The Long Unravelling: What History Teaches Us About Living Through Collapse - Paperback

Every generation believes its crisis is unprecedented. History suggests otherwise.

The Long Unravelling is a book about the moment we are living in, written for readers who feel the ground shifting under modern life and want to understand why. Drawing on the long arc of economic history, the structures of late capitalism, and the psychology of how individuals and societies adapt to decline, it traces a pattern that has played out before and is playing out again.

From the late stages of empire to the collapse of the middle-class settlement, from the financialization of everyday life to the slow erosion of meaning inside extractive systems, this is a guide to seeing the present clearly. Not as catastrophe, but as a recognizable historical phase with its own logic, its own warnings, and its own quiet possibilities.

Across six chapters and a closing reflection, Racquel Hines Lynch examines how we arrived at this particular form of exhaustion and why it is structural rather than personal; the historical patterns of collapse and renewal that shape the present; the psychological cost of living inside systems that demand more than they return; what has reliably survived previous unravellings, and what we might salvage from this one; and how to build a life of meaning, integrity, and resilience without waiting for the system to change.

Grounded in economics, psychology, and history, but written for readers who want depth without academic distance, The Long Unravelling is for anyone who senses that the moment we are in requires both clearer thinking and more humanity than the moment encourages.

We have been here before. The question is what we do with that knowledge now.