar US world order) than the end of the world itself.
Not that it's the actions of a bunch of angry and over-educated leftists who would bring it about, but as has always been understood by Marxists (among whom I do not count myself), the failure leading to its dissolution are the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself.
Which makes me feel amazingly hopeful, actually. I don't have any real political power (beyond my affinity group), so it's nice to know (like Duncan instead of MacBeth) that these things could maybe take care of themselves without me doing anything I don't find ethical.
Because I believe that there is a future for humans, I spend a lot of time organizing with folks even when I think the short-term goals aren't super useful: for instance, doing ICE Watch support with local folks, shooting a lot of guns with folks who understood the wisdom of John Brown, or just being available to help out folks who have politics oriented around direct action.
I have been spending most of my time clearing the scrub oak from various parts of the land where I live to make the wildland fire interface a little less terrifying. I build a pretty sturdy solar power system here. I've spent the last couple of months getting my head into programming the esp32 and its peripherals. I got a ham license and have been working on building radio systems. Hopefully I will figure out how to get an underground cistern next month, and then act on the septic permit I got last year.
Other than that, I assume that things aren't going to change much in my life time... I just sit here in my shack playing banjo and hoping for the best.
Prognostication should be illegal and all, but I suspect that Trump will probably kick off in 6 months from a stroke, the Dems will elect Newsom, and then they won't do a damn thing to change anything, and we will be fighting the facists under worse conditions when they finally find a pretty face to solidify them.
So I look forward to dying of Super Ebola-fluenza at age 65 in the middle of a mid-June snow-hurricane near Bluff, UT while supporting a bunch of anarchist 30 year-olds in a drone-powered trench line while they fight the "Western Slope Fascist Front". But I bet I'll still be driving my Tacoma to that battle...